Phil's Superpower of Enthusiasm

A place to write about things I enjoy, for my own edification. Headphones, audio gear, albums, whiskey, wine, golden retrievers etc.

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Lawyer, unabashed nerd and geek. Purveyor and pusher of excellent sci-fi/fantasy, good food, and repartee. He/him. Dog dad/servant to @Goldendenali.

I’m experimenting with Amazon Affiliate status in an attempt to defray some of the costs of headphone reviews; Amazon links may be affiliate links (depending on whether or not I’ve figured out how to use them correctly). Please feel free to buy elsewhere; this is just one way to recoup the costs of this hobby.

The Audeze Maxwell: a Great Headphone in a Mediocre System (aka I’m not Mad, Just Disappointed)

  1. I score bass, mids, and treble on a two part scale: 1-5 for quantity (5 being the highest), and A-E for quality (A being best in class, E being laughably bad). For soundstage it’s also a two part scale, with the number representing the width and the letter the separation within it. ↩︎
  2. For comfort/fit, my scale is A-E with A being disappear entirely into the background and E being I want to tear my ears off to stop feeling these headphones on my head. I’ve never had an E. Editor’s note: I’ve now had an E: the Koss Portapro. ↩︎
  3. More on this later. ↩︎
  4. I’ve never owned another pair of Audezes, weirdly enough. I tried a couple of pairs early on in my journey and found them to be … not to my taste, back before I realized how good planars could be. ↩︎
  5. It’s also worth noting that the Xbox Series X still lacks a USB-C port, in 2025, which means you have to use an adapter to plug this dongle into the Xbox. For a company that makes a great console, Microsoft makes some WEIRD decisions. ↩︎
  6. Don’t use an active headphone (aka a wireless one) via 3.5 mm cable. ↩︎
  7. I’m looking at you, Sony and Bowers & Wilkins. ↩︎
  8. Eventually I got it to update via Windows, but damn. ↩︎
  9. Also, bizarrely, you cannot change the EQ profile or move a slider unless audio is playing. I genuinely don’t how this was released. ↩︎
  10. I’m just never going to remember how any of this works unless I’m using them regularly, and that seems like a miss for a headphone designed to be used in a single location. ↩︎
  11. I am not a basshead, at least not anymore. I spend most of my time with active headphones turning down the bass, which is why it was so shocking to do the opposite for these. ↩︎
  12. In an app that constantly crashes, and even at the best of times hangs up for several minutes before letting you actually access the EQ screen. 🙃 ↩︎
  13. I still wouldn’t throw them across the room though, kids. ↩︎
  14. I’m kidding.

    Mostly.

    Kind of. ↩︎
  15. Full disclosure; my most recent comparison is the Dyson Zone, so take this statement with a well-earned grain of salt. ↩︎
  16. Towards the end of my review I started getting a lot more drops, but I was also getting a lot of notifications on my phone and I still have Bluetooth connected. ↩︎

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