As follow are my initial impressions for the first night.
The Aeon Flow headphones ship with what MrSpeakrs calls a Distinctly Un-Magical (DUMMER) cable. I enjoy this. I endorse any effort to criticize snake oil cables, and these cables are otherwise pretty nice. They feature a spring-locking quick disconnect on a 4-pin BNC-ish connector on each can. They're fabric-wrapped, and they're highly pliable.
The headphones also include three different interchangeable acoustic filters with increasing amounts of sibilant-range treble damping: foam, thin felt with one notch, and thicker felt with two notches. The headphones are shipped with the medium damping one-notch felt filters pre-installed.
I listened to them straight out of the box with no break-in. They sounded pretty bad. Recessed top end, bloated midbass, and no sub bass to speak of. My first thought was, "I paid $800 for this?" The filters came out after about 15 seconds.
I kept listening with no filters installed. Even with no filter, there's a hump in the midbass that makes them sound boxy, like someone speaking with a sinus infection. Although there was a slight punch to percussive bass, I didn't hear any sub bass. Still, song after song, the top end opened up little by little. Around the 6th song I could hear why these headphones have earned praise for their natural sounding vocals. The midrange seems well tuned, and these headphones are articulate and unflinching with heavy, complex polyphony. However, the positive attributes weren't enough to distract me from the sinusitis.
I'd read several reports claiming that these headphones need dozens of hours of break-in before they really start to shine. I think it's more likely the ears that needed break-in, not the headphones. Still, I put aside my skepticism and played pink noise through them for about 4 hours while I went out with my family.
When I returned, I put them back on. They sounded pretty much the same as I remembered.
The people who rave about the virtues of these headphones tend to spend three and four figures on various tube amps of differing sonic character in the hopes of finding a mate whose crazy matches their headphones' crazy. All I have is my $100 Fiio A5. I tend to believe that an amp which changes the timbre of the thing it's driving is no longer just an amp, but also a signal processor.
Fine. I can process signals, too, but I'm not spending hundreds of dollars to do so. I enabled the obscene bass boost on my headphone amp, then used software EQ on my mobile phone source to squash the midbass. This gave me profound sub bass (maybe a tad too much?), punchy bass, and controlled midbass, all without detracting from the midrange or highs. I'm starting to get these headphones dialed in.
For what it's worth, I've started using an app called
My Cloud Player. It's the only Android app I've found that will let me apply EQ to SoundCloud without my phone being rooted. For that feature alone I went ahead and paid to upgrade to the ad-free version. It also plays local media, and can scrobble last.fm. Cool.
Anyway, again I'm suspending disbelief and playing pink noise through them overnight. We'll see whether they sound any different tomorrow.
I really want to like these. They're outstandingly comfortable and I paid a small fortune for them.
More later.
