[kelly]

Grado RS-1 and a really dark amplifier... and an equalizer.

I'm quite sure most of you know where I stand on the W100 and while it's mostly on the extreme opposite side of Vertigo, I'm still taken aback by his ability to present his opinions. Awesome review and perhaps a bit more balanced than some of the other favoriable W100 reviews.

One thing I wanted to clarify because I'm afraid I'm the one who started this whole thing: I do not at all feel the Sugden Headmaster has poor bass performance. It is better than the Corda HA-1 and better than the HeadRoom Cosmic. My comments about it not being a *perfect* amp were in comparison to say the HeadRoom Max and AudioValve RKV that simply demonstrated how good it can be.

The HP-1000, also a low impedance phone, gets along just dandy with the Sugden and doesn't have issues with bass.

 

[JohnActon]

Awesome review, Vertigo!!!

 

[purk]

Vert,
Top notch!!!! Thanks for a very informative review.

Purk

 

[Tomcat]

Vertigo,

that's a very fine review! I feel you have conveyed your hearing impressions very well.

Okay, now for some comments:
Quote:

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.

The W100 bass mystery - will it ever be solved? My pair has the most realistic, believable and musically captivating rendition of low notes I have ever heard in a headphone. In terms of extension and slam, it's clearly superior to heaphones like the DT931, the DT990 Pro or the HD600. The only headphone I know that has bass reproduction more visceral than the W100 is the DT770 Pro (I don't know the W2002, though). The 770 Pro has slightly better extension but loses in any other conceivable area: it is less tuneful, it has less timbral fidelity and it's simply less musical down there. In the beginning, however, the W100's tonal balance and bass reproduction has been a disaster. I only started to see potential after maybe 50 hours, but then it kept improving for hundreds and hundreds of hours. Even after 300 hours, when I set a bass-heavy track on auto-repeat for the night - as I ocassionally did before - the W100's bass response noticeably improved. Another thing that will extend the W100's bass response is a tight fit. As suggested by JML, it may help to bend the connecting tubes a little, into a more oval shape, in order to increase the headphone's clamping pressure.

As you said, Vert, the Sugden may have something to do with this - I use the EMP - but frankly, I doubt it. Whatever garden variety headphone jack I plugged the W100 in: to my ears, it worked great. There is one thing I cannot rule out, though, and that's major production variance due to the wooden driver housings. I have never heard another W100.

Just a side note on a piano's frequency: the lowest note on a concert piano is at 27.5 Hz, the lowest note on a cello is at 65.4 Hz. So a piano can go more than an octave lower than a cello.

Quote:

Originally posted by The Quality GuruI find that in some passages this headphone is not very listenable- though mostly due to the reverberations that I think are somehow added (mostly to voices it seems) creating an artifical "concert hall" effect and subsequent reverberationns that prove horribly annoying.

Quote:

Originally posted by Vertigo I think I've heard that echoey effect on one track in particular, Keiko Matsui - Light in the Rain. The opening starts off with a quick series of drum hits...those drum hits seem to create such reflections as to make me feel as though I could clearly hear the recording venue. The band in this track sounds very encapsulated...you can just hear everything bouncing around this tight little space. I tend to think this is good ambient environment retrieval, but this could very well be the headphone casting reflections into the music.

I'd say the W100 excels at ambient retrieval. I feel that I can perceive the size of a recording venue with the W100, that I can hear the low sound waves bouncing off of the walls. That is something the DT770 Pro is very good at as well - and reportedly, so is the W2002. If a recording hasn't been recorded and mixed all too well (e.g. The Sympathy for the Devil album by the Stones) you can hear the sonic properties of the different recording locations superimposed on each other. When Mick Jagger's voice track enters, quite often he seems to sing in a space all of his own - what I interpret as the small recording booth, his voice has been recorded in. Those ambient clues are things that actually are captured in a recording but that one will probably never be able to hear with a speaker system. To me, this isn't really distracting and the musical benefits of the W100's extreme low-level resolution and of its ambient retrieval far outweigh the disadvantages.

Quality Guru, you talk about the "reverberations" that seem to have been added mostly to voices on some recordings. Are you talking about popular music? That's what they do there all the time, adding reverb, especially to the frequently rather thin voices of pop singers. Once again, I'd say it's very likely that the W100 simply shows you what has been recorded (and mixed and mastered). To my ears, the W100 is just a very transparent and natural sounding headphone that simply steps back, so I can listen to the music. I love it.

