[Tomcat]

[size=small]Audio Technica ATH-W100[/size]
dynamic headphone


HISTORY

The W100 belongs to the W series of Audio Technica (A/T) headphones from Japan. All W series headphones are closed designs with wooden enclosures. A/T has started the W series in 1996 when the ATH-W10VTG was introduced, a now discontinued model that has been followed by several limited edition designs and by one continuously produced model: the ATH-W100. A brief overview:

ATH-W10VTG – introduced in May 1996, discontinued
ATH-W10LTD – December 1997, 2,000 units, sold out
ATH-W11JPN – December 1998, 2,000 units, sold out
ATH-W100 – December 1999, still in production
ATH-W11R – December 2000, 800 units, probably sold out
ATH-W2002 – October 2001, 1,000 units, they are out of stock at A/T (as of February 2002), but there still might be some available at retailers in Asia.

Yes, this is the sad thing about the W series (and the A series) headphones: Audio Technica has marketed them primarily in Japan, hesitantly in South-East Asia, and never at all in Europe or the Americas. I don’t know whether people in New Zealand or Australia have been more fortunate.


CONSTRUCTION

At the same time as the wooden W series, A/T has manufactured the ATH-A “Art Monitor” series of headphones, closed designs, which don’t use wood for the enclosure, but share some design characteristics with the ATH-W series nevertheless. All those ATH-A and W series headphones have their drivers installed at an angle, in parallel not with the side of the head but with the general plane of the earlobes, a design idea Sony has used before, in their MDR-R10 King , MDR-CD3000 and MDR-CD1700 headphones. Sony called this the “auro-nomic” design. It is safe to say, that A/T drew a lot of inspiration from the MDR-R10, the first headphone with a sealed wooden enclosure, and, to this day, the most expensive dynamic headphone ever.

Another thing the W series has in common with the A series is their headband – or the lack thereof. Instead, there are two padded plates on very flexible hinges, one on each side, that utilize a self-adjusting spring mechanism, in order to provide just the right amount of counter-pressure to keep the headphone from slipping downwards. This may sound a little cumbersome, but it is, in fact, utterly comfortable. The considerable weight of the W100 (320 grams) is hardly noticeable. The big earpads that fit circumaurally around the ears feel very soft against the skin. The W100’s earpads are made from a synthetic fabric that feels and looks like soft nappa leather. Although there is very little pressure against the head, the earpads seal very well. This is another common trait in the W and A series: The earpads are thicker at the place behind and below the ears where the head tapers off into the neck, thus providing a rather airtight seal. The downside of this tightly sealing earpads is, that it might get a little warm beneath the headphones during prolonged listening sessions.

The driver sizes are the same in all W and A series headphones: 53 mm, but the W series employs 8 nines oxygen-free copper for the voice coils (OFC8N), that’s a purity of 99.9999997 percent. The initial W10VTG excluded, all W series headphones have enclosures made from cherry trees from the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido. Slowly grown hardwood trees from harsh climates are said to make the best sound-boxes for musical instruments, by the way, because they have the highest lignin density and the best resonance behaviour. Another feature all W series headphones have in common is the plug. It is a gold plated big size 6.3 stereo plug with wooden handle. The usual mini-to-big-size adaptor solution would have compromised sound quality. But a big-to-mini-adaptor is available from A/T, as are replacement ear-pads. The straight 3 meter cord is covered in a brown silk fabric on all W series phones. This gives the cord something of a retro look and reminds me of electrical appliances of the fifties. Some limited edition W series headphones use 6N OFC copper wires in their cord, this is not the case with the W100: the wire is made from 4N OFC. The cord enters into the left driver housing and is not detachable.

Two W series phones have had a special traditional Japanese lacquer applied to their wooden enclosures, reportedly improving their stiffness, their sound and their looks, of course: the ATH-W11JPN and ATH-W2002. This not the case with the W100. The enclosure has a medium reddish brown colour and a matt satin sheen to it. I presume the surface has been treated in some way, besides having been polished, but I couldn’t say for sure. The cherry wood’s grain is clearly visible and suggests that AT uses the heartwood part of the tree for the W100 as well, although the marketing literature claims this for the limited edition W series headphones only.


SOUND

Now for the good part: the sound of the ATH-W100. I’ll say it just as it is, without any further ado, no beating around the bush, you have a right to know, and I have no intention whatsoever to keep this information from you, believe me, I fully understand your anxiety to learn about it, and I couldn’t agree more, you absolutely have to know it right now, and don’t you just hate it when a reviewer doesn’t come to the point and you have to read through pages and pages and pages of narcotizing descriptions, having nothing to do with what is, in the end, the only thing that matters to any true self-respecting audiophile, and damn right he is: the sound.

The sound of the W100?
In one word: gorgeous, beautiful beyond description, captivating, enchanting, mesmerizing, engaging, transfixing, elating, I am running out of attributes here. Let us just say: musical?

The term musical means a lot of different things to different listeners and to different reviewers, I know. But I don’t know what else to say. If you listen with the W100, you forget about audiophile criteria, you don’t ponder issues like soundstage, treble response or transients any longer. The W100 transcends the lowly concerns of high fidelity and offers nothing less than a shortcut to musical bliss. I honestly feel, that the W100 towers above the competition. There is something so fundamentally right about the way the W100 reproduces the emotion of a musical piece, that it defies comparison. To me, this is not a subtle difference, not at all. Even well respected headphones like the Sennheiser HD 600, the AKG K501,the Sony MDR-CD3000 or the Stax Omega II system are shrieking monsters by comparison. The W100 reproduces music with ease, effortlessly, never showing the slightest sign of strain. “solomon”, a Chinese headphone enthusiast had mentioned the merits of the W100 at the HeadWize forums in June 2001. This has been the first time I was alerted to their quality. This is how solomon described the W100s:

The type of sound W100 produces is very different than the exciting and forward sound of Grado, and is also different than the more analytic sound of AKG or Beyer. It is very "oriental" in a sense. Hard to depict, but kind of yin and yang thing. I mean, if Grado typically represents yang, the active and positive aspect of things, then W100 is the yin, subtle and introvert, with beauty hidden deeply inside. The bass is very rich and deep, though not the cleanest, and doesn't have the Grado type of slam. The entire midrange is soft and mellow, and the high end is incredibly beautiful. It is very forgiving of bad recordings. The best way to appreciate its beauty is to find yourself lying in an armchair, completely relaxed and let the flow of music massage your body, from head to toe. It soothes your soul and body. It is that magical.

If I had to use a single attribute other than “musical” to describe the sound of the W100, it would have to be “liquid”. The W100 is liquid in the same sense that triode tube amplifiers are considered to be liquid: the W100s convey the flow of the music, its essence, its meaning - and all its emotion. You don’t listen to headphones with them, you listen to music. They plainly transcend hifi-sound. Yes, there is considerable treble extension, yes, there is a midrange smoother than silk, yes, there is bass that is as deep as the ocean and slamming as a ton of bricks, yes, there is lots of low-level detail and ambience information, a soundstage that is stunningly real, yes, there all these things, but listen with the W100, and you’ll forget about these facts as soon as you have perceived them. There is no attention-grabbing hifi-sound, there aren’t any special effects, there are no sonic fireworks. There are details abound with the W100, probably due to their high efficiency, but they never distract attention from the music. Music is always reproduced as a believable whole. The W100 manages to keep the musical flow intact, and to seduce you with it.

It is very easy to hear details as a musician’s intonation and phrasing of a tone, how a note is formed, how the bow is moved across a violin’s string, whether the movement is slowed down, whether there is any hesitation. You can hear these things, but they don’t get in the way of the experience. You are not forced to focus on them, ever. Oh, that’s what this noise was: a musician turning his note sheet. You may hear this, but you just don’t care. Believe me, you couldn’t care less. Another aspect of the W100’s ability to render music as a natural whole is its forgiving nature. You may try listening to CDs again that you deemed hopeless, not to be listened to. The W100 will make sense of them, it will retrieve what musical honey is left in CDs with truly bad cases of digitalitis. I think, the W100 manages to do this, because it doesn’t introduce any timing inconsistencies and distortions of its own. Everything sounds properly connected with the W100. Instruments at home in different frequency bands will play together as they should, harmonically and rhythmically. If the music allows for it, your feet will be tapping. This homogenous presentation has another important consequence: the W100 is extremely transparent, more so than any other headphone I have ever tried, be it dynamic or electrostatic. Organ concerts are notoriously difficult to reproduce. The more registers and pipes, the more complex the harmonic structure. This can get so bad that you just don’t want to listen to this cacophony. But with the W100, you can not only hear through the harmonic structure, you can clearly perceive the timbre different pipes provide for different musical lines.

This is one of the strong points of the W100 when compared with my previous favourite headphone, the Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (250 Ohms model). The W 100 isn’t just captivating, it has an enormous degree of timbral fidelity. It just gets things tonally right, not just in the mids but throughout the frequency spectrum. The bass of the W100 might not be quite as extended and slamming as that of the DT 770 Pros (it is clearly better than that of the DT 990 Pros, however), but it comes close, and, what’s more important, the W100’s bass is extremely tuneful, it is tighter, and it just belongs there. It is timbrally right. It not only provides a feeling of body and heft with those instruments that happen to have a body, a sound box, it simply supports whatever is happening in the midrange, just as it should be. The Beyerdynamic rendition of bass frequencies is a tiny bit detached from the rest of the spectrum, and has something like a rubbery timbre to it. There is not a trace of timbral infidelity with the W100. It is just gorgeously natural throughout, whether it’s in the bass, in the mids or in the treble. Voices, for example, are reproduced with uncanny realism (and are bit more forward than with the Beyerdynamics).

I am not quite sure about this, but the timbral fidelity, the naturalness of the W100’s reproduction and their ability to convey a spookingly realistic soundstage at times might be intertwined. I must admit that I didn’t give much thought to the soundstage issue while listening, but I guess, that’s just what the W100 does: it lets one forget about petty details and audiophile concerns. I guess the angular driver placement improves imaging clues. I hear less of a hole in the middle with the W100, and lots of depth clues. The extremely extended bass response makes it easy to perceive the boundaries of the recording venue, and singers can sound so real (with the Earmax Pro headphone amp, that is), that it can be spooky. And the perception of depth is noticeably improved with the W100. It’s still a headphone, and it doesn’t provide the imaging of a speaker, but, you know, I just don’t care. The W100 gets it more right than any other dynamic headphone I have ever listened to. Electrostatic headphones might have “clearer” imaging, but they are specific to a degree that I find unnatural and obtrusive. As I said, I just didn’t worry about soundstage issues with the W100. I have been busy listening to music.


BREAK IN

I have had the W100 for about two weeks now, and can confirm that the W100 needs break in. Lots of it. Audio Technica even says that break in will never stop because of the wooden enclosures. My W100s have gone through several stages, I'd say. First they gained extension at the frequency extremes and especially in the bass (after 20 to 40 hours), then they started to show some growing pains with the added treble and higher sensitivity and dynamic range, producing more grain and a slightly harsher treble, and now, after 100+ hours, they have really come together. If it should get any better than this… Anyway, have a little patience with brand new W100s (or other W series headphones, I presume), and very likely, you will be rewarded.


CONCLUSION

I don’t know, whether you could tell from my review: I guess I like the ATH-W100. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY like them. A lot.

GETTING THEM

If it hadn’t been for “M Rael” (Mark Rael), who has been bold enough to search for an Asian source for the latest wooden headphone, celebrating Audio Technica’s 40th anniversary, the ATH-W2002, I wouldn’t have gotten the W100. Thank you, Mark! Mark has posted my review of the W100 at his website – and practically forced me at gunpoint to take some photos of the W100. I have been very glad to oblige. The site contains quite a lot of additional information about his beautiful W2002 and about how it compares with other high end headphones like the Sony MDR-R10.

