DCA Expanse review and comparison
I really like to share my experience with the Expanse but I did not really know how to put it into words so I just made a list of stuff that is most important to me and compared it to the rest of my collection.
I will just give some explanations to what I mean by some categories.
All listening was done with the Chord Dave and M Scaler. Expanse got at least 100 hours of burn in with moderately high volumes. Please ask if you want me to explain further on what I mean exactly.
Tonality: good tonality to me means that a headphone needs no or few eq to sound natural/neutral.
Timbre variation and accuracy: Instruments and voices are presented in their character, saxophones sound rich and warm, violins have some bite and resonance…so on
Dynamics: at first I wanted to make two categories for micro and macro dynamics but the differences where to small to matter really, for example the HD800 has a tiny bit more macro- than microdynamics and the Edition 5 the other way around.
Treble realism: Are cymbals sharp but not too sharp? Do female voices sound a bit more breathy but not harsh?
Instrument separation: this is a bit more complicated than I want, but it is not only about placement on the stage and space between them but also about the differences in timbre and layering that help to hear through the recording. So it seems that categories overlap each other a bit here.
Live feeling: How much time does it take to loose myself in the music and feel like a am really there? Also does it stay that way after a longer period of listening?
Comfort: Yeah I think this one is obvious. Most comfortable will still be the Hifimans.
Layering: I did not want to give soundstage a score as I think it is too subjective and has just different feelings to it. The HD800 sounds wider the Utopia/Expanse closer, Edition 5 somewhere in the middle. But what is not subjective is the ability to hear the distances in depth between instruments.
Detail: I tried to keep the force with which the detail is presented out of the equation. The Expanse is really layed back in detail presentation while the Edition 5 is more direct but the Expanse is the headphone that allows me to hear the most detail if I listen for it.
trails of notes/no „one note effekt“: With drums there is the initial stick hit, the drum timbre, even the timbre of the stick and then the boom of the drum itself, same for piano. Basically how many layers of each note am I able to hear.
Score: I took the weighting percentage for each category into account. What’s interesting to me is that the the final score is also representative for the order in which I like to spend time with each headphone.
I like to ad that I really enjoy each of those headphones regardless of age. New means not always better in every category. I also do not tend to have honeymoon phases. I am a bit more of sceptic when it comes to new gear and expect nothing special, but if I enjoy a headphone even after years and years my respect to the developers grows. I am amazed that the HD800 (although now heavily modded) is still one of my go to headphones.
The Expanse is definitely doing something special with it’s AMTS system and in some ways it could be a new standard.