 

[jude]

[size=xx-small] Quote:

Originally posted by Vertigo-1 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....

Quote:

Originally posted by Tomcat ....Just a side note on a piano's frequency: the lowest note on a concert piano is at 27.5 Hz, the lowest note on a cello is at 65.4 Hz. So a piano can go more than an octave lower than a cello....

[/size]

Nice review, Vert!

Regarding the cello and piano, Tomcat is right about the piano reaching significantly lower than the cello's mid-bass bottom end. In fact, according to Stereophile a big Bösendorfer piano can reach approximately ten hertz lower than a standard concert grand's 27.5 Hz bottom end; so the big Bösendorfers can reach well into infrasonic territory.

 

[Fadamacka]

Quote:

Originally posted by Nick Dangerous Grado RS-1

I'll second that

 

[Vertigo-1]

Quote:

Originally posted by Tomcat The W100 bass mystery - will it ever be solved? My pair has the most realistic, believable and musically captivating rendition of low notes I have ever heard in a headphone. In terms of extension and slam, it's clearly superior to heaphones like the DT931, the DT990 Pro or the HD600. The only headphone I know that has bass reproduction more visceral than the W100 is the DT770 Pro (I don't know the W2002, though).

Hmm...so, your pair has visceral impact with leftover to spare? That's quite opposite of my pair, which has little to no visceral impact. It also has very little low end extension. I wonder if there isn't some quality control issues indeed. Well today I will get to hear them out of a Melos. That should at least show whether an amp other then the Sugden, which I suspect to have a weak bottom low end, does anything for the bass.

Regarding reverb/echoes...I think that quick, tightly controlled echo is what allows wooden headphones to particularly show off drums well. I've been trying to pinpoint all along why drums sound particularly effective out of wooden headphones like the Grado RS-1, Sony R10s, and now, the W100s, and I think it's the slight, but effective echoes. Either that, or it's just a case of wood knocking back on wood, creating some sort of wooden sympathy.

I'm on the fence about whether the W100s are introducing reflections, or if they're just reproducing the closed in reflection cues from the recording venue itself. Part of me says there's also the electrostatic methodology of recreating ambience, which is a sheer brute force method through utmost detail retrieval. Clearly there are two ways at getting at the recording venue then...is the wooden headphone way simply more natural through the use of reflections, or one that has a chance of introducing reverb colorations into tracks that don't welcome the extra echoes?

 

[Anders]

The last two weeks I have only been listening to speakers. Just before I read Vertigos review, I had listened to Roger Waters Amused to Death. Now it was an excellent opportunityy to pick up the W11R again and re-evaluate it in the light of Verts observation. Listening to Amused to Death On W11R was a big disappointment compared to speakers. My first conclusion was that the main problem was lack of visceral bass (auditioned with an old model Headroom MOH).
But it doen't seem to be that easy. The HD600/Red Clou didn't give much more of the visceral bass. And I remembered that in previous comparisions I had found that the W11R often presented better defined bass lines than the HD600 (probably acoustic bass that I remember). Now I picked Richard Strauss Also Sprach Zarathustra (Telarc) with deep bass, among others an organ, in the introduction. This worked out well. So I continued to compare these albums on the two headphones.
On W11R, the Strauss recording sounded as in a huge concert hall and as happening in a much more restricted space on HD600. I clearly preferred the first.
On Roger Waters the main difference didn't seem to be the magnitude of the bass although the W11R had a little softer and the HD600 a little punchier bass. It was rather a lack of coherance in the W11R that was the problem, especially on fast parts. You could hear all instruments seperated but in some way they floated around with a loss of rythm and pace. This is of course a catastrophy on rock music, and there is music that is even more demanding than Waters. Softer, more melodic pop/rock music can work fairly well on the W11R (Paul Simon etc).
I don't now how much of this applies to the W100, but believe that much does (they are siblings in construction).
So the main issue could be the spatial presentation of the AT woodies, sometimes an advantage and sometimes a drawback in my opinion. Some may even like it on all music and at the other extreme, on no music.

 

[The Quality Guru]

Quote:

Quality Guru, you talk about the "reverberations" that seem to have been added mostly to voices on some recordings. Are you talking about popular music? That's what they do there all the time, adding reverb, especially to the frequently rather thin voices of pop singers. Once again, I'd say it's very likely that the W100 simply shows you what has been recorded (and mixed and mastered). To my ears, the W100 is just a very transparent and natural sounding headphone that simply steps back, so I can listen to the music. I love it.

