20 minutes? You're going to get a lot of disagreements on your assessments....................
I´ve never really felt the need to audition gear for more than that. Intuitively it doesn´t take long for me to know how I feel about it. All of my purchases have been made with similar short testing. Longer ownership usually tends to reinforce the first impressions, rarely have I noticed any major change to the opposite direction. That being said, as my comments are probably quite a bit removed from the mainstream on this matter so I´ll make a few clarifications:
- Source was Naim DAC-V1 fed by a CD transport; my reference at home is for now Valhalla 2 (OTL tube amp, very good synergy with high ohm dynamic headphones) fed by a cheap HRT Microstreamer. Previously I had a HDVD800, which I unfortunately had to sell to fund another purchase. Hopefully I will be able to upgrade my DAC soon. So my comparison electronics was actually a lot cheaper than what powered the Focals. On the other hand Naim gear in general tends to, in my experience, have an aggressive and artificially hyped sound. Thus it is entirely possible that the somewhat harsh/uneven highs were due to a bad electronics match. So it could have been a bad synergy match.
- The Utopia/Elear being easy to drive is due to their impedance characteristics. They are quite sensitive headphones for a flagship gear. My experience has been that <100 ohm headphones (and the Sennheiser HD 700 at 150 for example) in general tend to be not as demanding of amplification in particular, although I do of course believe the Utopia/Elear both scale with better gear. What I meant is that if driven from weaker sources they sound quite good already, as opposed to HD650/HD800 which tend to sound really bad without powerful amplification.
- I went in ready to buy the Elear after reading all the hype on them, but the Utopia was never on my list due to the price (I find the entire 3k+ headphone phenomenon ridiculous and bad for the industry, but that´s just my opinion). There is a separate audio jewelry market (= high performance in very beautiful enclosures at extreme prices) like the Chord DAVE etc. Utopia belongs there in my opinion. I´m only interested in the traditional high performance market without the jewelry bonus. In other words this excludes LCD-4, HE-1000, Abyss and others.
- I don´t feel full size headphones have made any major technical/sound quality improvements since the 2009/2010 launch of the first new flagships (+ each of them have some critical flaws, if you ask me all new flagships are good secondary headphones to add to the classic era flagships like HD 600/650, K700-variants, DT-variants; they have not surpassed them as all rounders). The situation is not the same in the in ear headphone category, where things have truly moved forward.
- My reference headphone is the HD 650, which in my opinion is still the best headphone thus far in tonality and overall cohesion of sound. Overall I feel it is still better than the HD800S I own (that is mostly being used for specific music and gaming/movies). I place a very large priority on tonality/cohesion and wearing comfort, everyone has their own priorities on what features they value the most.
- I don´t think I was actually all that negative. For the Utopia it´s mostly the pricing that´s wrong, I do consider both of them worthy as flagships, i.e. competitive against HD800S/T1 (2g)/LCD2-3 and others. The Elear especially is a big star with the 1k pricing. They are tuned different than the Utopia, but I would not say they are particularly technically inferior to them. It´s mostly down to the tuning. From what I´ve read apparently if you change the pads on the Elear you can bring back a lot of the upper midrange dip which would fix their achilles heel for me.
Last but not least, the only thing that matters in regards to enjoying your headphones in the end is your own opinion: one should never put too much stock on what is said on forums. There will be opposing views on every single product. The HD 650 I adore are veiled, slow and grainy to others. Try various gear for yourself and find what works best for you. I´m sure many will feel the 4k Utopia is worthy of the price and is a clear upgrade to HD 800 and that´s fine. Nothing bad in agreeing to disagree. Moral of the story? Always audition gear yourself (and with music you are very familiar with!), never buy anything in the flagship category blind. Most good dealers should provide the opportunity to do just that.
Also before buying any flagship it is usually worth it to buy a few of the classic era flagships that ruled Head-Fi.org before 2009: they cost almost nothing compared to these new 3k+ era flagships (+ are easy to sell) and will provide a benchmark to compare "value" against. Perhaps you will even agree with me that they still do some things better than these new flagships (such as the "all rounder factor") despite clearly losing in things like resolution, speed etc.
