Audiophilepure

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“Connected via Bluetooth, it is silent at idle, with no obvious clues that it isn’t conventionally wired up. The connection is entirely stable up to a few metres from the transmitting device. This ensures that music isn’t affected by unwanted background noise and the sparse Shadow Queen by the Alba Griot Ensemble sounds immediate and believable as a result. The interplay between the guitar and harp as well as the vocal harmonies is easy to follow. For a closed-back design, there is very little feeling of constraint to the soundstage.

If you select something a bit more ballistic like Resonant Body by Octo Octa, the Sennheiser responds effortlessly. The driving rhythm of Can You See Me? is deep – effortlessly subsonic, even – and detailed without losing the energy and speed that’s needed to sound convincing.”

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“The timbre is wonderfully natural sounding on the Diana V2. The overall timbre is richer and relatively forgiving compared to the crisp and peppy treble tour de force of the Phi. Studied matching with sources will pose less of a challenge with the Diana V2.

To achieve this Abyss has attenuated the V2 treble just a little and pulled back its upper mids to match to dull down any potential odd-harmonic nasties. At the same time, the midbass and sub-bass FR has a bit of a bump throwing in some additional body and warmth into the mids to up the even-harmonic bias.”

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” The ATH-WP900 is intended to deliver a fun and engaging listening experience, no question. These babies are made to entertain, rather than analyse. These are the sort of headphones that you can hand over to someone completely uninterested in audiophilia, and they would plant an immediate smile on their face – they make music come alive in a visceral, exciting, and crowd-pleasing way. And you know what? I absolutely dig it. You only need to listen to four bars of Outkast’s ‘Behold a Lady’ to know that you’re in for a Good Time with the ATH-WP900. The WP900 is equally at home playing well-mastered and recorded audiophile material as it is churning out Top-40 ‘guilty pleasures’. Let’s just say that I went to town on both Phil Collins and Taylor Swift for the purposes of this review. You’re welcome. ”

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“Here’s my take on the overall design: I think it’s a love it/hate it kinda vibe. Whereas the TH900 gloriously celebrates itself with those big red cups, the TH909 looks somewhat confused, and compromised. While it did grow on me during the time that I spent with it, I think the grilles don’t really reconcile with the Urushi outer cups. And with the big hole cut in the middle of the cups, you wonder if it was worth going to the trouble of getting that fancy laquer at all on the TH909. Still, when you hold them you do recognise that you’re holding something special. Quibbles with the headband aside, they very much fit the bill of ‘flagship’ not only in terms of the materials used but also the emotions they invoke – while I didn’t buy this pair (and I don’t get to keep them either), I reckon I’d feel pretty proud to have them taking pride of place on my desktop.”

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“Listening to Melody Gardot’s “Mira,” one of my go-to test tracks, the HP-1 captured the essence of the performance in a textbook manner. The dynamics were conveyed incredibly well, vocals were clear, and the overall frequency range was represented very well. My memory of headphones that I have had at the price point of the HP-1, put the HP-1 far ahead of like priced competition, and in my opinion makes it simply a no brainer at its retail price.”

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“Grado headphones all fall very much on the sensitive side when it comes to power requirements, and The Hemp Headphone with its 38 ohm 98 dB/mW drivers is no different. It’s an easy pair of headphones to power and will deliver excellent performance from modest sources such as your garden variety smartphone. This should be welcome news for readers who are considering getting into the hobby and might be balking at the prospect of having to spend additional money on source gear and amplifiers. While my Samsung S9+ gets them happily singing at around 60% volume, a quality discrete headphone amplifier will yield nominal audible benefits when fed with decently-recorded and mastered source material.”

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“Sonically, the KLH Ultimate One delivers a classic large-diaphragm dynamic driver sound. The soundstage (with the right music) is large, cohesive, and dimensional. Listening to my recent live recording of the local neo-old-timey band, Masontown, I noticed that the KLH Ultimate One reproduced all the subtleties of the recording. Compared with several of my reference headphones the KLH harmonic balance was quite close, with the exception being the bass, which was fuller and slightly less controlled than through the Focal Elegia or Abyss Diana Phi. Lateral focus and image definition was good through the KLH Ultimate Ones, but again the two reference headphones delivered a somewhat more precise and better-defined three-dimensional image.”