The contact Mark managed to establish in Asia is with an employee of Audio Technica in Singapore: Vincent Chan. Mr. Chan is not a retailer, but he happens to be very kind, reliable and helpful, and the W100 can be ordered from him. This is his email address: vin@audio-technica.com.sg
Please mention that Mark Rael provided the contact information when you send an email. I had to transfer 600 Singapore Dollars (=330 US$ or 380 EUR) to an A/T account in Singapore. This sum included the cost of shipment by UPS. The headphones arrived in Germany one week after I had ordered them from Mr. Chan. It has been a pleasure to do business with him.

Afterwards, German customs has struck me with 16 percent import taxes. But, you know what: I didn’t really care.

 

[Flasken]

Very, very, very good review!

It is truly a pleasure to read and you have even added some very interesting facts about A/T.

When I go get my Beyers on friday I will probably include some sort of Beyer history in my review inspired by you. [if I can find any]

Great review

 

[M Rael]

I only wish the moderators had more faith in audio-technica; that review deserves to be archived.

I'll tell you what Tomcat- I'm glad I didnt read your review of the W100 before I bought the W2002. Otherwise I might have decided to save some money and get the W100 instead! The effect your review had on me was to 'let me let myself' try listening to what I have with unrestricted pleasure. You obviously know how to enjoy yourself with music, and it reminded me that thats the most important thing.

 

[kelly]

Awesome review, Tomcat. I wish you could get a chance to hear the W2002 to compare.

Kelly

 

[darkclouds]

Tomcat, that was a beautiful review. You've help me in deciding what my next purchase will be. The pictures are gorgeous.

 

[JML]

Tomcat, like the ATH-W100, the review gets better as it burns in.

Thanks to you and Mark for finding these gems. I love them as much as you do.

By the way folks, the frame is magnesium alloy. Very, very light. And it may be possible that the earpads are leather, not synthetic. Mine smell like leather, but Tomcat says his don't, and to me they feel like the leather, and remind me of the leather pads on the electret Stax SR-44 I used to have. But M Rael is trying to find out. (And Mark, if you do, can you find out about replacement earpad costs for all of these AT cans? It might be worth it for us US owners to chip in and buy one shipment, and then seal them away for the future.)

 

[M Rael]

Funny you should mention earpads JML. Vincent says he just got some spare parts in, including earpads for the W2002. I'm getting some for myself to future-proof my W2002. They cost $42 per pair of pads.. and those are the lambskin, though they might fit the W100 just fine. Do me a favor JML and look at your headphones and tell me if you can figure out how the existing earpads come off. I'm looking high and low but I cant see how they are supposed to get removed.

 

[ai0tron]

That was a decent review tomcat.

They sound like they are very warm. And do tell how a headphone takes a cd with a bad case of digitalitis and make it beautiful without introducing any signature of it's own. Which is something you insinuated. "it will retrieve what musical honey is left in CDs with truly bad cases of digitalitis." In otherwords it will warm everything up and make the sound nice and preeetty. Which isn't bad and I admit I like that depending on my mood, however there are other viewpoints as to how a system should interpret a recording.

Would it in your opinion be better to have a source that sounds like the W100 and ultra revealing headphones, or W100's and an ultra revealing source?

Or would it actually be best to get the absolute best recordings you can find?

I understand your enthusiasm, but IMO these headphones deviate from being hi-fi judging by your description. If a cd sounds bad, it sounds bad, I will listen to its badness and still enjoy it simply because I like the music, what matters to me in terms of my equipment is that I am hearing the cd as it is. Not as AT or any other headphone manufacturer thinks it should sound. You seem to indicate that you like the sound of the AT's and we are happy for you. But IMO, there will be many people who will not come to terms with their warmth or inability to totally resolve what is actually on the cd. More and more I am realizing that the most important thing is the thing we as listeners have no control over, the recording. And some may want to overcome that with their equipment but others will want to hear the badness just so the day a perfect recording comes along everything sounds that much better.

Anyhow, nice review, it bothers me though with it's one sidedness and it's rampant disregard for the achievement of ultimate fidelity.

