Music Listening Notes:
I think the best way to describe the sound of a headphone and how its frequency balance and performance traits work together is by sharing listening notes… plus it’s fun to share and discover music! I’ve shared this playlist before, and maybe my dear reader has sampled them to hear what they sound like on familiar gear, but let me briefly explain the standout features of each of these music tracks:
Notes based on using a midrange DAC/amp USB dongle, the Apogee Groove, and Apple Music HiRes.
Track 1: Unfinished Sympathy - The opening booms and record scratches dig deep and resonate in a large, reverb soaked, underground sounding space. The timbre of this track hit me
just so, YMMV but this headphone gave me a pleasant spine-tingling sensation, one of only 5 headphones ever to do that for me.
Track 2: What Is the Code - This synthetic/cyberpunk song demonstrates how the OAE1 can perform the sound suck-out before the bass drop, also frequency sweeps from mids to bass showing how the amplitude doesn't drop off and maintains a tight bass even with extended notes.
Track 3: The Great Divide (Seven Lions Remix) - This electronica track shows the leading edge impact of mid bass hits, also how the big bass doesn't bury the airy female vocals that float around the stage before the vocalist snaps into place. The voice is clearly processed through a vocoder, but it fits the song, and the vocals also don't sound shouty alongside the bass, but this is still clearly a fun rather than analytical tuning.
Track 4: Moonlight Sonata: I. Adagio sostenuto (Arr. for Cello & Electronics) - Less fantasy, more organic. The rain and thunder at the beginning gave me shivers again... but the headphone is able to portray the distant rumble and percussive pitter-patter well. The violin is not veiled, it has good presence despite being mic'd from a distance (or at least made to sound so by the sound engineer) but still has sparkling moments.
Track 5: White Summer - A sparse but lively arrangement of just guitar, bongos, and a recorder (or some kind of woodwind, I'm not an expert haha). It's definitely good to play around and find the sweetspot for where the headphones rest around your ears for this song... helps get rid of some mid suck-out and sound more natural. Wearing the OAE1 backwards on this track collapses the soundstage, arranging all the instruments along a 1D line from ear to ear, also muffles the highs and sense of the recording room almost entirely. A slightly more lo-fi recording than the next one, but still fun to listen to.
Track 6: Strive (Binaural) - This is an intimate track, it sounds like we're up on the stage with the string performers, but also its easy to hear the reverb of the big empty hall. This was a song recorded with headphones in mind, without any special processing it has a great sense of imaging and soundstage.
Track 7: Dronning Fjellrose - Another track specifically great on headphones due to Dolby Atmos processing baked into the recording file, the OAE1 is able to pinpoint place the singer and each instrument in their own space on the stage. Axel is careful to point out that the OAE1 by itself doesn't apply In-Front-Localization... but here the sound is very 3D.
Track 8: Liberty - Forward and intimate female vocals. Not hearing any sibilance, but you can easily hear her wet mouth and breathy softness. Forward, but for me it's still comfortably short of being shouty, it just sounds like there's less separating me and the singer, but this might be a good track to EQ to taste.
Track 9: We Are Not Alone - This song has two layers... the saxophone that performs at the forefront, but the mood sounds very different depending on the headphone if all the little flourishes of instruments in the back are audible alongside the frontman. On the OAE1, the playful and weird slurring and shifting instruments playing simultaneously with the sax and rhythm bass are all played confidently and my brain is calmly able to hear each instrument or just wash in the full arrangement without straining to focus.
Track 10: Sakura - Lo-Fi Chill song. The binaural beats here work, for a headphone with forward bass and vocals it's still easy to sit back and relax to something like this.
Track 11: Dark Fate - GOOD MORNING! This ought to wake you up! Good impact and slam, switching between grand clamor and intimately hopeful guitar. If you were going to try EQ'ing the headphone, this would be a good evaluation song to check that you don't lose what makes this headphone special.
Bonus: Hotel California (Live on MTV, 1994) - The OAE1 sounds very rich here! The bass and sense of depth is great here too.
Movies: Dredd and Wall*E
I remember the first time Dredd was brought onto Netflix for streaming, I had been loaned a Sony MDR-MA900, which was also an extremely open and easy to drive headphone with a Bio-cellulose driver like the grell OAE1... but the MA900 felt like listening to tiny speakers, the sound was clear with almost no resonance BUT the bass and treble extension was weak, making guns wheeze and explosions melancholy. Fast forward like 12 years, the OAE1 is even more open, but it has a full cinematic feel with a better sense of air and especially weighty explosions that really sell the excitement and adrenaline of the action movie. On an entirely more peaceful and curious note, WALL*E's opening few chapters are dialog free, focused almost entirely on Ben Burt's brilliant sound design. These opening scenes were portrayed by the OAE1 with a big sense of stage depth or even open air, selling the desolate open spaces convincingly, but the focused moments with just a little robot's antics felt important rather than laid back, appropriately intimate (and curious).
Gaming: Helldivers 2 and CoD: MW2 (2022)
These familiar games don't have their own Spatial Audio processing built in... so on PC or Xbox the default would be regular stereo, with strong separation between the left and right channels (separated by your head, of course). You will be able to get a good feeling for distance, and generally left or right, but you won't be able to hear the difference between front and rear sounds. However, with a bit of crossfeed, or ESPECIALLY with some spatial audio processing applied like Sony's Tempest 3D Audio that comes with the Playstation 5, the processing considers what something like 120 speaker positions would have sounded like by the time their sound waves would have reached your ears, and then the headphones play that back in realtime.
WITH Spatial Audio/ HRTF Processing / Headphone Surround applied to the audio signal, the OAE1 provides a spectacular platform for very precise positional imaging that smoothly pans around you, and it's easy to hear someone running along the other side of the wall and predict exactly when they'll come into view. Helldivers is a little more vague than CoD, because the bots and bugs don't make footstep sounds, so you just hear when enemies or allies call out, but you do hear everything... tonight was the first time I noticed the backpack shield makes it's own quiet shimmering sound. Bonus: the Hitman series of games are usually more methodically paced, but it's super immersive to hear people talking all around you (and easier to hear where someone shouts "Hey!" from if they spot you), really making me feel in the game.
Stream-of-conscious first impressions on head-fi here…
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/axel-grell-headphone.967413/post-18088983