There's Something About Ultrasone…

[Dexdexter]

Nice one, bizkid!

Good photos too, especially enjoy the side-by-sides with the AT, making the PROline 750 look veritably svelte and portable by comparison. Sure beats the heck outta staring at frequency curves, don't it?

All you need now is a decent tissue box!





Best, Dex

[lolos]

Does it require an amp? I am leaning to it more than HD595, but will be using it unamped.

What is a good price for them used/new?

Thanks!

[A.Thorsen]

Has anyone compared an Ultrasone 2500 against the AKG 701's? Comments?

[bizkid]

I didnt try it with an amp yet (besides my HA5000), but the sound doesnt change much with the HA5000 anyway, and it sounds great already out of everything. If youre looking for a matching amp i would look at something with no bass bloat and very tight bass control, i think it wont mate well with tubes. From my experiences a discrete amp using FETs is the way to go, not an OPA/Buffer design amp which just dont offer the same bass control as discrete designs.


Its hard to compare the Ultrasones to any other headphone because of its built in somewhat crossfeed like "s-logic".. Also i think these are more dangerous to buy unheard because they just sound so different.
Please dont get the idea to try out a crossfeed plugin to see if you would like the ultrasones, that is CLEARLY THE WRONG WAY as the ultrasones sound much much better as your usual crossfeed plugin or hardware implementation. I never used crossfeed and never liked it, actually i hated the downsides of it. So i guess crossfeed is just one small part of their whole s-logicwhatever thing. However its clearly silly to name it surround

[Sovkiller]

Originally Posted by A.Thorsen

Has anyone compared an Ultrasone 2500 against the AKG 701's? Comments?

Yes I have heard both, I love the Ultrasones and own them, OTOH I did not like a little bit the K701. IMO those are another of the "soft sounding" heapdhones from AKG, not worth the prases we heard everyday here in head-fi, and not in the league of the rest of the high end cans we hear off, but what do I know about headphones.....

[Dexdexter]

Originally Posted by bizkid

Its hard to compare the Ultrasones to any other headphone because of its built in somewhat crossfeed like "s-logic".. Also i think these are more dangerous to buy unheard because they just sound so different.
Please dont get the idea to try out a crossfeed plugin to see if you would like the ultrasones, that is CLEARLY THE WRONG WAY as the ultrasones sound much much better as your usual crossfeed plugin or hardware implementation. I never used crossfeed and never liked it, actually i hated the downsides of it. So i guess crossfeed is just one small part of their whole s-logicwhatever thing. However its clearly silly to name it surround

I must confess that I feel somewhat conflicted about the whole S-Logic business since it inevitably gets misconstrued as gimmicky and artificial even though it appears to be based upon nothing more fancy than innovative acoustical engineering:

Problem: headphones fire sound directly into ear canal, while sound in nature is processed by the ear in its entirety, utilizing the outer ear as a receptor for spatial orientation and information.

Solution: offset the drivers to also bring the outer ear into play and voice them to take headphone-cup reflections into account.

Simple enough, no? Well, no, not when people interpret it as sonic voodoo.

And no one is more to blame for this than the marketing department at Ultrasone. By applying a vague, computer-ish sounding name to their concept and further muddying the waters with the suggestion that their headphones achieve something approaching "surround sound", they inevitably invite skepticism.

If they had chosen instead to introduce their product simply as "the headphones that sound more like loudspeakers", which is arguably true IMO, I believe folks here might be more receptive. But to a marketing team, this would be dull and unexciting. In this age of lightening speed technology, consumers expect nothing less than magic.

So by coming up with the S-Logic hook, Ultrasone have chosen a marketing tack that mystifies rather than clarifies. And, to be fair, what else could they do? A relatively unknown company, just beginning to reach out for a global market in only the past 5 years, and trying to compete with brands established for better than 30 years.

By opting for the gimmick in order to differentiate and distinguish themselves, the basic and most easily understood concepts behind the engineering simply get lost in the shuffle.

For what it is, as opposed to what it claims to be, S-Logic works. As always, YMMV. It is not an effect, it is a presentation.

Unfortunately, the marketing creates unreasonable expectations and confusion, so reviewers interpret the concept as anything from "crossfeed" to "passive noise-cancellation", to "surround sound". And hype-wary members here seem to either turn and run away or give a cursory listen at a meet and pronounce Ultrasone to be crap.

I kinda makes me wonder if a forum such as Head-Fi was around when electrostatics were introduced whether they would have ever had the opportunity to gain acceptance after running the gauntlet of people disinclined to give anything outside the established status quo a fighting chance.

Of course, Ultrasone is partially vindicated by their having achieved some degree of acceptance in the studio and professional community. And undoubtedly, there are consumers who are impressed by their marketing gibberish.

So hopefully, Ultrasone will continue to grow and innovate. And be comfortable enough in their own skin to tone things down a bit on the marketing front and concentrate on their genuine strengths.

Best, Dex

[The_Duke_Of_Eli]

The HiFi 2200s won't let you down. Truly amazing headphones.

[Sovkiller]

Originally Posted by Dexdexter

I must confess that I feel somewhat conflicted about the whole S-Logic business since it inevitably gets misconstrued as gimmicky and artificial even though it appears to be based upon nothing more fancy than innovative acoustical engineering:

Problem: headphones fire sound directly into ear canal, while sound in nature is processed by the ear in its entirety, utilizing the outer ear as a receptor for spatial orientation and information.

