lovethatsound said:

13 ft is just about right for me.Its about time headphone manufacturers started giving us decent lengths of cable,anywhere from 10 ft.

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Assuming the Elear cable is good enough, I will eventually cut mine in half and reterminate so I have a balanced and an unbalanced cable. The cable with the stock 3.5mm connectors will have a 4-pin balanced connector on the amp end and the cable with the 1/4" connector will have 3.5mm connectors on the headphone end.
 
However, I'm always wary of stock cables. Just because the cable has a thick housing doesn't mean the actual wires inside are very thick. I've cut some stock cables that were impressive on the outside but had very thin wire inside, so you see a wire that looks like the typical wire on a lot of mid price headphones. The stock cable often has some 'filler' inside to make it thicker and to give the impression that it is a high end cable. Unless you can find a picture of a cable someone has cut you won't be sure what size wire is actually being used. I'm not sure why so many manufacturers shortchange their phones with what I consider to be a somewhat substandard wire. Of course that keeps the aftermarket cable guys in business but degrades the potential of the phone.

Messaged Jason. Hey is there away to preorder the headphones off your website? Couldn't find them. Or do I have to fly to California to do so?

pkcpga said:

If you buy the right speakers and properly power and set them up, I find sound staging on speakers to be much better also. My nautilus speakers with naim preamp, amp and Dave give a great presentation. As well as even my much cheaper Kef ls50's. Not sure it's quit as drastic but I'd say more like hd800 at 4, ls50 at 7 and nautilus at 10. But its true your talking about spending 50k instead of 5k, except for the ls50's they'd fall on a more even price point.

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I think too many factors play with the sound  end results, the room acoustic, the damping of resonance and vibrations, the topology of each piece of gear and their own synergy,all  independently of price... My 100 dollars used Mission speakers have an imaging like my stax SR-5 headphone or like my lambda headphone or  like my HE 400... But my speakers are sorbothanized like my headphone, and  i have apply a roon treatment for music in all my room...Without that the speakers are less , way less good...My sorbothane cost me a few bucks, the  room treatment  with some  2 sort of cheap foam, a few bucks also.... Ooops! it is better to come back to the Focal headphones, i am very interested by the Elear...Because of Tyll

Hi-Fi was marketing lingo used in the 70s for speakers that could actually reproduce full spectrum audio with minimum distortion.  By the original terminology, almost every single headphone on the market is hi-fi.
 
I personally can't stand the notion of using 'mid-fi' today, as there really is no such thing.  People are using mid-fi, hi-fi, and summit-fi to denote price of headphones and their respective 'exclusivity.'  In fact, Currawong wrote in a post a while back in regards to moving the LCD2 thread from summit-fi to full-sized headphones that he defined summit-fi as headphones that 'cost thousands of dollars' or ones that were rather esoteric- such as electrostats, which required their own unique amps-- two things which have absolutely nothing to do with sound quality.
 
Sure you can make the argument that times have changed, and the bar has been raised for something being high fidelity or not in relation to other headphones on the market, but then you'd have to realize what high fidelity means-- which is faithfulness to the original signal-- something which many current 'summit-fi' headphones do a worse job at than so called current mid-fi headphones.
 
If people would just categorize headphones as mid-priced, high-priced, and flagship pricing etc, (or something along those lines), then it would be a whole lot less idiotic than saying mid-fi, hi-fi, and summit-fi.  This trend is almost as dumb as the people who would respond to an entire quoted post with just a '+1', when the forum already had an add to reputation button.

raypin said:

  I'm not saying anything new here. It is just common knowledge.

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Whilst I agree with most of your thoughts and I too believe the Elear can potentially be categorized as mid-fi (especially if we're talking about Tyll's wall of fame, for example), one thing I find a little jarring is that the Elear may be a better match for the WA8 than the Utopia based off of the fact that the latter requires "TOTL amp/DAC" to sound its best.
 
Sure, the WA8 is closer to the price tag of the Elear than it is to Utopia's and my experience with really expensive gear is quite narrow (I own a WA7 for example) but I find it hard to believe that a 2 thousand dollar amp (possibly paired with an external DAC) crafted by arguably the most respected valve device manufacturer in the US cannot adequately drive the Utopia. I refuse to believe you need to spend 16 grand on their WA234 Monoblocks, which after all is their TOTL product, to get the Utopia to sound as it should. Of course, the better the chain, the better the headphones will sound, any properly built headphones nowadays will scale fairly well in my opinion but is that last 1 or 2 or however much % really worth paying 3 times the price of the WA8 to get the WA5 (which isn't even their TOTL) instead? Maybe, but I personally didn't take @Currawong 's claims that far.

richard51 said:

I think too many factors play with the sound  end results, the room acoustic, the damping of resonance and vibrations, the topology of each piece of gear and their own synergy,all  independently of price... My 100 dollars used Mission speakers have an imaging like my stax SR-5 headphone or like my lambda headphone or  like my HE 400... But my speakers are sorbothanized like my headphone, and  i have apply a roon treatment for music in all my room...Without that the speakers are less , way less good...My sorbothane cost me a few bucks, the  room treatment  with some  2 sort of cheap foam, a few bucks also....:atsmile: Ooops! it is better to come back to the Focal headphones, i am very interested by the Elear...Because of Tyll

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I'm very interested in both focal headphones if they are going to really create a better soundstage than my previous headphones. Can't wait to try them.

petezjunior said:

Messaged Jason. Hey is there away to preorder the headphones off your website? Couldn't find them. Or do I have to fly to California to do so?

