Three weeks ago I walked into my local headphone store when I heard they had gotten in some Utopias, because I was curious to give them a listen. I walked out owning a pair. This was not at all my intention. I just wanted to hear them, educate myself, and maybe dream about someday owning them. The Utopias are simply different from any other headphone I’ve heard. They’re closer to perfect. In fact, for the first time, it is hard for me to picture how the headphone-listening experience could improve beyond what these provide.
The Utopias are full, sweet, and clear. Music is immediate and present. They make it easy to ride the crests and descend the valleys, and see every detail along the way. They command your attention - it is difficult to multitask (reading, working, or anything else) when they’re on. And, the more you pay attention, the more they reveal to you.
The Utopias are standout headphones in dynamics, detail, tonal balance, and imaging.
Dynamics. These headphones punch like nothing I’ve heard. There is an immediacy and a swing from subtle to powerful that I have not experienced anywhere other than the best speaker systems.
Detail. I have heard the cliche, “brings you closer to the artist’s intentions” to describe everything from remastered recordings to cables. With the Utopias, I feel I know what that expression means. When an artist is making tiny decisions, they are very close to their instrument, hearing everything in a way that their audience might not even detect. The vibrato on a sustained note, one extra quiet strum on a guitar, a vocalist moving in closer to her mic for a syllable or two, I hear these things again and again on the Utopias, even in songs I thought I knew inside and out.
Dan Clark of MrSpeakers made the comment that he judges the quality of gear by listening for cymbal hits. Is it just a haze, or can you actually distinguish one cymbal from the next? Is the sound natural, with no etched glare? I’ve heard others say that they listen for the applause in live recordings. Can you hear individual hands clapping, or is it undifferentiated, like raindrops? For both cymbals and applause, the Utopias capture the nuances and distinctions.
Another aspect of detail: I love being able to precisely pick out what the other musicians are doing when they think nobody is paying attention to them. Other transducers ignore them, but the Utopias don’t let them hide.
Finally, for me, detail means being able to make out lyrics. With the Utopias I can follow the words better than I have with any other transducer. They articulate so well, it is more like I am listening to conversational speech than I’ve ever heard.
Tonal balance. Are these bass-light? Are they too bright? I had both of those concerns in the shop. The Utopias were so clear in the upper registers that I feared they could tip into being sibilant. Forward-sounding gear elicits a “wow” factor in the showroom, but it can fatigue once you spend hours with it at home. Any hint of sibilance I was picking up on at the shop has vanished at home with my own amp. The shop had them plugged in to a current-mode amp, and I already knew I don’t like current amps. My own amp is a traditional voltage amp (Violectric V281, balanced cable), and there’s no hint of sibilance here, just a wonderfully forward presentation without
any fatigue after loong listening sessions.
Also, I am very happy to report that the bass in the Utopias is beautifully rendered. It does not dominate the music, but bass notes can be distinguished from each other better than on any other headphone I’ve heard. There is an integration along the entire frequency spectrum that makes music more involving. Bass-heavy headphones can impress at first, but the bass boost added by headphone designers, even in top gear, is usually unfaithful to the recording, and then you can't escape the bass even in music where it was intended to be subtle.
With vinyl in particular, the Utopias are winners. Vinyl has such articulate and strong bass, and at least on my gear, an overall laid-back sound signature. On good equipment, these are strengths, but on entry-level playback gear, vinyl can sound wooly and dull. The Utopias play well with vinyl’s inherent characteristics - rendering the bass wonderfully while making the presentation a little more forward in the upper registers - to yield the most engrossing and satisfying listening experience I’ve had in my own home.
Imaging. On the Utopias, every instrument is at one specific location, and it does not budge. I have not experienced such tight localization before, and it is a thing of wonder. True, the whole soundstage is between my ears, but the imaging is remarkably distinct and tight. (
Imaging, in my opinion, is different from
soundstage. If you want a big soundstage, get a pair of decent speakers. If you want imaging - the localization of instruments within a spatial field, no matter how large or small that field might be, then headphones are at least as good as decent speakers in this regard.)
In all, I consider the Utopias very well-priced at $4000, because they are meaningfully better than headphones that are priced in that ballpark, and because to get this level of sound quality would require a top-of-the-line speaker setup, which will cost significantly more than $4K.
By way of illustrating how much the Utopias mean to me personally, I want to compare them to the other headphones I own. What follows is part comparative review, part personal narrative, because for (almost) anybody buying a $4K pair of headphones, it is a significant life decision, which comes at the cost of other uses for that money, and it is the culmination of a long search. For me, the other headphones I’ve owned are the rungs of a ladder that led me to headphone Utopia. From top to bottom, here is my particular ladder:
Top rung: Audeze LCD-3F and Sennheiser HD 800.
Two years ago, I auditioned both at my local shop. After much dithering, I bought the LCD-3. There was such a tangible immediacy to the music that I could not let it go. I could perceive how the HD800 was more balanced across the spectrum, but it felt aloof to me.
Well, a couple months later, I also purchased the HD800. I felt that the LCD-3 and the HD800 each gave a different perspective on the music, and for me it has been a great joy to replay favorite songs or albums back-to-back through both cans. Ideal audio gear should impart no character of its own (right?), but I decided that that was not actually attainable - the best you could hope for was a presentation that was to your liking. And, in the absence of perfect gear, we should delight in the different perspectives on our music that are provided by different equipment. Audio gear is a mixture of engineering and artistry, and like we do for the music itself, we can appreciate the design choices that go into crafting a headphone’s sound.
For me, the Utopias are so balanced and coherent, they don’t leave me wanting to hear music through any other headphones. They have the snarl of the LCD-3’s and the air of the HD800’s. I am about to put my other cans up for sale - I just won't be using them much anymore.
The most effective gear assessments are comparative. Almost anything is going to let you get lost in your music, and at the same time, almost any gear can leave you aching for more, wondering if there is a way to get even more enveloped in your favorite music. If you really want to see how good a piece of gear is, listen
down. Start with the better thing, then listen to the almost-as-good thing. I find this makes the differences more apparent than listening
up (from good gear to better gear). Going from the Utopias to the HD800s, it is stunning to me how much musical information is lost. The 800s blunt the peaks of the dynamics, and they also allow the quiet details to fade into the fuzz. Imagine standing on the beach at the edge of the ocean. You experience the crash of a wave followed by the hiss of the sand around you as the tide recedes. That’s the Utopias. Now imagine standing up amidst the blankets and umbrellas. The ocean is still there, with the crash and hiss, and it’s magnificent. That’s the 800’s. You don’t perceive it could get any better, until it does.
And in comparison to the LCD-3F’s, when you switch from the Utopias to them, you perceive that there is a hole in the middle, which you were unaware of prior to the switch. The Audezes have amazing bass, so tight and impactful, and highs that pop right out at you. It isn’t until you hear better cans that you realize that the LCD’s the are lacking integration across the frequency spectrum.
I
prefer the LCD-3F to the HD800, and yet my recommendation for anybody at this stage of their quest should buy the HD800, simply because it is more musically versatile and accurate, and because its comfort is the best I have ever experienced, short of custom iems, and even better than the Utopias.
Sidestep 1: Good speakers (Bowers and Wilkins 805D2 driven by a McIntosh MC152).
In my quest for audio nirvana, I decided that two-channel reproduction was where it’s at. I visited Tyll for Big Sound 2015, and I spent a marvelous day delighting in the absolute-best headphones and gear in the world. I greatly enjoyed appreciating the nuances in presentation among the world’s best headphones: Stax, Abyss, Hifiman HE-1000, Anax-modded HD800s, Audeze, Ether Flow, Enigmacoustics, etc etc. They each had strengths and tradeoffs, and I delighted in the differences. It was a wonderful experience, but at the end of the day, I left feeling that Bob Katz’s assertion was spot-on: no headphones are perfect.
The next day, I called up Todd the Vinyl Junkie, and asked if I could pay him a visit. He was such a gracious host, and to this day, my afternoon with him was the pinnacle of my music-listening experience. Todd’s setup consisted of Vivid speakers driven by Luxman monoblocks, a VPI turntable, and the rattiest and most comfortable sofa in the world. I sunk in, while Todd cued up album after album of music I thought I knew well. I had never experienced musical reproduction like this. In fact, I had never experienced
music like that. The immediacy and the dynamic range were breathtaking. The soundstage was enormous and three-dimensional. The imaging was almost visual.
