I recently picked up of pair of these 180s: Village Knitâ„¢ with Headphones (Ear Warmers) for Unisex, Men's at REI on closeout for $14.83. They are a behind the ear warmer with built in headphones. I checked them out at the store and the headphones sounded surprisingly decent with my iPhone, and...

I was looking for some phones to use at my office that offered moderate levels of leakage and isolation. I decided to try to quantify these attributes for various headphones I have, and made some measurements using a headphone test jig I had made earlier with a SPL meter and a the digital level...

I have updated my buffer distortion measurements. The new data was taken in the META42 amp using the AD8620 op amp but with a higher inner loop gain than before (around 333), which benefits all but the best buffers. I have shown only the data for low resistive load since the distortion was...

At the recent bay area meet I had a chance to measure the distortion of a bunch of amps. For all amps I measured THD at 1v output at 1 kHz into both a 30 ohm and 100 ohm resistive load, and many amps I also recorded the levels of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th harmonic. All of the solid state amps...

The Bay Area meet was last Sunday at Nanahachi's house and had a very good turnout, both in terms of people and equipment. There was so much stuff there that it was hard to listen to everything, but it provided great opportunity to hear some stuff that is hard to audition otherwise. For amps...

I made some distortion measurements of a number of different buffers that I'd like to share. I have measured not only the THD (total harmonic distortion) but also how many dB down from the fundamental 1kHz frequency each of the first 4 harmonics are. Typically even harmonics are less bothersome...

My dog and I set out on our morning walk today and I had my usual rig of late, a Panasonic CT570, my blue Meta42 and Koss KSC/35 phones, listening to the new Springsteen CD. Before we reached the end of the street the battery died in the amp. This wasn't too surprising, as I had already gone...

I recently have put in a low current FET cascode current sources into my Porta Corda. I used a 2N5457 with a 2N5486 and a 100 ohm resistor to give me around 1.2mA. The layout of the Porta-Corda is such that it is easier to put in than it was in the Corda HA-1. Unlike the standard Corda, the...

I just put a couple of AD8610s in a dual browndog adapter, and I noticed that the current draw is about double of what I saw from a AD8620. I tracked it down to one of the AD8610 units that has some leakage between -IN and +IN. I haven't found out yet if its the chip or the browndog. Anyone else...

I have been working for several months now on modifications to the Meier Audio Corda HA-1 headphone amp. This is already an excellent headphone amp for the price, but since I had built mine from a kit and Jan Meier has published articles about the design including schematics, it seemed like a...

Introduction This is a listening comparison of four headphones that range between $330 and $800 in the US. These are neither the cheapest good headphones nor the most expensive headphones you can buy, but they are in the same price range as some very good (but not the most expensive you can...

Well, so far I can tell you that although there are certainly family traits that are shared, these are not twins or like Sennhieser HD580/HD600 brothers. As of now the W100 have about 10 hours on them and the W2002 have over 100 hours, but they sound almost as different from each other as they...

Recently on a business trip to Taiwan, I had a free weekend and went to Taipei in search for the new closed Stax headphones (or as Stax says, earspeakers), the 4070. You can see a picture here: http://www.stax.co.jp/ENG/4070E.html Well, I found them and listened to them with their recommended...

I'll be going to Taiwan shortly and wondered if it was worth my time to shop around for some nice headphones while I'm there, either in Taiwan or maybe in Hong Kong or Japan. Anyone have some ideas about this? I was thinking about some Stax, the Sony R10 or the W2002. Ideally it would be a place...

Note: I am posting this at both HeadWize and Head-Fi so if you read it at one place you don’t have to read it again. This is a review of the Meier-Audio Porta-Corda (Serial number 01001), HeadRoom Total Airhead (later version, no s/n), and what I call the CHL, which is the Levallois version...

The other day I stopped by The Analog Room in San Jose just to see what was new, and I was surprised to see a Sugden HeadMaster sitting on the shelf next to a Grado RA-1. I was surprised for two reasons, one being he doesn’t carry much in the way of headphone stuff, only Grado in the past. The...

Does anyone besides me get the feeling that headphone manufacturers don't know the @*!% they're doing? Maybe they make so many headphones that sound so different from each other just to try to please everyone, so that someone will like and buy something they make, but this type of shotgun...

I was paging through the new issue of Listener magazine when I was shocked to find out that Harvey Rosenberg, also known as "Gizmo" had died on July 16 at the age 60. He suffered an apparent heart attack en route to hear a new triode amp. Anyone who knew of Gizmo probably either loved him or...

Note: I am posting this at both HeadWize and Head-Fi so if you read it at one place you don't have to read it again…it is very long. The day following the Bay Area get-together at my house I still had a table full of amps, so I spend another evening doing comparisons. When we had as many as 8...

Here is a couple of the shots from the recent Bay Area get-together. Thanks to everyone that came out and to HeadRoom for providing some equipment. Everyone had a good time!

I think it's time we had another Bay Area get together. We all had a nice time at the last couple of meetings, trying out different amps, headphones, CD players, DACs, cables and tweeks. I'm sure there will be some new things to try, and hopefully some of those who couldn't make it before can...

I have had Grado SR60 headphones for several years and although quite happy with them I was interested in possibility going up a few notches in the Grado lineup for even better sound. I visited a local full line Grado dealer and spend a bit more than an hour listening to the lineup using a Linn...