Phil's Superpower of Enthusiasm

1. I don’t even know how to measure the cost of these. For what I paid? 10 out of 10. At MSRP … 8 out of 10? 7? 9? ↩︎
2. 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.  ↩︎
3. 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 had one E: the Koss PortaPro. ↩︎
4. While I am mostly a balanced vs single-ended skeptic, I tend to do most of my listening balanced just because XLR is cool. I’ve got the cables and the amp. ↩︎
5. I’m definitely a cable skeptic; I’m pretty solidly convinced that a competently manufactured cable does shit-all to the sound of a system. This is just a really nice quality of life cable that more or less lives attached to my Bliss for convenience. ↩︎
6. Audeze opened its doors in 2008, so this was VERY early in their operation. ↩︎
7. To be fair, a lot of that sounds like gobbledegook to me. ↩︎
8. Maybe I’ll keep an eye out next year for their Black Friday B-stock sale! ↩︎
9. Pretty sure I’ll fail, but eh. It’s good to want things. ↩︎
10. To the point where I did a couple of channel imbalance tests to make sure that it wasn’t an issue with the headphones! On an imbalance test the sound wobbled only very slightly, less than most headphones I’ve tried it with and certainly well within the bounds of normal driver matching. ↩︎
11. I mean, it’s possible they’re synth violins, but I’d be surprised if it’s not Boyd Tinsley. ↩︎
12. See the discussion both before and after this; I’m pretty convinced that I’m hearing the dip in the mids/treble that Crinacle measured. Cleaning that up helped a lot with this timbre issue. ↩︎
13. At least 72 times from Roon since January. It’s one of my favorite test tracks. ↩︎
14. Placebo is a hell of a drug, which is why I try to do my listening before looking at the graphs. ↩︎
15. Yes, this is a particularly unhelpful comparison, pitting one out-of-production product against another out-of-production product. Have an issue with that? Hush. Get your own blog if you want more timely and relevant content. ↩︎
16. I’m going to spend some more time with them, but a cursory sweep with them shows that I do get a pretty harsh spike around 13 kHz that may be contributing to it. ↩︎

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