Two Days In ...
The Fostex AH900s showed up late on Wednesday. I kept checking the UPS site to make sure they hadn't been delivered to someone else, but at 5:41 pm the big, brown truck came roaring around the corner. I signed for a big box from HeadRoom and put it on my desk for later. No time as I had a Bible study to teach. It was so late that I couldn't even rationalize ripping them open to listen to the Messiah or the St. Matthew Passion as prep for Bible study.
Later that evening I took my time and carefully opened the boxes. At this point I'm sure they will be going back. After all the reading I had done on head-fi and all the reviews on the web, I knew I had to hear them. But there was no way they could be that much better than my LCD2s or HD800s, right? I've pretty much given up on the LCD2s because they are so uncomfortable, and I'm just not enamored with the HD800s - I mean they are all right, but so clinical. So many head-fiers have described the Fostex as "fun" and I have surely been missing the fun in my listening.
So I plugged them into the Lyr and hit play on my favorite Bach organ recording. The Prelude and Fugue in B- is almost instantly into the low pedals and the Fostex just grumbled "Is this what you've been missing?" Yes! I was planning to listen to the pedal entrance and then switch to hear something else, but I couldn't. It was organ, it was a glorious as hearing the Great Organ at Methuen (fortunately an hour away, on any Wed night in the summer - listen to Michael Murray's Telarc recording). The double basses in Shostakovich's 11th growled, the low horns on almost any symphony I listened to, ... the bass was really incredible. But the strange thing was, that even though it was there and powerful, I didn't have the sense that the Fostex was saying, "Hey, I've got great bass, don't I? Just listen to my bass!" It was much more like the bass fit into the music, it was surely doing it's part in holding the music together, but it wasn't covering the violins, or the flute, or recorder, or the soprano. So far these headphones have a greater sense of musical fit than I've experienced. They are much more than a headphone for listening to Bach organ and saying, "Wow the pedals are there." They are singing with all the stops.
These are super clear, super fast phones. I am hearing stuff I never noticed - fingers on the cello and piano, noises in the background of the recording (I keep turning around to see who walked in the room only to find that it was a slight noise on a recording that I'm familiar with and have never heard). This comes after years with the HD800s and the LCD2s! I didn't think there would be a great difference between the Fostex and the others, but for me it's an order of magnitude difference.
I want to report that these are incredibly comfortable as well. I had them on my head for hours yesterday and no fatigue, no neck pain. At times they seem to disappear from my head, which the LCD2s never did on their best day. They are at least as comfortable as the HD800s and maybe a touch more because the pads are more pliable.
Well, that's my 2 cents worth. Thanks for all the posts that drove me to get them. I appreciate the time you all take to make Head-Fi such an expensive place!
Blessings
What are the chances that the item actually does get damaged during shipping? On the other hand, custom tax on foreign goods can be exorbitant with products like the TH900 if declared at face value.
