The name similarities were too great to ignore. I have a small menagerie of Hifiman headphones and while I’ve written about them individually at length here and on Head-Fi, I’ve never gotten a picture of the full setup. So here they are: from left to right – Shangri-La Jr, Sundara, and R7DX. The Sundara was acquired in early March 2020, and it’s still working fine, though the right earpad has started to tear in some places. Not bad for a Hifiman, eh? The SGL Jr was bought in mid-February 2022, and the R7DX was from late May 2022. Three different driver types (electrostatic, planar, and dynamic), 3 different earpad types, 3 different headband types, and three-ish different earcup shapes. I do admire a company having breadth and variety in their designs.

Sound-wise, all three are cut from the same cloth. Bright and airy sound all around. The SGL is the brightest but also the smoothest sounding, the R7 is the roughest and peakiest of them, while the Sundara is in the middle. SGL has the best comfort by far. All three are commendable headphones to me.

For source gear, the FiiO K9 Pro (AKM) handles DAC and regular amp duties, with XLR out to the CCS-modded Stax SRM-006tS. The 006tS is a new acquisition to replace my 006tA that died at a headphone meet last year. I spent some time and effort to repair the old amp, but I wasn’t able to find out what was wrong. So I bought another unit from Mjolnir Audio.

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As for Hi-Fi Rush the game, it’s a quirky, fun game. It’s at its core a 3rd person rhythm-based melee combat game, where you time your actions to the all-pervasive beat, mixed with some platforming in a linear adventure game. Visually, it’s cel-shaded, so it looks a lot like Borderlands, and its overall tone is quite similar to the newer Borderlands games (BL2+) too. Unsurprisingly, given its Japanese development studio, there are a few elements present that are more common in Japanese games – the one I noticed is that in conversation segments, there’s the large box at the bottom of the screen displaying the dialogue that’s being spoken alongside a 2D head render of the speaking character. My wife is playing Fire Emblem Engage these days, and dialogue sequences in that game have the exact same element. Curiously, while the game is titled Hi-Fi Rush, the start menu entry (I have the game from PC GamePass) says “Hibiki”, which seems to mean “echo” in Japanese and might be the internal title.