Introduction

Known as MrSpeakers until 2019, Dan Clark founded the eponymous Dan Clark Audio (DCA) brand in 2012. Dan has been in the audio business for a few decades now and we first got a taste of the brand’s work in the form of the Drop + DCA Aeon Closed X—a set of closed-back planar magnetic headphones which bucked the trend of poorly tuned such offerings in the market and presented a good entry point to the use of dampening materials in headphones. Dan Clark and his team have been working on this concept for a while now and shook the headphones market a couple of years ago with the release of the flagship closed-back STEALTH which debuted their Acoustic Metamaterial Tuning System (AMTS). This was then followed up by the open-back planar flagship EXPANSE and I have been wanting to try out both of these sets for a while now purely because of the materials design and engineering involved. Then things got more interesting as earlier this year saw the launch of DCA’s new electrostatic headphones called the CORINA.

The CORINA is not Dan Clark’s first foray into the wacky world of e-stat headphones, with the VOCE having taken that spot and still continuing to be sold today. Once again I lack context on how the VOCE sounds but that’s not to say I have no experience with e-stat headphones having covered the Audeze CRBN and Nectar HiveX before and working on reviews for the HIFIMAN Shangri-La duo as we speak. Indeed, I immediately admired the extremely natural presentation of e-stat headphones when I first listened to them last year to where I ended up purchasing a $8000 Headamp Blue Hawaii Special Edition purely for them.

Imagine my delight then when learning DCA used the same BHSE amplifier to work on the CORINA, and also that this used the novel AMTS implementation too. The CORINA is classified as a flagship reference e-stat headphone which aims to address one of the biggest concerns of e-stat headphone tonalities in the form of an overly bright treble response that is compounded by many sharp peaks and dips galore. Dan Clark Audio is promising smooth mids and highs while still retaining detail and have gone the extra step in ensuring channel balance not only with driver matching but also ear pad matching—a first in this industry as far as I am aware! There is clearly a lot to unpack here in our review of the DCA CORINA, so let’s thank Dan Clark Audio for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp and begin with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications