Just audited music through Focal Elear overnight and I'd like to give an impression of Focal Elear. Amp/DAC I used was a Schiit Valhalla 2/Lehmann clone amp+Schiit Gungnir original, iPod classic + Lehmann Traveler, iphone 6 + Dragonfly red. Used a Mogami 2893 cable.
Take home message: Great flagship audiophile headphone. Best for modern music IMO. Versatile. What I am surprised that it does not cause fatigue at all.
Good Hi-fi headphones aim to re-present the sound waves propagating back when the music was recorded in the recording room. Elear does the job very well. Very accurate sounding. Very lively sounding. Very CLEAR sounding.
To achieve the goal to present as much details as possible, there can be side affects:
- Some headphones tend to get bright for some people (Beyerdynamic, Hifiman, and Grado go this route. I'd like to mention that MrSpeakers handle the cocktail extremely well to my taste.).
- And some headphones have some peaks in the treble and resolving the peaks that could be disturbing to some people. Sometimes they can be uneasy and require modding, but the problem is hard to fix. The amp with synergy is hard to find, some cables could be expensive, and most EQ softwares/hardwares suck. Even you are a pro modder it could be uneasy to get a totally pleasant sound out of it, plus, most mods have trade offs themselves, either muffing some frequency regions or changing air flow/soundstage/sound propagation. In most cases, mods can't save a headphone.
Focal Elear wins by giving all the details but not remaining fatiguing. They have Audeze-quality bass and present mids very clear highs that does not fatigue me at all. Just like a CLEAR version of HD600/650. Bass is clear, mids are clear, highs are so much clearer.
They are polite and energetic, but not aggressive. Plus they just do everything right. Soundstage is good enough, imaging is incredibly good to my ears. Compared to most other "flagships" they are not hard to drive at all. Comfortable to wear, solid-built, and they do not look ugly.
To my ears, they do extremely well for classical music, and they are the king for modern music.