Battle Of The Flagships (58 Headphones Compared) UPDATE: AUDEZ'E LCD-2 Revision 2 (6/4/13) - Page 16

A big big thank you.

This is excellent work.

It is amazing your dedication to such a big project and then you give it away to the community.

Arturo

I've been dreaming to see this battle and finally it's here! Many many thanks to David!

Priceless post! absolutely stunning and thank you for the taking the time to do it.

Wow, this is probably THE best write-up i've ever seen on this site! Thank you! This is definitely going to help a lot of people.
Edited by jwusoccer - 11/1/12 at 3:07pm

Finished reading the whole thing and thorougly enjoyed myself.

 

Well done sir.

 

Read the whole review in a single go WITHOUT BLINKING, that,s how good it is.

 

Now to start saving for some SR-007MK2 and an amp.Oh and a Koss ESP950 and the STAX SR-....nevermind.

I haven't made my way through the whole review yet so for now I'll just say WOW. Thank you for posting this.

WOW! Read this non-stop. Guess I would agree completely with the Grado reviews (having owned the RS1 and GS1000) and feel lucky to have the Senn HD600 and HD650 (with upgraded cables) as my main cans! Thanks for a most comprehensive review!

The content of the review is an invaluable contribution to Head-Fi and I have to commend DavidMahler on the time & effort that I'm sure went into it, but at the same time, I have to call into the question the legitimacy of the review when the background of the review is literally an ad for Headphones.com. Seriously - was this review written for Headphones.com or Head-Fi? The not-so-subtle advertising for Headphones.com completely devalues this review for me.

I feel I must add to the well deserved accolades for this series of posts. It is clear that this goes well beyond "public service" contributions to a "reference" post that will help many new and aspiring headfiers (I count myself among them) find their way through a forest of one off reviews or comparisons across a few "comparable" 'phones to the audio Rosetta stone. If there is a subtle marketing effect in the review, it worked ;) I just moved from TF10's to LCD-3's and never thought I would think about headphones again. Now I am tempted to add a few more...

This epic comparison was obviously written for Head-fi, there is nothing promoting Headphones.com except for the fact that their logo has been added to the background (screened back ~90%), and DavidMahler's status as an employee of this Head-fi Sponsor. This section ("I began writing this review before I started at headphones.com") is the only mention of them, and it seems entirely reasonable to me. They're not even mentioned in the "Final thoughts and thank yous" section although as David said earlier, his rapport with the manufacturers has helped this effort, and that rapport is due to his position with Headphones.com.

As a comparative example, I found the JH Audio Facebook link on Head-fi page margins to be much more intrusive. Finally, Headphones.com carries around three times as many brands of the headphones compared to what David mentioned, and don't carry many of them at all. Even though they are a Head-fi sponsor, this doesn't seem like much of a "promotion" for Headphones.com or any particular retailer IMO.

edited to add links
Edited by grokit - 11/1/12 at 4:29pm

 

I'd say that David's 50+ headphone comparison is one of the most valuable posts (if not the most valuable) I've read on head-fi. Just because it points to headphones.com in no way diminishes its intrinsic value; if anything it adds to it.

 

Edited by Windsor - 11/1/12 at 4:19pm

Hats off to you, David! I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down to take in your experience. 

 

A few things you and I both missed:

 

Marvin Gaye - perhaps, you meant "What's Goin' On"

Ella Fitzgerald? 

Janos Starker??

A bowl of delicate green tea! 

Edited by Silent One - 11/1/12 at 4:30pm

David has been working on this since before he was employed by Headphones.com. I don't feel like it reads like an ad at all. We've spoken on the phone about this project of his several times (which, by the way, still didn't prepare me for the remarkable scope of it), and he had some concern about how it might be perceived (in the context of his employment).

 

Having read the whole thing now, I can say that it doesn't at all read like an ad to me. Anything this comprehensive, this well-planned, this fervid...it can only be a labor fueled by a true passion for headphone audio. On top of all that, I think he owns everything he's reviewed in this project, so I can't imagine he could ever profit financially from this, just given the financial costs he's already sunk into it.

 

This is passion, obsession, love...plain and simple. I'm still wide-eyed at the scope of it, and I've been staring at it almost nonstop since last night.

Jude, any thoughts on adding a thread stickie function on HFi? That way people don't need to bookmark or forum-search for good threads like this when it gets a few pages off front-page.