 

[JML]

M Rael, I'm afraid to try and remove the pads. But it looks like they're just like the Sony MDR-V6 pads and the Beyer pads. The edging material goes into a routed slot without anything else holding them on. I'd feel better if I saw the replacements before I remove the existing pads.

And aiOtron, don't exaggerate or try and read too much into what Tomcat said. These have to be heard; words are not good enough, no matter how we try (and Tomcat and I are professional writers). If I try to describe what these are like compared to every can I've heard, I think of the difference between very high-quality analog sources and similar digital sources. Most of my listening has been using vinyl, and these are a perfect fit (plus Tomcat is using a tube amp, and that must have something to do with it, too).

It is not mere euphonics. The transparency and liquidity is not a coloration or addition. It's the absence of added color.

 

[ai0tron]

Im still not convinced. "Sounds good with everything" sends chills down my spine. That simply isn't right, some cd's sound bad and thats a fact. If the sound on the cd is harsh , I want harsh sound. weeeeeee!!! Not because I like harsh sound, but because the system should be transparent IMO.

 

[Tomcat]

I am glad most of you liked the review. I guess it shines through that I am smitten by the W100. I tried to be as objective as I could, but, I must admit, I listened to it before I wrote the review and I am only human. So, what did you expect? I mean, look at poor JML. He has practically turned into a zealot since he got his W100. The W100 is a siren, I tell you, a siren. Her voice is not meant to be heard by us mortals. It will destroy us. It will lead to rampant disregard of ultimate fidelity. It will lead to, be strong now, it will lead to... to musical pleasure.

There, I said it. I feel ashamed, but I am glad it's out now.


ai0tron,
I guess you deserve better than to be made fun of (nevertheless, you deserve that too). Let me try to answer some of your questions in a more serious manner.

Quote:

They sound like they are very warm. And do tell how a headphone takes a cd with a bad case of digitalitis and make it beautiful without introducing any signature of it's own.

If I had to choose between warm and analytical equipment, I would indeed prefer warm sound. However, did you notice, that I didn't use the term "warm" at all in describing the W100's sound? You know why? Because it didn't come to mind. To me, the W100 is transparent, flowing and effortless. It is extremely musical, but not in spite of its resolution but because of it. This very transparency is one of the W100's most striking features. JML and KurtW have said the same thing. To me, the W100 is the exact opposite of colored and obscuring.

ai0tron, how do we know that a CD recording sounds hopeless? How do we know how it would be supposed to sound when played through the perfectly neutral and accurate system? How do we know it is not our very system that leaves it in pieces, destroys its sonic integrity and pushes it beyond the edge of listenability? Why do so many of us equate the ability to perceive distortion with accuracy? How do we know that our analytical equipment isn't the culprit? If the perceivability of distortion was the ultimate sign of accuracy, what would we have to listen for? More distortion, right? The more resolving and mercilessly revealing our equipment, the more flaws we would have to hear, in other components of our system and in our recordings.

Quote:

More and more I am realizing that the most important thing is the thing we as listeners have no control over, the recording. And some may want to overcome that with their equipment but others will want to hear the badness just so the day a perfect recording comes along everything sounds that much better.

I would like to play advocatus diaboli for a little longer. Let us expand this thought of analytical accuracy and the perceivabilty of distortion as the ultimate criterion. Let us apply this thought of analytical accuracy to the recording chain. What would constitute a "perfect recording" then? I guess we agree that perfection has not yet arrived. Any part of the recording chain will compromise sound quality and distort the signal in some way. If a better microphone or recorder was used, wouldn't this mean that it would be easier to hear just how imperfect and rotten and unlistenable the rest of the recording equipment sounded? Wouldn't the best and most neutral recording be the one that exposed its shortcomings the most? And that exposed how insufficient our own systems are? Shouldn't our systems sound worst, when fed the perfect recording?

ai0tron, I believe, that this theory that, due to its analytical nature, better and more neutral equipment should be more revealing of distortions and shortcomings, be it in the recording or in one's own system, will get us nowhere.

My guiding principle is: if it sounds worse, it is worse. As simple as that. And if it sounds good, I am pleased. That's all I ask for. I am reckless, you know.

