ChiUniFi 08 Meet Impressions - Chicago has another great meet! - Page 5

Originally Posted by Akabeth

During the meet at Ray's place I said I'd post an impression of the Orpheus vs Jade because (I think) we all spent a LOT of time a/b'ing both. Possibly against some others' opinion, I frankly think the Jade held its ground against the almighty Orpheus.

Originally Posted by Akabeth

Also, I believe John wrote a comparison of the two elsewhere in the high-end forum. He worded his thoughts better than I can ever hope to.

Originally Posted by unary

Can someone kindly provide a link to the other comparison?
I was not very good at the search function on this forum
Thanks
unary

Originally Posted by RDK845

May be some headfiers wants to hear more about this little electrostat event. So here goes what I experienced in some detail before the memory becomes blurred. It is my first time writing this type of stuff, so please pardon me if it turns out not so good.

My primary goal attending this meet was to make my own assessment on Jade, since I’ve been considering Jade, Omega II and HE60 for my office set-up. My home reference system is K1000 / modified dared 845 SET/ DIY squeezebox based computer audio player, which I brought to the ChiUniFI meet. Based on my short experience at a couple of meets, I feel this system can compete with almost any top of the line dynamic headphone and amp with CD player priced > a few K$. My listening preference is acoustical, mostly classical music.

At the meet, I tried Feng’s (head-direct) Jade/HE audio amp/Meridian CDP (may be 808) using Joshua Bell’s Beethoven Violin Concerto. Almost immediately, I felt the sound was somewhat overly boomy to my tastes and then I noticed the intimacy level is perhaps one or two notch lower than the K1K set-up. Coming back and forth between my reference set-up (until cable of 1 channel of K1K gave up) and HEAD-Direct set-up, confirmed this impression. Of course part of this could be coming from the difference in sound signature of sources, but needless to say I was a bit disappointed at this point. (For Head-Direct defense, Feng told us that the amp was not the top of line they have in their sleeves.)

After the meet, about 8-9 of us had a great time at Ray’s place comparing HE90, Omega II, HE60 and Jade, using his prototype electrostat headphone amp / preamplifier. Ray guided the trials with a sound and systematic way. We preped our ears with Ray’s speaker system consisting of Blue Heron Speakers from Mapletree / Cary amp (I think it was CAD 805) / prototype amp in preamp mod / Turntable. Except the preamp, which I don’t know what the price would be, all the other components individually cost more than 10K. The system sounded as good as or better than what the price dictated. I ended up picking Heifetz's Glazunov Violin concerto (Living Stereo) LP for a trial and it sounded great, having all hi-fi aspects, great details revealing Heifetz’s delicate variation of intonation and bowing techniques, while sounding very natural, lively and overall well composed from top to bottom. I would guess that the system sounded slightly rich in midrange with better than average bass dynamics compared to similar system in the price range, but I think that is Ray’s personal preference.

Using same music and source, we now flip the prototype to electrostat headphone amp mod and A/Bed HE90 and Jade. The HE90 sounded fantastic, similar sounding to the speaker system in tone and detail (with slightly smoother sound signature than those of speaker) which was amazing. I should note thought, that it was my first time to listen to a HE90. Immediately after I switched to Jade, I noticed the treble of violin has some sparkle to it, which was not there with HE 90. The sound stage appeared to be a bit larger, with a sense of more separation between instruments. The latter may have been a good thing in technical terms if it was for speaker system, but to me, with headphone, it brought out tiny unnaturalness to the music, particularly when combined with the more excited trebles. Other aspects like details, and dynamics seemed to be similar level to those of HE90.

Later we compared Ray’s HE60 to HE90 and Jade. According to Ray, he replaced the driver of this HE60 to the latest one, and this made its sound signature considerably smoother than the original HE60. He said the original HE60 was too bright to his taste. As soon as I put on this HE60, it was rather clear that the sound stage is noticeably smaller, top end may be slightly less extended and midrange is slightly congested (or less transparent) compared to HE90. This is somewhat different from what I read about the HE60, so it adds to the weight on what Ray mentioned about his HE60. I felt that Jade seemed to have somewhat larger soundstage and has slightly better transparency then this particular HE60.

Finally Ray brought in his omega 007A and we did stock 007A vs. HE90 vs. Jade. At this point we were using only female voices like Nora Jones for comparison which has less extended top and bottom than classical orchestra, but the difference in sound signature of 007A from Jade and Sennheisers was quite apparent. It sounded like as if very low bass is somewhat cut-off, and high bass to low mid is a little congested, while mid itself sounded more laid back then the others. Overall it was somewhat less involving and flatter than the rest. I’m not sure whether I’m putting this in right word, but it had this slight delicate or frail nature to the sound, somewhat similar to what I found from some Audio Technica phones.

But in the end, this last comparison was a somewhat moot point, since Ray’s amp was voiced using HE90 and one probably should not expect to hear good performance of a 007A, unless the amp was voiced with it in mind. In fact Ray continued to show how tweaking may make the amp sound more fit to 007A, but this post is already way too long to discuss that. I should also note that never listened to 007A with a Blue Hawaii.

In regards of fit and finish issue, Jade felt somewhat nicer overall than what I imagined from pictures, better than HE60 which was plasticky. All three headphones were comfortable, where Jade felt slightly heavier than Omega II which I thought, was most comfortable between 4 phones.

In conclusion, I felt Jade performed very well against Sennheiser stats at least when hooked up with very good gears. But I suspect many of us will be using less expensive gears than Ray’s, so it is upto users to discover good matching gears to bring out the best of them. Also I was told that the Jade used in the meet IS Immtbiker’s, so we have sampled only one Jade so far.

After some thought, I decided to order Jade as opposed to going with OII MK1 used, since at least initially, I will be using some kind of transformer box with speaker amps to power my electrostat headphone and I thought brighter headphone may be better in such set-up.

YMMV.

Thanks.

-John

Originally Posted by Akabeth

After going on and on typing my 1932 word-long impression of this meet, I conclude that I fail in writing... What I wrote just doesn't make 'sense'. The following is a much simplified version of what I wrote.

I like:

#3) RSA Stealth > HP1000; first Grado headphone (or rig) I actually enjoy listening to in a while (I heard it was Steve's but I never found out the owner)

That's the top 3 in no particular order but the list goes on... of course

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Good night.

Originally Posted by ZoNtO

Bump for more RE0 impressions?