This impression of the Audio Technica W100s is written as a response to PianoBlack’s request for more impressions from other Headfiers about the W100s. Having read some rather controversial back and forth arguments about this wooden headphone, my interest was piqued, and I simply could not refuse an opportunity to audition this “love it or hate it” headphone. The W100s arrived today from the previous auditioner Tweertinelle...and here are my thoughts. The usual disclaimers…what I say is what I hear, don’t take my word as gospel, or as a replacement for your own pair of ears sitting between W100s. Likewise everybody’s system is different…to some degree, system matching will make an impact on different things. And everybody has different music tastes.
[size=medium]Looks/Construction[/size]
Regardless of price or price range, Audio Technica really knows how to make some headphones that look like they mean serious business. While cloth covered cords are slowly starting to make their way into more generally cheaper mass marketed products, wooden covered plugs are very much not. That was a touch I very much admired in delight. The wooden cups have a very highly polished, smooth feel to them…running my hands over them does not feel as if I’m making contact with wood. The pads are made of synthetic leather, but it’s probably the most soft and comfy leather I’ve touched. It has a very moldable feel to it. My favorite part of all though was the gull wing headband. The headband is disconnected in the center, so that the two spring loaded wings separately adjust to your head’s shape. It lends this headphone quite a sophisticated look, in that it has a feature that no other company’s headphone currently uses. Overall a very elegant and beautiful headphone...I can only imagine how awesome the flagship W2002s must look.
[size=medium]Comfort[/size]
From seeing pics, I already suspected that the thickness of the pads was not enough so that the ears would be adequately engulfed in them, depth wise. Unfortunately that is the case for me in reality. While the pads themselves are more then wide enough in diameter to encircle my ears, the pads are not thick enough. My ears easily brush against the foam protection pad on the inside, and also against the leather pads, so that my ears are squashed a bit. Surprisingly though after an hour, my ears didn’t feel the tight exhaustion that I would’ve gotten from this squashing effect with supraural style headphones. I suspect it is the moldable leather pads molding around my ear flaps that prevented my ears from feeling too squished. The gull wing headband was very cool, in that it’s the closest I’ve felt to not having a headband in place. It gives the perfect amount of counter tension without feeling as if you have a solid piece of cloth or leather running across your head, something that has tended to pain my head over time. This is a feature I wish other headphone companies could adopt. Once on the ears, they seal out a decent amount of noise…not quite in the levels of a Sony MDR-V6 with Beyer pads, or the Etymotics, but it is enough to block out some ambient noise, like fan noise.
[size=medium]Specifications[/size]
Here are the specifications on the W100s, as per the Audiocubes website:
Features
Specifications
[size=medium]The Sound[/size]
Alright, enough about looks or comfort. We all know that if it sounds good enough, looks or comfort (and price!) take a back seat, right? Or at least I hope that's the way it goes.
With that said, I'll admit it's very difficult to tack on a definite generalization to the W100's sound at first, because it tends to change very wildly depending on what type of music you listen to. This is very much a headphone that sounds great on one CD, and like utter crud on the next one.
I fired up the headphones with the CD Bond - Born. About 10-15 seconds into the first track, I thought to myself "man, these sound like crap!". An hour later I revised this thought to "W100s no like Bond...Bond no like W100s...they no like play together" (that's Hawaiian pidgin talk for you BTW).
Seriously, the sound was just disastrous. In the track Quixote, it sounded as if everything from different frequencies had been collected together and shoved into the midrange region. It made for a very rough, grainy presentation. The bass sounded thin and weak, and the treble region where the violins normally played in was totally shelved downward. Ugg. Not much better on Bond's main theme track Victory...although I did take notice of the rather exceptional separation between the fast bow strokes, a strength to me that not very many other headphones share. It wasn't until the track Bella Donna, in which Bond uses acoustic instruments, that things sounded better. Still I did not hear the famed wooden sympathy that the W100s are supposed to excel at...that wooden body was still rather lacking. What I did hear though was rather marvelous imaging and instrument spacing...the W100s is one of the few dynamic headphones I've heard that can pull off this spacing with ease, with the other being the Beyerdynamic DT-931. Still, the cello string plucks in this track rather lack the grunt behind it that I'm normally used to hearing.
