Sometimes a headphone needs the right music for its sound signature to click with you. And once it clicks, you enjoy it more even on other songs. I made this realization two days ago with the Z1R when I finally realized what its tuning was going for. It puts me in the conductor's position (or in the Decca Tree used for recording) in an orchestra.
After getting home from my business trip (after listening to the Z1R exclusively for several days), I did some EQ as I do on all of my headphones. When I compared the stock sound with Oratory1990's EQ profile, vocals sounded a lot more detailed and textured with EQ. Bass was tighter and less boomy. The treble was a bit more crystalline, without the odd whistling character from that 10K peak. The stock midrange sounded very recessed in comparison, but certain instruments and certain vocals sounded very close, despite it being pretty open-sounding in general.
My experience has been that odd tonality means that the headphone is going for a particular experience, so I just needed to find the music that experience was meant for. For the Z1R, I think it was made for orchestral music. Everything about its odd tuning clicks. The Z1R is meant to emphasize the spatial positioning of a symphony orchestra from the perspective of the conductor or recording rig. The reason most vocals are recessed is because it's meant to sound like the choir, which is usually
behind the orchestra. Yet some vocals are very close-in, because they map to the soloists in a performance who are standing in the front by the conductor, not in the back with the choir.
In Mvmt IV: Finale of
Beethoven's 9th Symphony by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the soloists were clearly in front, close to me, rendered in front of my cheekbones. The Mendelssohn Choir was clearly in the back, slightly above my eye level, as can be heard at the 8:00 mark. If I apply the EQ, the soloists move further back, while the choir moves forward. There's still layering, but the effect is reduced. The effect with EQ is that of listening as an audience member with the entire orchestra and choir somewhere in front of you. The Z1R's tuning is rather more like being with the conductor. It's very immersive. It sort of exaggerates all of the spatial distances in the mix so that elements are spread further apart in depth. EQing the Z1R to Harman neutral moves the closest elements further away while slightly pulling in the furthest elements, so that there's more space between you and the closest instruments, which can sometimes seem like wider soundstage, but an overall flatter sonic image in front of you.
The Z1R captures the raw energy of orchestral bass drums better than my other headphones. The bass on the Z1R is boomy and certainly not tight and controlled like a planar or electrostat. But bass drums in concert halls simply aren't that well-controlled. Bass drums aren't meant for delicate passages, they're for hitting the audience with energy and driving emotion with their reverberation. The bass does seem flabby sometimes with studio-produced music, where the drums are recorded in anechoic rooms and reverb is added later. But with orchestral, it really captures the power and energy of bass drums.
Violins are a curious case. If I use the oratory EQ, it restores a lot of texture to the violin's notes, like the texture of the bow being drawn across the strings, and violins as a whole cut through the mix better than in the stock tuning, where violins can sometimes struggle to be heard over the brass and percussion. This is due to the strange midrange and lower treble tuning, particularly the recession in the 5-8KHz region. Yet in orchestral music, somehow the violins, despite that lack of texture and bite, sound "natural" within that context. My sister was quite good at violin, and I attended some of her concerts as part of youth orchestras. The sort of detail and texture that's rendered in an EQ'ed neutral tuning is detail that you would hear if you were right next to the violin player in a small room, but in a large open venue, that detail would naturally be lost due to room acoustics and all of the other instruments playing. It's not the notes that are being lost, you can hear every note, you just can't easily perceive those fine details like the scratchiness of the bow being drawn that lie in the higher harmonics. The neutral tuning sounded more like my sister practicing her violin at home in our family room. The stock tuning sounded more like her playing as part of an orchestral performance. The spatialization of violins and strings is also very immersive. I can hear first violins to my left very close in, just where they would be relative to the conductor. On a neutral headphone, those violins are moved further out, so it's more like listening to them from afar rather than being up close with them in an orchestral setting.
Overall, I find the Z1R very immersive. I was comparing them with my favorite open-back, the Hifiman Shangri-La Jr, and both offer extremely compelling presentations. The Shang offers that audience perspective. Layering is very good, but it's mostly in front, while it offers all of that midrange and treble detail and reins in the bass for a tight and controlled sound. The Z1R takes the conductor's view of "exploding" the spatial image to render the orchestra all around me and giving me the full power of an orchestra. I really like the Z1R; it's a keeper.