Solution: offset the drivers to also bring the outer ear into play and voice them to take headphone-cup reflections into account.

Simple enough, no? Well, no, not when people interpret it as sonic voodoo.

And no one is more to blame for this than the marketing department at Ultrasone. By applying a vague, computer-ish sounding name to their concept and further muddying the waters with the suggestion that their headphones achieve something approaching "surround sound", they inevitably invite skepticism.

If they had chosen instead to introduce their product simply as "the headphones that sound more like loudspeakers", which is arguably true IMO, I believe folks here might be more receptive. But to a marketing team, this would be dull and unexciting. In this age of lightening speed technology, consumers expect nothing less than magic.

So by coming up with the S-Logic hook, Ultrasone have chosen a marketing tack that mystifies rather than clarifies. And, to be fair, what else could they do? A relatively unknown company, just beginning to reach out for a global market in only the past 5 years, and trying to compete with brands established for better than 30 years.

By opting for the gimmick in order to differentiate and distinguish themselves, the basic and most easily understood concepts behind the engineering simply get lost in the shuffle.

For what it is, as opposed to what it claims to be, S-Logic works. As always, YMMV. It is not an effect, it is a presentation.

Unfortunately, the marketing creates unreasonable expectations and confusion, so reviewers interpret the concept as anything from "crossfeed" to "passive noise-cancellation", to "surround sound". And hype-wary members here seem to either turn and run away or give a cursory listen at a meet and pronounce Ultrasone to be crap.

I kinda makes me wonder if a forum such as Head-Fi was around when electrostatics were introduced whether they would have ever had the opportunity to gain acceptance after running the gauntlet of people disinclined to give anything outside the established status quo a fighting chance.

Of course, Ultrasone is partially vindicated by their having achieved some degree of acceptance in the studio and professional community. And undoubtedly, there are consumers who are impressed by their marketing gibberish.

So hopefully, Ultrasone will continue to grow and innovate. And be comfortable enough in their own skin to tone things down a bit on the marketing front and concentrate on their genuine strengths.

Best, Dex

Whole it is true that many headphones, and brands of headphones while designing their models, they indeed fire the sound directly into the ear channel, it is true also that there are a few of them that also had adopted angled drivers, by coincidence most of them offer a completely different presentation and a wider soundstage, and a "more credible" presentation and that is not new in the market...

I crossed some emails with Florian some time ago, as I was partially worried about this new S-Logic technology and the fact that they are placing the drivers off axis, which create also an off axis audition, and a difference between "our normal way of audition" introducing some variations into the freq response of the drivers as well (as we have seen on speakers many times, they offer one curve on axis, and another off axis, usually 15 and 30 degrees from it) I wanted also to know a few whys, and he explained me that angled drivers were simply not enough, and far from being the ideal solution to the problem of incorporating the outer ear into the audition, and offering a more natural presentation. So Ultrasone went more further into that, they displaced the drivers, and calculate the area to be exposed of the diaphragm of the driver in order to create what he called a "nearfield point" inside the cup, which recreate more accurately the sound of the nearfield monitors used in studios, and offer a lot more natural presentation.

So it was not only marketing, there are more behind this design, they were not done by fortune, or trial an error, by any apprentice, all was calculated meticulously inside. He had being studding this field and have wrote a few articles and books about this fascinating theme of auditions and audio in general, for over 20 years, and the same way as the guys at Etymotics Research, I also consider that Dr. Florian "knows more of your ears than yourself" (as someone wrote about Etymotics Research once)....

And talking about Ultrasone...we need an smiley, an Edition smiley, or a PROLine smiley...Anybody could think on one.

[bizkid]

Dex: I completely agree but its also just as clear that the Proline 750 shows this: I pan music to the right, the left channel isnt completely silent. I do this in software so its 100% certain that its completely panned. BUT, this is very very subtle, im pretty sure that a "normal" listener, even a regular head-fi visitor, wouldnt have noticed this at all. You need alot of experience to notice it during normal listening. Anyway this is whats called crossfeed. And thats surely not explained by only placing the drivers away from the ear canal

The whole s-logic package seems to consist of various tricks or technologies, whatever you want to call it. It would be really nice to read some clarification, just out of curiousity.

ps: from a price/quality ratio point of view this is the BEST can i owned my whole head-fi career.

PPS: If somebody here got Florians email adress, please PM me. I want to ask him about this and doublecheck what im hearing.

[Dexdexter]

Much to my own embarrassment, I've just realized that I've been calling the HFI-2200 ULE throughout this thread HiFi-2200 ULE.

And it appears I've got others doing it as well:

Originally Posted by The_Duke_Of_Eli

The HiFi 2200s won't let you down. Truly amazing headphones.

Oh well, live and learn.

Originally Posted by Sovkiller

And talking about Ultrasone...we need an smiley, an Edition smiley, or a PROLine smiley...Anybody could think on one.

I'm all for it! Perhaps something along the lines of these, only with offset-driver headphones:









But then how might we best convey the wonderful, mystical magic that is S-Logic???

Until then, I suppose this is the closest we have:

Cheers, Dex