At this point I figured it was time to just give them what I knew they wanted...CDs laced with slow vocals, and pure acoustic instrument recordings. So in went my Final Fantasy S Generation Soundtrack for some orchestra works. First was The Man with the Machinegun, a light, fast paced orchestral piece that leaves some headphones in the dust with its complex speed. Here the W100s began excelling, and strangely enough, I didn't feel a single note was out of place. It kept excellent timing and pace through this track. Likewise when I switched over to Aeris' Theme, a beautiful, slow orchestral piece, and one of my favorites ever to date. The W100s captured the warm bloom of the wind instruments very well. And in both of these pieces, the instrument spacing was just astounding. The final track of this CD was Melodies of Life, a slow Japanese ballad. The vocals sounded absolutely stunning on the W100s. Very transparent midrange that carried great emotional feel without sounding deliberately warm or muddy. I think I finally hit the W100s sweet spot.
The CDs that followed thereafter were Keiko Matsui - No Borders, Secret Garden - Dreamcatcher, and Elva - First Album...the list goes on, mostly all along the lines of orchestral works, or slow ballads. In all of these, not a single note sounded out of place...the W100s particularly blew me away on Keiko Matsui and Secret Garden's work. Nonetheless these CDs also allowed me to pinpoint a more general sound description.
The W100s have a rather relaxed, laid back treble. I don't think it has that good of a high extension...most of its strength comes from the lower treble to about middle treble. Instruments that play in the upper treble region tend to get shelved down into the lower treble areas...which is why I suspect Bond sounded so bad. The electric violins they normally use play in the higher treble regions.
The midrange sounds very, very transparent. Yes, this midrange sounds very much like the R10's elusive midrange, with the difference being the R10's midrange carries a much sweeter sound behind it, and thus more emotional attachment. It is very hard to quantify this type of midrange I think, because it is neither thin or weak, nor is it thick, warm, or heavy. It's just very natural and transparent. It's also the best "medium" I've had the pleasure of hearing voices and vocals travel through, because you get all of the emotion, but none of the heavy colorations some headphones tend to place in the midrange, such as the Grado RS-1 (deliberate warmth), or the Sennheiser HD600 (deliberately laid back). Likewise the focus of the voice tends to remain anchored firmly in the soundstage depth in accordance with the recording itself; there is no back and forth feel to the voice being placed deliberately on the voice, such as with Grados (forward) or the Sennheisers (laid back).
If the W100s have one glaring weakness, it's the bass. It lacks visceral impact (not a bad thing at all in my case, but probably a downfall to the bass whores out there). It also lacks grunt in the lower registers, i.e. I can barely make out cello string plucks. That low tone resonance and extension just seems to be not there. I have no complaint however with upper bass notes, such as low piano notes...I hear excellent decay there. I think the piano decays on this headphone are one of the best I've heard...yet I wonder if this isn't what others are calling "reverb" or "echoes". I don't think the notes hang around longer then usual; rather they just have a natural decay that hangs. On J-pop, which tends to have quick, thumping bass lines, the W100 held itself just fine on the bass. Now on the lack of low bass notes, I wonder if this could be attributed to the Sugden Headmaster, which is not known to have a strong low end. I'll have to hear from others on this one.
The soundstage does not feel like a closed one, and yet it doesn't quite impart as much left and right separation as the typical open headphone might to notes that stray out to the extreme left and right. It sounds quite cohesive and not broken up at all...very similar to the R10s. By cohesive I mean that there isn't as much of a distinct left/center/right situation going on; there's also the spot between left and center, and right and center. I feel that a lot of headphones hit and miss at pulling those in-between pieces together to create that natural, whole soundstage in front of you. The R10s are very good at creating that wholesome soundstage feel, and I think the W100s do quite a good job at it as well. What the R10s are better at is presenting ambience...the W100s ambience feels a bit dry in comparison. I've always thought though that this cohesive feel to the soundstage makes the soundstage feel smaller and tighter, in that it's so very well focused in front of you. By front, I mean as far away from your nose as the sound could possibly feel...which in reality isn't all that far with ANY headphone. It's just some are better at making things feel farther away, or more complete in front of your nose, then others.
