While digging through my box of earphones back home I came across my good old Sony MDR-A44 vertical in-the-ear headphones which I had bought back in the days when I was still experimenting with earphones, and not yet into headphones. I had always enjoyed listening to them everytime I come back home from college because of their unique and unobtrusive size and comfort, only to be disappointed with their screechy highs and thin sound.
Well, tonight I gave them another one of those bypass listens from my Sony R900 MD recorder, and yep...thin and screechy highs, thin sound overall, not much bass. Blech. BUT...if there was one factor that impressed me, it was the sense of inner detail and transparency I got. I started smiling slowly because I had a feeling, I had another one of those headphones where the better the rig, the better they sound.
So I ran over to my home rig of some stuff I shipped back home which consists of a Sony JB-920 MD deck, Totem Acoustic Sinews, and JMT Cmoy amp, along with my Grado 325s that I had brought along with me back home. Jacked that frail little A44 right into the Cmoy, and fired up the rig...and *WOW*!!!
I haven't been very excited about headphones for a very long time now I must say...for a good 3-4 months at least. Not in the sense that the moment I hear a headphone, it'll make me want to run online and share what I'm hearing immediately (you know what I'm talking about if you were with me in Headwize's early days, where you see reviews from me just about every week on a new 'phone
). These A44s now make me want to do that again.
These things, quite simply, are open air Etymotics! When driven from a nice big rig, the sound fills in tremendously, the soundstage blooms, the highs become very smooth with no screechiness at all. The bass is very similar to Etymotic style bass...it's bass you can totally hear, but can't quite feel. But where they are most like the Etymotics is in inner detail and transparency...when driven out of the Cmoy, you can just hear everything. Background singers and instrument decays are just totally laid out. Each word a singer sings is pronounced with frightening accuracy and sharpness, particularly noticeable when I play Asian music through them.
Quite simply, I don't think any of my other headphones have ever showed me this degree of high quality sharpness to everything, other than the Stax 3030 system that I tried before...it's like you suddenly gain a heightened sense to the intricacies of the music. Even the Etymotics, while being incredibly detailed, had the tendency to soften words up. This is not sibilance that I am describing either, it's more like an absolute lack of warmth perhaps. It's very clean and cold sounding.
The A44s strangely can't resolve speedy instrument seperation very well, meaning when I listen to a fast violin piece, the back and forward strokes sound smeared. With the R10s I can pick up when the bow is sawing forward, and then back. But otherwise, you can really, really hear slow paced instruments very distinctly, such as a piano piece, or slow guitar playing.
Strangely I had always thought the A44s sounded very tonally wrong all along when all I had used it out of was portables, but out of the Cmoy it sounded very accurate and flat. The bass had sounded slightly hollow from the R900, but it was dead tight and flat out of the Cmoy, not very different from what I heard from Etymotics. One of my favorite tests for drums is in the Mandarin version of Coco Lee's "A Love Before Time" in the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack. Towards the end of the song there are a couple of drum beats that reverb into the right 'phone cup that are particularly hard to reproduce accurately as there is a definite sense of a wooden reverb that is hard to catch tonally, and these are also rather deep notes (as in bookshelf speakers will tend to almost miss these notes entirely). The A44 was able to reproduce these bass notes accurately and with the "woody" sound as well, which surprised me greatly.
The closest thing I have to compare the A44s to are the Grado 325s, and the A44s simply blow away the 325s in the area of pure detail and being able to hear the little background details. The Grados win out in that they give you a bigger, fuller sound, with more bass. But the A44s simply smoke them in the amount of music they can deliver to your ears. Almost a case of electrostats vs. dynamics...almost.
I am now VERY eager to get back home and run these babies off the RKV and 9000ES, and see what happens then. But in the meantime, I think I've just found a headphone that can definitely satisfy my craving for just being able to hear everything in a recording.
Yes this is a very surprising turn of events. The once highly dissed, $25 P.O.S. MDR-A44L, is suddenly considered very good. It makes me wonder just how those V600s would do if given a proper source and headphone amp.
Well, tonight I gave them another one of those bypass listens from my Sony R900 MD recorder, and yep...thin and screechy highs, thin sound overall, not much bass. Blech. BUT...if there was one factor that impressed me, it was the sense of inner detail and transparency I got. I started smiling slowly because I had a feeling, I had another one of those headphones where the better the rig, the better they sound.
So I ran over to my home rig of some stuff I shipped back home which consists of a Sony JB-920 MD deck, Totem Acoustic Sinews, and JMT Cmoy amp, along with my Grado 325s that I had brought along with me back home. Jacked that frail little A44 right into the Cmoy, and fired up the rig...and *WOW*!!!
I haven't been very excited about headphones for a very long time now I must say...for a good 3-4 months at least. Not in the sense that the moment I hear a headphone, it'll make me want to run online and share what I'm hearing immediately (you know what I'm talking about if you were with me in Headwize's early days, where you see reviews from me just about every week on a new 'phone
These things, quite simply, are open air Etymotics! When driven from a nice big rig, the sound fills in tremendously, the soundstage blooms, the highs become very smooth with no screechiness at all. The bass is very similar to Etymotic style bass...it's bass you can totally hear, but can't quite feel. But where they are most like the Etymotics is in inner detail and transparency...when driven out of the Cmoy, you can just hear everything. Background singers and instrument decays are just totally laid out. Each word a singer sings is pronounced with frightening accuracy and sharpness, particularly noticeable when I play Asian music through them.
Quite simply, I don't think any of my other headphones have ever showed me this degree of high quality sharpness to everything, other than the Stax 3030 system that I tried before...it's like you suddenly gain a heightened sense to the intricacies of the music. Even the Etymotics, while being incredibly detailed, had the tendency to soften words up. This is not sibilance that I am describing either, it's more like an absolute lack of warmth perhaps. It's very clean and cold sounding.
The A44s strangely can't resolve speedy instrument seperation very well, meaning when I listen to a fast violin piece, the back and forward strokes sound smeared. With the R10s I can pick up when the bow is sawing forward, and then back. But otherwise, you can really, really hear slow paced instruments very distinctly, such as a piano piece, or slow guitar playing.
Strangely I had always thought the A44s sounded very tonally wrong all along when all I had used it out of was portables, but out of the Cmoy it sounded very accurate and flat. The bass had sounded slightly hollow from the R900, but it was dead tight and flat out of the Cmoy, not very different from what I heard from Etymotics. One of my favorite tests for drums is in the Mandarin version of Coco Lee's "A Love Before Time" in the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack. Towards the end of the song there are a couple of drum beats that reverb into the right 'phone cup that are particularly hard to reproduce accurately as there is a definite sense of a wooden reverb that is hard to catch tonally, and these are also rather deep notes (as in bookshelf speakers will tend to almost miss these notes entirely). The A44 was able to reproduce these bass notes accurately and with the "woody" sound as well, which surprised me greatly.
The closest thing I have to compare the A44s to are the Grado 325s, and the A44s simply blow away the 325s in the area of pure detail and being able to hear the little background details. The Grados win out in that they give you a bigger, fuller sound, with more bass. But the A44s simply smoke them in the amount of music they can deliver to your ears. Almost a case of electrostats vs. dynamics...almost.
I am now VERY eager to get back home and run these babies off the RKV and 9000ES, and see what happens then. But in the meantime, I think I've just found a headphone that can definitely satisfy my craving for just being able to hear everything in a recording.
Yes this is a very surprising turn of events. The once highly dissed, $25 P.O.S. MDR-A44L, is suddenly considered very good. It makes me wonder just how those V600s would do if given a proper source and headphone amp.
