[Skylab]

TESTING METHODOLOGY:

For the review I used the following headphones:

• Early reviews: Sennheiser HD25-1 (primarily), 2005 Beyerdynamic DT770/32 ohm, 2005 Beyerdynamic DT880/250 ohm
• Middle reviews: Denon D5000, AT-ESW9, Ultrasone HFI-780
• Current reviews: Sennheiser PXC350, AT ESW9, Beyer DT880/600, Kenwood KH1000


I listened to some with Shure E500’s, but that was not part of the “formal” test.

Music used for the review:

• Patricia Barber – “All or Nothing at All”, Nightclub
• Holly Cole, “Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night”, Temptation
• Crash Test Dummies, “In the Days of the Caveman”, God Shuffled His Feet
• Dave Matthews, “Oh”, Some Devil
• Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins, “Handle With Care”, Rabbit Fur Coat.

Listening was done with the levels matched to within 1db using a RS SPL meter, so that the listening volume level was identical with each amp. Source was a RedWineAudio iMod iPod, connected with an RnB Audio interconnect.

No attempt is going to be made here to completely describe each amp – this has been done plenty of places on this site. Rather, I scored the amps based my listening in the areas of midrange, treble, and bass performance, transparency, neutrality, soundstaging, build quality, and other pertinent comments. I used an academic grading scale, but as in most academics, the lowest grade any of these amps got was a B-, since they were all pretty good.

At the end I will rank each of them, but to start they are listen in alphabetical order. Also, in case there is any question, I purchased all of these amps with my own hard-earned money, and they are the stock amplifiers – no mods of any kind were done. Where there was a bass boost function, it wasn’t used.