** Mini-Review ** (You can skip this part if you want) **
I haven't had much time to listen but so far some impressions are already becoming clearer. They can play loud ... more than I would want to listen at just from the output of my MacBook Pro's headphone socket. They also don't get congested when you turn up the wick.
They are ruthlessly revealing of recording quality ... you can hear exactly what the engineer is doing on a song. The very bottom octaves are a little pronounced but not objectionably so. Vocals sound very natural with no hint of chestiness. That is a bit of a surprise because at first I though female vocals were a little tilted downward, but on further listening I find that's not the case; it's that "revealing" thing again, where you can hear it if the proximity effect was utilized in the recording, and it's absent if it's not there. Good so far.
Male vocals are even better. I don't think I've heard Michael Stipe (REM) sound properly before. There are nuances in his voice that are lost in lesser phones. You can easily hear each distinct vocal in choruses and harmonies. Words are enunciated extremely well ... I've already been able to "correct" lyrics where I had always thought the singer said something else. Moving right along ...
Instruments have the correct timbre and tone, whether it's acoustic guitar, Fender Rhodes, various organs, sax, horns ... well the list goes on.
Drums are punchy and things like pick bite comes through on electric guitars. You can easily follow bass notes even on songs that don't have much bass in the mix, like early Beatles tracks. Kick drums remind me of high-volume Klipsch La Scalas where if you stood a few feet from the bass horn your pant leg would flap with every kick drum beat. Of course that's not happening with 'phones, but the sound is there, and that's not a common thing with cans or speakers.
They do image, there is a soundstage that is shallow and seems to hover a bit above the ears, but of course anything panned hard right or left comes out as such. Drums seem to be back in the mix but not by much. I suppose it's asking a lot for stereo mixes to sound natural image-wise with headphones, but we try.
There is something in the tonal balance that is off a bit. They are not sensitive to placement, at least on my skull and the head shake test is a full pass with me at least. They are light on the ears and after about three hours of listening they are still comfortable. If you push on the earcaps the bottom end gets more pronounced so they aren't clamping as hard as they could, but I think that's a good thing, or at least potentially a double-edged sword.
But back to the balance, these have plenty of sparkle when it's in the mix but I wouldn't describe the highs as "sweet" the way some loudspeakers can pull it off ... say, some KEFs. It's a bit dryer than that, although maybe more accurate that way. But the very top end, I dunno around 10K or so and up, seems to be missing, or recessed maybe (I'll have to do more listening). Because they do the bottom so well it seems more pronounced than ideal. A lot of people prefer that tonal balance but I keep wishing I had my old Lab Reference Series Lux 5L15 so I could hit the Linear Equalizer by a db or so.*
Maybe they will sound a bit more natural after a few hours of exercise. Most transducers do. I might leave them playing overnight while I grab some zzz's and see if I feel the same way tomorrow.
It's early yet to come to any final conclusions. But at least so far I like them. I only have limited music on my laptop's SSD (it's 512GB but that isn't enough for my music collection, even if there was nothing else on there, and there is lots on there) so the choice of songs isn't as varied as I would like. Will hook up the external drive and see what some of my usual reference tracks say to me later.
MacBook Pro 10,1 15" Retina, Early 2013; 2.7 GHz Quad i7; 512 SSD; 16GB RAM > OSX 10.9x > Audirvana Plus v2.6.8 Hog Mode; on Battery Power [FLAC 16/44 > 24/96] > NAD VISO HP50
* Luxman often implemented what they referred to as the Linear Equalizer in preamps. It adjusted the balance from top to bottom in 0.5dB increments up to maybe +/- 2dB. So all to the right the bass would be +1dB and the treble would be -1dB; all to the left and the opposite "tilt" would be employed. QUAD did something similar in their 44 preamp although the range of adjustment was coarser and greater at the same time. It's a great feature as it swings linearly (that is, in a straight line on a graph) around 800 or 1KHz. depending on the unit in question.
[I posted the same image twice inthe previous post, but from experience I know that trying to fix it I'll have to re-do them all, so I'm leaving it as is. I massaged them down to 100 kb each so it shouldn't matter much to Gene's poor server.]