The W100s are quite good at imaging, and very good at creating instrument spacing. I think they could very well better the R10s at spacing in fact, precisely because of their drier ambience. The R10's heavy ambience recreation tends to drown out the spacing defined between and around instruments, in that they become too connected. Strangely this is something I never noticed or paid attention to much before, quite possibly because headphones I've had in the past just weren't very good at this. When I got the Beyerdynamic 931s, I suddenly had to adjust to the strange sensation of hearing each and every instrument suspended within their own space. It was very new to me, and very exciting to hear. The W100s fall along that same line, in that instruments just pop out of a black background, and just seem to be glowingly vivid in their own area within a soundstage.
It may be strange that I'm comparing a $349 headphone to a $4000 one. But honestly, some of the W100's traits I've heard nowhere else except in the R10s. Rest assured that these in no way lay the smack down on the R10s...the R10s are still miles ahead in many other departments, such as detail retrieval, and clean smoothness in transients between frequencies. As stated above, the tonal balance of the W100s is not perfect...and sometimes instruments seeping from frequency to frequency will show a broken up feel. The R10s are much flatter as far as tonal amplitude goes, or i.e. how loud one tonal region is over another, which equates to better IMO.
[size=medium]Conclusion[/size]
Tweertinelle originally gave me a hint that whether you love or hate the W100s will largely depend on whether you listen to classical. I totally agree with that. These headphones have a very relaxed trait to them that makes them much more suitable to slow paced classical, orchestral, or vocal music. Give them something wildly fast and furious like Bond, or probably rock and/or rap, or techno, and they will very likely break down. I should also note that this seems to be a headphone that enjoys being played loudly. It's not quite that sensation where the headphone makes you want to go louder; rather it seems to have better dynamics at louder levels. They seem rather easy to drive...my Sugden's knob stayed relatively close to the start position at all times.
Associated equipment is as follows:
Arcam FMJ CD23T CD player
Cardas Neutral Reference interconnects
Sugden Headmaster headphone amp
Absolute Power cords on the Sugden and Arcam
I'd like to thank PianoBlack for this great auditioning opportunity. What at first seemed like a headphone I'd utterly hate, I ended up finding myself becoming rather attached to it. It's definitely not a bad headphone at all...IF the right music is used with it. It seems to work quite well for most of my music tastes.
[size=medium]Looks/Construction[/size]
Regardless of price or price range, Audio Technica really knows how to make some headphones that look like they mean serious business. While cloth covered cords are slowly starting to make their way into more generally cheaper mass marketed products, wooden covered plugs are very much not. That was a touch I very much admired in delight. The wooden cups have a very highly polished, smooth feel to them…running my hands over them does not feel as if I’m making contact with wood. The pads are made of synthetic leather, but it’s probably the most soft and comfy leather I’ve touched. It has a very moldable feel to it. My favorite part of all though was the gull wing headband. The headband is disconnected in the center, so that the two spring loaded wings separately adjust to your head’s shape. It lends this headphone quite a sophisticated look, in that it has a feature that no other company’s headphone currently uses. Overall a very elegant and beautiful headphone...I can only imagine how awesome the flagship W2002s must look.
[size=medium]Comfort[/size]
From seeing pics, I already suspected that the thickness of the pads was not enough so that the ears would be adequately engulfed in them, depth wise. Unfortunately that is the case for me in reality. While the pads themselves are more then wide enough in diameter to encircle my ears, the pads are not thick enough. My ears easily brush against the foam protection pad on the inside, and also against the leather pads, so that my ears are squashed a bit. Surprisingly though after an hour, my ears didn’t feel the tight exhaustion that I would’ve gotten from this squashing effect with supraural style headphones. I suspect it is the moldable leather pads molding around my ear flaps that prevented my ears from feeling too squished. The gull wing headband was very cool, in that it’s the closest I’ve felt to not having a headband in place. It gives the perfect amount of counter tension without feeling as if you have a solid piece of cloth or leather running across your head, something that has tended to pain my head over time. This is a feature I wish other headphone companies could adopt. Once on the ears, they seal out a decent amount of noise…not quite in the levels of a Sony MDR-V6 with Beyer pads, or the Etymotics, but it is enough to block out some ambient noise, like fan noise.