We are told that the ultimate goal of musical reproduction is to be indistinguishable from live, unamplified music. (The “absolute sound”.) Speakers should sound like live music, and headphones should sound like good speakers. But I’ve come to completely disagree. First of all, it is very rare that we hear live, unamplified music. When I’m at a classical or rock concert, my sense for soundstage and imaging is
visual, not auditory. If I close my eyes, it falls apart, because after all, the sound is coming from towers of speakers. The soundstage and imaging present in audio reproduction are studio artifacts, and that’s fine with me - it is still an engrossing illusion and a pleasant aspect of musical reproduction. This is nothing new - artists and engineers have always sculpted music with the playback mode in mind. Bach composed so that his music would sound good in the salons and churches where it would be performed. The 3 1/2-minute-long song convention is a result of the duration of one side of a 78. Music does not exist in some pure form regardless of how it will be reproduced, and it never has. We are not so much trying to capture the original event, but rather, we are trying to create a beautiful illusion.
Should headphones sound like speakers? I don’t think they ever will, and I don’t think they should. They have very different strengths, and some unavoidable disadvantages. Our body does so much to the sound we hear before it reaches our ears, that unless you mimic those effects with signal processing customized to your own body, you’re never going to get headphones to trick you into thinking the music is rendered in front of you. But, that doesn’t matter to me; I believe the very best way to experience reproduced music is on a phenomenal two-channel system, and getting there is a long-term goal of mine. But, as we already know, dollar-for-dollar, you can do much better with headphones - unless soundstage is what matters the most for you in music. So, although I love my good speakers, at least in my price bracket, speakers cannot provide the immediacy and detail that good headphones offer.
Third rung: JH-13 custom in-ear monitors.
I purchased these waay back in 2009. I was convinced they would be the only headphones I would ever need, and for several years, that was true. They still receive more listening time than any other transducers I have, since they are in my ears sometimes all day long at work, and always on my bus commute, or while getting the dishes done. They are a simply gorgeous rendition of sound. There is so much detail and clarity, and they are so comfortable. Jerry Harvey’s company is terrific to work with: when I dropped them and blew out a driver, out of warranty, they repaired them for a price I considered more than reasonable. (I am not sure they still have the capacity to do that, given their growth, but I know this company will do everything they can to keep their customers satisfied, and I respect that greatly.)
However, IEMs will lack a feeling of embodiment, and now that I’ve heard lots more audio gear, I can recognize that the JH-13’s are not neutral - instead they are tuned to make music satisfying. The best gear should not need to have a voicing of its own. Nowadays I mostly listen to my 13’s when I need to be mobile.
Second rung: Sennheiser HD650 and HiFiMan HE-500.
I purchased the 650’s in 2008, and the 500’s in 2012. They occupy the same rung on my ladder because for me the sound is about equally engrossing from both, but they are VERY different-sounding transducers. The 650s have drive, and they are involving, but at the same time, I feel like there is a distance between me and my music. (I think “veiled” captures it.) I think the engineers’ intentions were to make headphones that sounded like good speakers - laid-back, but with growl. That made perfect sense, given the dominance of speakers at the time these were originally released.
The HE-500s are clearer, but they sound too polite to me. I would say they are more tonally balanced than the 650s, but they are also less fun. For classical and electronic, I wanted the 500s, and for rock, I wanted the 650s. A great comparison between these headphones is listening to both during live sporting events. With the 500s, it’s uninvolving and distant; too clean. With the 650s, you are in the stadium, close to the action, and the applause surrounds you.
Sidestep 2: LFF Paradox, AKG Q701 / K7xx.
The price/performance relationship in audio gear is an asymptotic curve. It rises quickly, but then levels off. I have learned that you’ve got to pay 5-10x more to pull out that next level of detail, nuance, and subtlety. Still though, it is always fun to find those special pieces of gear that offer great audio value at their price-point.