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Hahaha no you don't have to fly to get them .... Sorry I'm not up all night reading Head-fi messages

vigrith said:

Whilst I agree with most of your thoughts and I too believe the Elear can potentially be categorized as mid-fi (especially if we're talking about Tyll's wall of fame, for example), one thing I find a little jarring is that the Elear may be a better match for the WA8 than the Utopia based off of the fact that the latter requires "TOTL amp/DAC" to sound its best.

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Just get Chord DAVE and be done with it. Well, that's what I'm contemplating, though not in a rush.

I wonder if that combination will be available to listen to at CanJam London. Seems unlikely unless you bring your own DAVE.

petezjunior said:

Messaged Jason. Hey is there away to preorder the headphones off your website? Couldn't find them. Or do I have to fly to California to do so?

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He takes orders over the phone.

tmraven said:

Hi-Fi was marketing lingo used in the 70s for speakers that could actually reproduce full spectrum audio with minimum distortion.  By the original terminology, almost every single headphone on the market is hi-fi.

I personally can't stand the notion of using 'mid-fi' today, as there really is no such thing.  People are using mid-fi, hi-fi, and summit-fi to denote price of headphones and their respective 'exclusivity.'  In fact, Currawong wrote in a post a while back in regards to moving the LCD2 thread from summit-fi to full-sized headphones that he defined summit-fi as headphones that 'cost thousands of dollars' or ones that were rather esoteric- such as electrostats, which required their own unique amps-- two things which have absolutely nothing to do with sound quality.

Sure you can make the argument that times have changed, and the bar has been raised for something being high fidelity or not in relation to other headphones on the market, but then you'd have to realize what high fidelity means-- which is faithfulness to the original signal-- something which many current 'summit-fi' headphones do a worse job at than so called current mid-fi headphones.

If people would just categorize headphones as mid-priced, high-priced, and flagship pricing etc, (or something along those lines), then it would be a whole lot less idiotic than saying mid-fi, hi-fi, and summit-fi.  This trend is almost as dumb as the people who would respond to an entire quoted post with just a '+1', when the forum already had an add to reputation button.

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+1

Question for the more seasoned veterans on here. Can i pair the Focal Elear's with the IFI IDSD micro ? Will that provide ample power in moving these headphones to higher outputs ? 

Should

illmatic9108 said:

Question for the more seasoned veterans on here. Can i pair the Focal Elear's with the IFI IDSD micro ? Will that provide ample power in moving these headphones to higher outputs ? 

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should be fine. The Elear is pretty efficient and can even run from a phone relatively well.

tsavjason said:

Should
should be fine. The Elear is pretty efficient and can even run from a phone relatively well.

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Hmm. Maybe depending on what phone. Because the new ZTE Axon 7 has pretty good DAC chips inside. I bet running them from my 
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge will suck really bad. Some of my more efficient headphones were really bad volume wise with that phone. 
I'm a bit of a volume loony. So i need loudness. But clear at the same time. I am a producer music-wise so i am severely addicted to sound
not lyrics. 

pkcpga said:

If you buy the right speakers and properly power and set them up, I find sound staging on speakers to be much better also. My nautilus speakers with naim preamp, amp and Dave give a great presentation. As well as even my much cheaper Kef ls50's. Not sure it's quit as drastic but I'd say more like hd800 at 4, ls50 at 7 and nautilus at 10. But its true your talking about spending 50k instead of 5k, except for the ls50's they'd fall on a more even price point.

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Well, I have heard many of the top of line speakers (including KEF) on even $70k+ amplifiers. They seem not be able to produce hard left or hard right sounds correctly. It is still coming from the front a bit.

I'm just saying not everything about the soundstage of speakers is better than the HD 800 S.

But I prefer the soundstage of speakers also for reference recordings since it actually sounds like a live performance in the room.

ubs28 said:

I disagree. Speakers generally don't seem to be that good with imaging as if all the sounds are coming from the front. A sound coming 90 degree from the right will still come from right front while the HD 800 S will place it there at 90 degrees right.

However what I find $100k speaker system good at is presenting a live performance in front of the room, as if the band is playing right in front of you.

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And that is not imaging? Last sentence.