 

[solomon]

W100 is not colored. It is a bit slowish on the bass side, but otherwise it sounds natural and transparent. I agree with Tomcat.
But I would say Grado RS1 and SR325 are both colored (although I don't dislike that coloration) as compared to W100. I once compared RS1 and W100 head to head, and coloration was the word that kept popping up in my mind when listening to RS1, while W100 didn't make me think of that word.

 

[JML]

This is off-topic a bit, but as far as the quality of the recording, and digital format influence goes, there's a fascinating review in issue #14 of HiFi+, a British magazine, of the Chord DAC64. It has a novel filtering scheme and keeps the digital signal in a RAM buffer. I don't understand more than a glimmering of the technical stuff described in the review, but if this toy is only half as revolutionary as the reviewer claims, then most of what we've been thinking about CD playback and CD recording is going to have to be re-evaluated. 1900 Pounds. www.chordelectronics.co.uk

But I'm using analog sources, and stuff I've listened to for decades; I'd know coloration if it was present. These cans are frightingly transparent, and they sound less mechanical and more like music than anything I've ever heard (no, I haven't heard everything, just enough to know what I'm listening to, and I've been listening for a long time). Too bad they're not more widely distributed outside of the Far East, because I think the competition and amplifier designers could learn a good deal by listening to them. I hope Jan Meier and the guys at Headroom read these reviews and get themselves some AT cans.

 

[PianoBlack]

One question: how does the W100s compare to the HD600 WITH Cardas/Clou/Stefan cables?

Hypothetically, the cables provide a better (tighter/extended?) bass response and more transparent sound. In other words, the few who expressed interest in the W100 solely for its better bass response (since we can't quantify musicality) may want to look at $150 cables?

Since I have neither the W100s or the newfangled cables, this hypothetical is bordering on rumor-mongering. So any educated guesses/tests are welcome.

 

[ai0tron]

First of all, dont worry about making fun of me, if youre making fun of me you are just getting closer to understanding my frame of my mind as it is in general.



"The more resolving and mercilessly revealing our equipment, the more flaws we would have to hear, in other components of our system and in our recordings"

I thought that was the point, to a certain extent, of hi-fi.

"What would constitute a "perfect recording" then? I guess we agree that perfection has not yet arrived. Any part of the recording chain will compromise sound quality and distort the signal in some way. If a better microphone or recorder was used, wouldn't this mean that it would be easier to hear just how imperfect and rotten and unlistenable the rest of the recording equipment sounded? Wouldn't the best and most neutral recording be the one that exposed its shortcomings the most? And that exposed how insufficient our own systems are? Shouldn't our systems sound worst, when fed the perfect recording?"


RIGHT. Perfectly and utterly right. I think however that recordings are much closer to perfect than we think they are. Which is why from MY point of view, when the perfect recording DOES happen, and it WILL and has been nearly achieved now colored sytems that made their place by sounding good with everything, WILL sound off compared to more neutral systems. I have several recordings that I would describe as nearly perfect in that they have no flaws which I can discern. (And it's not that I spend all day listening for flaws, I am just mentally cued to them, so when they happen I recognize it.) These recordings sound wonderful on the HD600's. The AT 100's would sound slightly off according to your statement when compared to a more accurate headphone on an extremely good recording.

What you describe to me is very like the bliss of tubes. And you know, some guys wont speak so highly of the bliss of tubes. The point is, the bliss of tubes is kind of like hedonistic cop out. A cop out I'm perfectly happy making I might add. IMO, if you could get a cd that sounded like the bliss of tubes then played it through an ss system youd have the real deal. Thats just how it should be IMO. But I admit whole heartedly you woldn't be buying many cd's if your system was totally resovling of everything.

The joy should come from the recording, the equipment should just be passing it along.


My opinion. However, thats just a prelude to actually buying them and contradicting myself. So either you really are deluded or they are damn good.


PS I think cd's have plenty of fidelity.
SACD offer improvement, but its so small you can just forget it in my opinion. It has more to do with the quality of the recording process and the quality of the SACD players.