Tomcat
1000+ Head-Fier
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[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.