[size=medium]Specifications[/size]
Here are the specifications on the W100s, as per the Audiocubes website:
Features
- Light weight and high rigidity Magnesium frame adoption with comfortable installing
- Made by Hokkaido's cherry tree and Echizen lacquerware
- High class wooden headphone
- Superior and deep resonating bass and vocal projection unmatched in its class
- Housing vibration-proof mechanism (PAT)
- Comfortable natural collagen ear pad with ear fitting design
Specifications
- Type: Closed Dynamic
- Driver Unit: 53mm, Super hard coat diaphragm, Super high class OFC8N bobbin to wind Voice coil
- Magnet: Neodymium
- Frequency response: 5-30,000 Hz
- Impedence: 48Ù
- Max. Input Power: 2,000mW
- Sensitivity: 100dB
- Plug: Gold-plating phi 6.3 stereo standards
- Cord length: 3.0m (100% Silk/PCOCC)
- Net weight (without cord): 320g
[size=medium]The Sound[/size]
Alright, enough about looks or comfort. We all know that if it sounds good enough, looks or comfort (and price!) take a back seat, right? Or at least I hope that's the way it goes.
With that said, I'll admit it's very difficult to tack on a definite generalization to the W100's sound at first, because it tends to change very wildly depending on what type of music you listen to. This is very much a headphone that sounds great on one CD, and like utter crud on the next one.
I fired up the headphones with the CD Bond - Born. About 10-15 seconds into the first track, I thought to myself "man, these sound like crap!". An hour later I revised this thought to "W100s no like Bond...Bond no like W100s...they no like play together" (that's Hawaiian pidgin talk for you BTW).
Seriously, the sound was just disastrous. In the track Quixote, it sounded as if everything from different frequencies had been collected together and shoved into the midrange region. It made for a very rough, grainy presentation. The bass sounded thin and weak, and the treble region where the violins normally played in was totally shelved downward. Ugg. Not much better on Bond's main theme track Victory...although I did take notice of the rather exceptional separation between the fast bow strokes, a strength to me that not very many other headphones share. It wasn't until the track Bella Donna, in which Bond uses acoustic instruments, that things sounded better. Still I did not hear the famed wooden sympathy that the W100s are supposed to excel at...that wooden body was still rather lacking. What I did hear though was rather marvelous imaging and instrument spacing...the W100s is one of the few dynamic headphones I've heard that can pull off this spacing with ease, with the other being the Beyerdynamic DT-931. Still, the cello string plucks in this track rather lack the grunt behind it that I'm normally used to hearing.
At this point I figured it was time to just give them what I knew they wanted...CDs laced with slow vocals, and pure acoustic instrument recordings. So in went my Final Fantasy S Generation Soundtrack for some orchestra works. First was The Man with the Machinegun, a light, fast paced orchestral piece that leaves some headphones in the dust with its complex speed. Here the W100s began excelling, and strangely enough, I didn't feel a single note was out of place. It kept excellent timing and pace through this track. Likewise when I switched over to Aeris' Theme, a beautiful, slow orchestral piece, and one of my favorites ever to date. The W100s captured the warm bloom of the wind instruments very well. And in both of these pieces, the instrument spacing was just astounding. The final track of this CD was Melodies of Life, a slow Japanese ballad. The vocals sounded absolutely stunning on the W100s. Very transparent midrange that carried great emotional feel without sounding deliberately warm or muddy. I think I finally hit the W100s sweet spot.
The CDs that followed thereafter were Keiko Matsui - No Borders, Secret Garden - Dreamcatcher, and Elva - First Album...the list goes on, mostly all along the lines of orchestral works, or slow ballads. In all of these, not a single note sounded out of place...the W100s particularly blew me away on Keiko Matsui and Secret Garden's work. Nonetheless these CDs also allowed me to pinpoint a more general sound description.
The W100s have a rather relaxed, laid back treble. I don't think it has that good of a high extension...most of its strength comes from the lower treble to about middle treble. Instruments that play in the upper treble region tend to get shelved down into the lower treble areas...which is why I suspect Bond sounded so bad. The electric violins they normally use play in the higher treble regions.
The midrange sounds very, very transparent. Yes, this midrange sounds very much like the R10's elusive midrange, with the difference being the R10's midrange carries a much sweeter sound behind it, and thus more emotional attachment. It is very hard to quantify this type of midrange I think, because it is neither thin or weak, nor is it thick, warm, or heavy. It's just very natural and transparent. It's also the best "medium" I've had the pleasure of hearing voices and vocals travel through, because you get all of the emotion, but none of the heavy colorations some headphones tend to place in the midrange, such as the Grado RS-1 (deliberate warmth), or the Sennheiser HD600 (deliberately laid back). Likewise the focus of the voice tends to remain anchored firmly in the soundstage depth in accordance with the recording itself; there is no back and forth feel to the voice being placed deliberately on the voice, such as with Grados (forward) or the Sennheisers (laid back).