I am aware that in some pop recordings they sometimes add reverb and other such "enhancements" to make the voice either sound more cool or to make it sound fuller- as you said. However, most of the recordings in which I notice this "echo" (though definitely a subtle one) are not subject to that sort of "enhancement." For example, I don't think James Taylor adds any reverberations to his voice! Though I think with his recordings it may be the recording itself- or better ambient detail retrieval. I really do believe that the headphone does create and ambience in itself; and there is no doubt IMO that one can practically hear the venue sometimes- with its reverberations and all. Although other times, I still wonder if it's the venue.

Quote:

Regarding reverb/echoes...I think that quick, tightly controlled echo is what allows wooden headphones to particularly show off drums well. I've been trying to pinpoint all along why drums sound particularly effective out of wooden headphones like the Grado RS-1, Sony R10s, and now, the W100s, and I think it's the slight, but effective echoes. Either that, or it's just a case of wood knocking back on wood, creating some sort of wooden sympathy.

I'll just say that drums do sound quite good on the W100; I believe others have mentioned this previously- and IMO it is so true.

Quote:

I'm on the fence about whether the W100s are introducing reflections, or if they're just reproducing the closed in reflection cues from the recording venue itself. Part of me says there's also the electrostatic methodology of recreating ambience, which is a sheer brute force method through utmost detail retrieval. Clearly there are two ways at getting at the recording venue then...is the wooden headphone way simply more natural through the use of reflections, or one that has a chance of introducing reverb colorations into tracks that don't welcome the extra echoes?

If the reverberations are in the recordings themselves and are not being produced by the headphone then perhaps a very high end speaker/ headphone to compare it with could reveal whether the W100 is really just very detailed because of its introduction of ambient cues or just plain reflective.

Or perhaps this: If the reflections are actually being added by the W100's and are not in the recording, then the reverberations would probably be in different places on people's voices or instruments than the exact same place that the recorded reverberations were. So one needs to use some ambiently detailed reference headphone like the R10 and see if the reverberations or colourations are in the same places- meaning that it is the recording. These differences in the location of colourations/reverberations in the headphone vs. the recording could prove to be very difficult to differentiate, however. Hard to tell, no doubt.

Quote:

Grado RS-1

Hopefully I'll soon be a member of this team, too.
Go Team Grado-Technica!

 

[kelly]

Anders
I haven't gotten to hear the W11R yet (say, where do you live again?) but I have heard the W2002 and a W100 and think they're not so similar at all. From what I'm told, the W11R is in a class with the W2002 if not better so while I enjoyed reading your summary, I'd not not apply those comments to the W100. I love Amused to Death, by the way--excellent album. I'm not sure what Waters does when he processes his bass in the studio but I think it's more than just your average bass guitar. There are notes coming from his live album that shake the foundation of my apartment when played through speakers--not something a normal bass guitar can do.

QG
Reverb is added to *almost all* recordings, even the high quality jazz ones that purists go for. The problem is that the musicians are typically recorded in a studio. Studios have padded walls designed specifically to absorb the sound. Otherwise all studio recordings would sound like they were recorded in a tiny room. So, yes, even someone like James Taylor needs it unless you were listening to a live recording--and even then, it's sometimes added. In earlier days of recording, they used to actually (not making this up) send the sound from the engineer's desk into a large auditorium like room where the sound played through a pair of speakers. A mic situated in front of the speakers would then record and send the "reverb-added" sound back to the engineer. Now to be fair, things have gotten a lot better since then and the high end processors they use in studios now can be really good without losing detail or dynamics -- but it's *REALLY* on a case by case basis. So it's not really James Taylor who is in question but which equipment the recording was mixed on and how good of a job the engineer did at *creating* a real space. Alternatively, Chesky (and some others) record literally 10th row center in a good venue -- with no added effects. If you still hear more reverb than you should on Chesky's demo disc, then you can begin to question things. Even then, I'd recommend having another headphone handy for comparison -- even if it's just a lowly Sony V6.

Sorry if that seemed to come out of nowhere but the subject gets mentioned enough that I felt it worth elaborating.