I bought each of these three headphones because I was trying to beat the curve of diminishing returns, and I would say I did. The LFF Paradoxes are a modded Fostex T50RP. I was very curious what a skilled modder could accomplish with a $70 headphone, and I was pleasantly delighted. Even as I sell off my other gear, I will be keeping these, in part because I love them for the technical marvel they are, but also because they are the only closed headphones I own (not counting iems). They sound open, it’s really quite an amazing feat. I prefer their sound to that of the HE-500, even though I would say the HE-500 is more technically accurate.
I own the AKGs because I had the pleasure of hearing the HD800 soon after they were released, and at the time I could not afford them. The gentlemen at Stereo Exchange in NYC (a wonderful store that my father used to take me into, nearly 40 years ago) let me audition a pair. He unlocked a glass cabinet and used a stepstool to reach them down from a high shelf. I was transfixed by the clarity and air of the 800’s, and the defined bass, that sounded like the music was playing somewhere in the room around me. Later on, when I read that the Q701s were like “little 800s”, I ordered a pair from Amazon. Sure enough, the air was there. The way the 701’s rendered female vocals, and picked apart complex musical material (My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” began to make sense to me on the Q701s.) However, I returned them to Amazon, because I knew I would not listen to them instead of my HE-500s. I just needed some bass.
I missed the Q701s, so when Massdrop offered the K7XX, I hopped right on board. I now own both again, so I can directly compare them. These are lovely headphones, and I use them to show my friends what can be gained by climbing the headphone ladder. When you start with either of these, it is hard to say there’s anything missing. The K7XX does indeed have more bass than the Q701s, but I actually feel that the added bass detracts from the clarity in the upper registers, somehow. I fear this may be happening again with the Sennheiser HD800S. Consumers will always ask for more bass, and manufacturers will be wise to respond to the demands of their customers. However, a well-designed sound signature is a carefully-balanced thing, which reveals itself through extensive listening. Adding in moar bass will have obvious immediate appeal, but it may actually diminish long-term enjoyability.
First rung: Shure SE-535 / E-530 in-ear monitors.
My sister gave me an iPod for Christmas in 2003. I really didn’t think I needed one. At that time in my life, music was background - something to do while you did other things. Car stereo, a countertop stereo while I cooked, some headphones from Best Buy while I worked in a crowded cubicle office. I still cared about quality music and sound quality, but I would put a favorite CD on repeat, and not interact much with it after that. It didn’t make any sense to me to just sit and listen. And now, that is one of my life’s greatest pleasures. I thank Apple’s Steve and Johnny and their wonderful iPod for getting music back to where it belongs in my life.
I knew right away that the earbuds that came with the iPod would not be enough. I farted around with some better earbuds at the Apple store, until I stumbled across head-fi, in 2004 (“sorry about your wallet”). There, I read raves about the Shure E-530 in-ear monitors, and I made my first major audio purchase. I can still remember unboxing them when they arrived (gorgeous brushed aluminum box), and plugging them in to listen to my favorite album at the time, the White Stripes’ Get Behind Me Satan. I don’t know how to describe the experience - disappointment initially, but then a transition to something more satisfying. I think I was expecting the music to sound fundamentally transformed, like the closeness of the musicians or the tone of the music would somehow change. Of course, it didn’t, and in those moments I began to understand that there are really no “night-and-day” differences between audio gear. Rather, there is gradually getting closer to how the music must have sounded to the studio engineers, mixing it on the best equipment money can buy. Good gear is all about clarity, subtlety, nuance, but even crummy earbuds, or music playing on a car stereo with the windows down, can still render for you the melody, instrumentation, and emotional tone of music.
But, oh how I struggled with the 530’s. Although they were better than anything else I had listened to at that time, I could just tell there was something missing. First, I went through a bunch of foam tips (comply, etc), looking for the richness I could get when I pushed them deeper into my ears with my fingers. I tried Etymotic custom ear molds from an audiologist. I tried different amplifiers (RSA Hornet; Headamp Pico), but there was always something missing. Also, they kept breaking. Shure even replaced them once or twice after they were out-of-warranty, but at last, I received a curt letter from them saying this was the last time they would replace them. It was time to move on, and that’s when I took what felt like a once-and-forever plunge, and ordered the JH-13’s.
