Obligatory unboxing pictures first:
Got my Gunnr in yesterday. Ordered it because I am curious about the Width and Presence processing. I am primarily a speaker listener, and have been chasing the same experience for headphones. I figured the Width and Presence processor may help get me closer to that reality. This is my first time buying a piece of Schiit directly from them rather than second-hand (my Freya+, which I love, was bought used from The Music Room).
First thing I did was try out the difference between directly powered over USB-C versus plugged into mains with the AC adapter. Obviously, plugged into mains, this little guy had zero difficulty driving my three testing sets (Thieaudio Hype4 IEMs, Sennheiser x Drop HD 6XX open-back dynamic cans, and Monolith M1070C closed-back planar cans). Negative gain was the right choice there for the IEMs and Low gain worked well for the two pairs of cans. Then I switched to USB-C directly powered by my HiBy R6 Pro II DAP and it still had sufficient oomph for all three, although I preferred using High gain for the two pairs of cans (the IEMs still best at Negative gain). So from a power standpoint, I don’t see a need to use the line out to an external amp. I did test this however, by hooking it up to to my xDuoo TA-66 via line out (gain set to Low, with the linear power attached) and listening to that using the HD 6XX, and enjoyed some tube magic that way.
So, onto the main event, the Width and Presence controls…
Before receiving the unit, my initial thought was that I would likely find a happy-place setting on the Width process to narrow the image down so that it would feel more like sitting back to listen with the musicians in front of me, rather than the normal head/earphone effect of sitting directly on stage with the musicians or first row dead center, and then maybe adjust the Presence process song to song depending on if the recording has the musician too forward or too far back (more likely push the musician back a little so they’re not singing right in my face), but once I had the unit in front of me and I got to listening, I realized there was a lot more to it.
What I ended up discovering is that there is not only no one-size-fits-all setting, even differing with each pair of ‘phones, but in fact there are even songs where I ended up widening the soundstage rather than narrowing it. For example, on the entire Shaken by a Low Sound album from Crooked Still, I found that widening the sound stage and pushing lead singer Aoife O’Donovan’s voice back using Presence process significantly enhanced the listening experience. Although this album was a bit of an outlier. Most of the other albums I tested went the other way, as expected. Older albums that were recorded with instruments to the extreme sides, like the Time Out album from the Dave Brubeck Quartet or Dizzy (Gillespie) on the French Riviera benefit greatly from basically slamming the Width control down to the narrowest possible setting. I also tried experimenting with the processes using binaural recordings and I found they sound excellent with the Width setting slammed to the narrowest setting as well.
The Presence control proved to be excellent as well, being able to move the vocalists back or forward song to song is really wonderful. This gets us to an additional point to highlight here: the ergonomics and ease of use of the sound processing features is just spot-on. I had zero difficult finding the, “sweet-spot,” setting for each process within the first few seconds of each song, and having the separate switch to flip them off and on on-the-fly really makes A/B testing the functionality an absolute breeze and even fun to do.
Is everything perfect? Well…nothing ever is, right? The Width and Presence processes are awesome, and 99% of the time I really enjoy the benefits of these features. That being said, they do occasionally produce anomalous effects and/or distortion, so sometimes it is better to be conservative with them or just disable them all together. I also prefer using balanced cabling for my IEMs and cans, so I would have liked to see balanced outputs. Finally I think a nice feature to have would be a separate USB-C port just for power input, in case the source doesn’t have enough juice, it can still be fed power from a portable power bank with a high current USB-C output.
-Ed