 

[Anders]

Kelly,
I have only heard the W11R so I really don't know how much the models differ. Hope you are right that the W11R is more similar to the W2002 than the W100. When I go from what I read here and what I hear from the W11R, I am inclined to agree. Maybee, they have saved a líttle to much on the W100 so it doesn't fully realise the potential of these wooden phones.
One can speculate that they have been voiced with AT phono cartridges playing acoustic music, maybe mostly Japaneese classical. And not for Roger Waters wall-shaking bass.
I live in the city of Malmö in southern Sweden, close to continental Europe. I would have liked if I could drive over to you and compare with other phones and amps!

 

[JML]

I think the differences here may be, literally, based on our ears. The outer ears, to be precise.

Think about how anyone can change the perception of bass in closed cans by pushing them tighter onto your head. So how tight they clamp makes a difference. And the volume (not audible, but physical) taken up by one's ears within the earpieces is different for each of us -- it has to change the resonance, just like changing the size of a loudspeaker cabinet. And don't forget the reverberation and spatial effects, based on the angle of your ears, the angle of the drivers, how your outer ear is distorted by the pad pushing on them, how the earpiece fits over the ear and whether or not the driver is centered on the ear canal, etc.

My W100 certainly doesn't lack bass, under any circumstances.

Loudspeaker reviews are heavily dependent upon room size and shape, as well as room contents -- and instead of dealing with the rooms in our homes, with headphones we're talking about the space between the driver and your ear canal.

My 2 cents, anyway. And it was a nice review to read!

 

[a1leyez0nm3]

i think that the w100 doesnt have extremely deep bass, but has some. it seems to get loose below 60hz it seems.. course the pair i listened to werent fully broken in.. but the midrange is soo enveloping. they are a bit boring to listen to with music that needs tight bass lines and such. but with vocals and laid back music or whatever they are great. i dont really know how to describe them exactly. they are so lush and full sounding.. they just suck you right into the music and make it sound like its all around you. my 280s seem to put it right up in your face, comparitively. i just love their midrange tho. but i think i would rather have er4 since er4 has really deep bass, which i think is a necessity for the type of music i listen to (trance). the w100s actually do well with trance, but you just get that sense that there is something missing, which is the low bass. but i still would love to have a pair as a compliment to the etys if i can ever afford to!

 

[taipeileviathan]

firstly, that was a great review vertigo, even though i don't agree with everything that u said

. in the phones that i had auditioned at a hi-fi exhibit where the W100's had been playing for at least a week non-stop, the treble was quite sufficient. i say sufficient even though in fact i loved the treble in these phones, but that's just my personal taste (i can't stand excessively pronounced trebles, especially in the higher treble range). extension wasn't a problem, and i thought that violin music, high cymbals, even the harmonics on didjereedoos (however u spell that) were really well defined all the way up... but that's just me.

one word in particular that u used in ur review blew me away tho... i've been searching for that exact word forever as one of the essential words to go by when describing W100's, and that is "dry". the sound is nice and "dry", like the perfect gin martini with just the right touch of vermouth.

okay, i'm still kinda new at this and trying to sound as technical and cool as possible, so please bear with the ambiguity of my descriptions...

i have to agree with tomcat in terms of what he said about w100 bass performance tho. he tells it like it was in my phones... could this be poor quality control from AT?

ambient retrieval was definitely there, and the only phones that i've heard (well, i haven't heard that many, but have heard most beyers, senns, and grados

) that compare with the AT's for ambient retrieval, soundstage, or imaging, are my stax 2020's. and that's pretty good...

man... now i'm thirsting for the w100's all over again... *sigh*...

btw, the elva album that u auditioned with, are u talking about the hot taiwanese singer who does the yogurt commercials?

 

[Vertigo-1]

I think I can safely stand by my treble observations in the W100s...particularly because two other folks at the Headfi meet today also thought the W100's treble wasn't as "clear or open" as some of the other cans available on the table. The bass though? Who knows...the W100s are out of my hands now though so that's it for me with them. Having now heard the AT A9Xs, I'm starting to think bass just isn't a strong point of Audio Technica in general.

The key is relativity. A headphone's bass is only considered deep, the treble sufficient, the midrange magical, until you run into a headphone that does these items better. I've heard enough to know that the treble and bass can definitely be executed better then the W100's presentation of these two items.

And yes, that is the Elva I'm referring to. I think blueocp on here uses a pic of her as an avatar.