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Official NYC Fall Regional Meet Impressions, Nov. 11, 2007
Head-Fi Meet Impressions, Trade Show Reports, Factory ToursThis sub-forum will serve as an archive location of past Head-Fi Meet impressions, trade show reports and factory tours.
Brief impressions, I didn't listen to all that much gear, which seems to be a trend with me and meets. As usual I had a great time hanging out with the NYC folks and it made the 8hr round trip more than worthwhile. Is it too early to start planning for the spring?
First up, Nikongod's HP's. I've never heard these cans before and I didn't know what to expect. I came away very impressed and these are the first Grados that I'd heard with flats that I really enjoyed. Great balance, tone and accuracy, it's easy to see why folks rave about these cans and pay the prices that they do. If I had $1200 to spend on a headphone I'd certainly go this way rather than something like the Edition 9's. And Ari's Supra sounded damn good with everything that I threw at it.
Speaking of the 9's, even on Tom's rig I simply couldn't get over the overpowering bass. He said that I should give them time and get used to them so I listened for a while and then switched to something else. My impression remains the same, huge bass that destroys the rest of the listening experience. I bet these headphones would be killer for listening to movies, but for music, no thanks.
The only other headphone that I made a real effort at listening to were the W5000s. The pair at the meet were recabled by some Enigma Audio company for balanced operation . I'm currently in negotiations for a stock pair and figured that I should try and spend at least a bit of time with them and see what I might be getting myself into. I spent a bit of time with them on my meager balanced rig and well, was seriously unimpressed. I kept turning up the volume to try and get the lower mids and low frequency information to sound right, but that made the upper mids and highs just plain piercing. Listening to Joanna Newsom was a good way to highlight this. I then switched over to Ian's Millett rig since it was right next to mine and things got better so clearly synergy is something that will have to be carefully considered and worked at with these headphones. The mini[sup]3[sup]2[/sup][/sup] is no giant killer or world beater amp but it was sourced well and can sounded pretty darn good so it wasn't like I was feeding them crap and getting crap back. I would have really like to try the 5000's on Ari's Supra but it was busy when I had the 5's and I didn't want to hog someone elses headphones.
I also got a bit of time with Headdirect's new IEM's and clip ons. At that point of the meet it was pretty hard to make any meaningful impressions (LOUD) but what I did hear was pretty encouraging. Mostly I'll be keeping an eye on the G-1s (I think that's what they're called) as they're a clip on style headphone like the Koss 35's that I use at work right now and I wouldn't mind having another pair of decent sounding work headphones. The IEMs, which aren't named yet and still just prototypes produced a pretty amazing amount of bass for such a little thing. I was having fitment issues and the seal kept letting go so I didn't get very far in my impressions but one thing is for sure, they're hard as hell to drive. Fang had a 4G ipod and running them directly out of the headphone jack I as running the pods volume around 70% to get a normal listening level. And I tend to listen very quietly compared to other folks.
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