Ground level: Bose Quiet Comfort, a car stereo, and my dad’s speakers.
Why do I care about good-quality music reproduction in the first place? Everybody here has a moment when music captivated them, and to an extent, we’re all chasing that experience. It seems to us that better and better gear can make those breathtaking moments more reliable. For me, there are three experiences I can recall that created within me the desire to always have well-reproduced music. First, when I was a child, maybe 11 or 12, it occurred to me to sit very close ton one of my dad’s speakers. It was probably Willie Nelson’s Stardust, or maybe Ella and Louis, on the turntable. I was amazed to discover a whole other world in there. I could hear the crackles of a voice, and the mechanics of playing a guitar, or the levers on a trumpet, things that just weren’t audible from the sofa. I was transfixed, and I’d often repeat the experience of sitting with my ear pressed against the grilles, with the music playing very quietly. Second, when Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out, my girlfriend and I listened to it over and over. On the first track, “I am trying to break your heart”, around 40 seconds into the song, there are two strums on a guitar to kick things off. Once, as we drove down a California freeway, windows open, stereo cranked, those chords leapt out at me, shimmering in free space. The experience transported me, and I have never been able to re-create it. Third, my boss loaned me his Bose QuietComfort headphones for a trip I took in 2005 or so. I was into the Black Eyed Peas’ album Monkey Business at that time. When the bass hit in My Humps, I was stunned. I did not know headphones could make a sound so big and full. I wanted a pair of my own, but some online research led me to head-fi, which warned me away from Bose. (I’ve come to feel that Bose does not deserve the backlash they receive from us. They may be overpriced, but their stuff usually sounds perfectly fine.) Instead, I went with the Shures, and I’m glad for that, because it began a journey that has culminated somewhere truly wonderful.
So there you have it - from ground up, my own 15-year climb to headphone Utopia. It is hard for me to imagine a better headphone coming along, at least not for quite some time, and it is hard for me to imagine coming to feel there is anything missing in my experience of music, as provided by the Utopias. I may upgrade my two-channel system someday, but of course I’ll start off by auditioning some Focal speakers. I can make a strong “buy” recommendation for the Utopia. If you have the means to do it, just get them. They are underpriced for the sound quality they deliver. Alternatively, if you want to work your way up to them, then enjoy your own particular ladder (and let us know what you find along the way!) And who knows, by the time you are ready to climb to that last step, maybe there will be something even better available to you.
A final thought: The era of the $4000 headphone.
Some people are choosing between the LCD-4 and the Utopia. I look forward to hearing the LCD-4, but until then, I can offer no comments on that choice, except to say that I
welcome the fact that $4K headphones are now available to us, and not only that, but we actually have
options at that price point. Just ten years ago, I dithered for months on whether or not to spend $500 on Shure IEMs, but a purchase of Utopias took me less than an hour to decide on. This is true for many of us - obviously, because there is a market now for $4K headphones. Here’s why this is a good thing. First of all, speaker makers, like Focal, are taking notice of the headphone marketplace. More and more of them are bound to move in. These are major players whose TOTL gear is in the $100K+ range. Their knowhow and facilities will transform what’s possible with headphones. Second, there will always be technology trickle-down, and $500 headphones are only going to sound better and better as time goes on. I for one welcome the continual improvement in the personal audio that we have the privilege of living through. And, to state the obvious, none of this would be happening if it weren’t for head-fi.
Associated gear:
Music: Electronic (Radiohead, Nicolas Jaar, DJ Shadow, etc.), Jazz (Madeline Peyroux, Bill Frissell, John Coltrane, etc.), Rock (Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Fleetwood Mac, etc.), Classical (Alfred Brendel’s Beethoven sonatas, Monteverdi madrigals, etc).
Amplifier: Violectric V281. Balanced cables for Utopia (Nordost), HD800 (Cardas), LCD-3 (stock). Single-ended for HE-500, LFF Paradox, HD-650, AKGs, JH-13.
Sources: Violectric V800 DAC for FLAC, running Audirvana on a Macintosh. For analog: clearaudio concept turntable / Violectric V600 phono stage.
