Audiophilepure

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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.”

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“However, a closer look at the spec sheet tells us that there are a few differences between the two Audio Technica stablemates. The ATH-AWAS uses a 53mm dynamic driver which has a nominal impedance of 40-ohms and a sensitivity of 99db/mW, slightly different to the 48-ohm/102dB/mW driver used in the ATH-AWKT. This driver features integrated pure-iron yoke, diamond-like carbon coating, and a 6N-OFC high-purity, oxygen-free copper voice coils. Audio Technica opted for synthetic leather pads for the ATH-AWAS as opposed to the sheepskin employed in the ATH-AWKT, which presumably helps to lower the cost between models by some $500. Like the ATH-AWKT, Audio Technica thankfully includes two 3.0m cables (employing their proprietary A2DC connector) as standard with the ATH-AWAS, a 6.3mm single-ended cable plus a 4-pin XLR cable. Listeners will appreciate the inclusion of the latter cable, which is both conspicuously absent from their flagship?

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“Tonally the Solitaire P resembles many other planar magnetics and runs true to what you’d expect from its frequency responses. While it lacks the shelved-up bass demanded by the latest Harman target response it conspicuously lacks treble energy. As a result it delivers a refined, low-grit and low-grain sound but can lack a little sparkle and analysis.
‘Now Is The Month Of Maying’ [96kHz/24-bit rip from Voices Unbound; AIX 80012], a track that I haven’t played for years, comprises an a cappella choir of male and female voices singing a well-known ballett written by Thomas Morley in 1595. As with all good choir recordings, reproduced at its best it allows you to ‘hear into’ the ensemble to individual voices within, which renders the performance altogether more real, more vital and engaging than a smoothed-over, lower-resolution equivalent. Arguably the Solitaire P errs slightly on the side of the latter.”