you know…you get in this hobby, and you go through the years listening to tens or hundreds of phones…some you seldom listen anymore, some settle in your listening habbits…And i believe in your collective memory, each of them makes a print….You know for sure the individual strenghts of your gear…
And then i got the SST’s….a little underwhelmed in the beggining…somehow i kept recollecting some individual qualities from the GR10, PF2, Sonorous VI, HE400i, which i felt bested the SST….
And they kept burning, and listening exclusively for the last month and a half….Lately, i started to go back to said phones, in a trial to prove to myself that my collective memory was right….And it was not…I listen now to the GR10, and i don’t find them more open, and way less clear than the SST. I listen to the PF2, and i don’t find them more raw than the SST. I listen to the Sonorous VI, and they are veiled and distant compared to the SST.
Don’t get me wrong…they are not perfect…In some tracks they are sibilant, in some tracks they lack some body….But what they do combined in terms of form factor, isolation, materials, ease of drive, comfort, sound signature, sound emotion, fun, clarity, speed, intimacy……Is far away from anything i’ve heard so far….