If the W100s have one glaring weakness, it's the bass. It lacks visceral impact (not a bad thing at all in my case, but probably a downfall to the bass whores out there). It also lacks grunt in the lower registers, i.e. I can barely make out cello string plucks. That low tone resonance and extension just seems to be not there. I have no complaint however with upper bass notes, such as low piano notes...I hear excellent decay there. I think the piano decays on this headphone are one of the best I've heard...yet I wonder if this isn't what others are calling "reverb" or "echoes". I don't think the notes hang around longer then usual; rather they just have a natural decay that hangs. On J-pop, which tends to have quick, thumping bass lines, the W100 held itself just fine on the bass. Now on the lack of low bass notes, I wonder if this could be attributed to the Sugden Headmaster, which is not known to have a strong low end. I'll have to hear from others on this one.
The soundstage does not feel like a closed one, and yet it doesn't quite impart as much left and right separation as the typical open headphone might to notes that stray out to the extreme left and right. It sounds quite cohesive and not broken up at all...very similar to the R10s. By cohesive I mean that there isn't as much of a distinct left/center/right situation going on; there's also the spot between left and center, and right and center. I feel that a lot of headphones hit and miss at pulling those in-between pieces together to create that natural, whole soundstage in front of you. The R10s are very good at creating that wholesome soundstage feel, and I think the W100s do quite a good job at it as well. What the R10s are better at is presenting ambience...the W100s ambience feels a bit dry in comparison. I've always thought though that this cohesive feel to the soundstage makes the soundstage feel smaller and tighter, in that it's so very well focused in front of you. By front, I mean as far away from your nose as the sound could possibly feel...which in reality isn't all that far with ANY headphone. It's just some are better at making things feel farther away, or more complete in front of your nose, then others.
The W100s are quite good at imaging, and very good at creating instrument spacing. I think they could very well better the R10s at spacing in fact, precisely because of their drier ambience. The R10's heavy ambience recreation tends to drown out the spacing defined between and around instruments, in that they become too connected. Strangely this is something I never noticed or paid attention to much before, quite possibly because headphones I've had in the past just weren't very good at this. When I got the Beyerdynamic 931s, I suddenly had to adjust to the strange sensation of hearing each and every instrument suspended within their own space. It was very new to me, and very exciting to hear. The W100s fall along that same line, in that instruments just pop out of a black background, and just seem to be glowingly vivid in their own area within a soundstage.
It may be strange that I'm comparing a $349 headphone to a $4000 one. But honestly, some of the W100's traits I've heard nowhere else except in the R10s. Rest assured that these in no way lay the smack down on the R10s...the R10s are still miles ahead in many other departments, such as detail retrieval, and clean smoothness in transients between frequencies. As stated above, the tonal balance of the W100s is not perfect...and sometimes instruments seeping from frequency to frequency will show a broken up feel. The R10s are much flatter as far as tonal amplitude goes, or i.e. how loud one tonal region is over another, which equates to better IMO.
[size=medium]Conclusion[/size]
Tweertinelle originally gave me a hint that whether you love or hate the W100s will largely depend on whether you listen to classical. I totally agree with that. These headphones have a very relaxed trait to them that makes them much more suitable to slow paced classical, orchestral, or vocal music. Give them something wildly fast and furious like Bond, or probably rock and/or rap, or techno, and they will very likely break down. I should also note that this seems to be a headphone that enjoys being played loudly. It's not quite that sensation where the headphone makes you want to go louder; rather it seems to have better dynamics at louder levels. They seem rather easy to drive...my Sugden's knob stayed relatively close to the start position at all times.
Associated equipment is as follows:
Arcam FMJ CD23T CD player
Cardas Neutral Reference interconnects
Sugden Headmaster headphone amp
Absolute Power cords on the Sugden and Arcam
I'd like to thank PianoBlack for this great auditioning opportunity. What at first seemed like a headphone I'd utterly hate, I ended up finding myself becoming rather attached to it. It's definitely not a bad headphone at all...IF the right music is used with it. It seems to work quite well for most of my music tastes.
