I've now spent a large number of hours critically listening to the Elex, both all day at work as well as at home, at which I've spent several hours A/Bing the Elex against the Sundara with select tracks. Some of my initial impressions of this headphone weren't quite on the mark, and some can be further clarified. Without further adieu...
I'm going to talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of Elex's sound quality as compared with the Sundara, my thoughts for which are
here. As indicated in my signature, they're both driven by the Arcam rHead, my thoughts for which are
here. I stated in my initial impressions that I felt the rHead presented the Elex as everything it is, and further listening has only solidified this feeling. Predicating this entire post is that both headphones sound very, very good to me, so I'm only going to talk about what relatively stands out about the Elex rather than offer an exhaustive description of its sonic performance.
The Good Shi..Stuff
- All of Elex's technical vectors, with the exception of sound stage, are very good, and some are noticeably superior to that of the Sundara, which means those are crazy good. One overperforming vector that must be mentioned is macrodynamics, i.e. transients, attack, and decay. My initial impression was that Sundara's planar transients were superior. I was wrong. The Elex's transients are supreme. Attack and decay are lightning fast. People often talk about how planars can tickle the ear when a snap drum plays. Well, this is true of the Elex for many different transient sounds. The driver pushes air pressure into your ear canal in a manner you can literally feel, and this is a quite defining characteristic of the Elex sound.
- As a consequence of its tier S attack and decay, the Elex sounds very clear. Specifically, the Elex does an unparalleled job at decongesting its stage, separating sounds and instruments, and imaging them distinctly, remarkably, and effortlessly. Before the Elex, I thought the Sundara's extremely thin diaphragm was fast and well dampened if by nothing else, air. Well, it is, but the Elex's magnesium alloy diaphragm one ups the Sundara's in this regard. The Elex's sonic experience is overwhelmingly driven, besides by its blistering transient performance, by a feeling of empty, black space around sounds and instruments.
- Bass: As I mentioned in my initial impressions, the Elex has the best bass performance I've heard in a dynamic headphone. Its bass is neutral, punchy, and nuanced, with very little distortion to boot. Dynamic bass has a different texture to planar bass, and while I prefer the latter, I very much like what the Elex does on the low end. Due to its low-mid-bass hump endemic to the fluctuating impedance of voice coils, I feel that the Elex adds extra heft in the right moments where the Sundara's super flat low end does not.
The subtle but present not so good stuff...
I feel like the Elex's strengths are, on balance, quite noticeable, whereas its weaknesses are quite subtle and require some damn careful listening to put one's finger on. Elex sets itself up for success in the impressions department for sure. Anyway, here we go:
- Recessed midrange funkiness? I'm going to call it that. Basically, there are some swaths of frequencies in the upper midrange through presence that feel too recessed relative to the insane impact of higher and lower octaves. It gives the sound a slight v-shape sensation, but really the most bothersome thing is that I have a hard time hearing things in familiar tracks that I'm very used to hearing through the Sundara. I could describe the sensation as these sounds are coming from a galaxy far, far away, or that they're just largely absent when they shouldn't be. When I crank up the volume to compensate, everything else becomes way too damn loud.
- Neurotic presence and treble. The short of it is that everything from the upper midrange through the treble sound quite edgy compared to the Sundara's relative smoothness. I think there are two factors driving this sensation. One is that the Elex's crazy, perhaps unnatural, attack and decay is creating a dryness in its sound. The other is that its top end FR is just too up-and-down, which is part of the reason for the first bullet as well.
- Timbre. Timbre is a little off. *Gasp*. I was shocked too. It's quite subtle, but I verified this over and over again. Specifically in two places. One is that its midrange is just a tad nasally, as if there's some sort of 1KHz peak that shouldn't be there. The stock M1060 was guilty of this to quite a larger extent. The second timbre issue that is much less subtle is that, and I think this is related to the first two points above yet again, is that the treble timbre is off. The treble is just too dry, too edgy, too...forward. If you listen to Hans Zimmer's First Step on the Interstellar soundtrack, and skip to 1:10, you'll hear the part where there's a rising crescendo of background strings. With the Sundara, these are very much string instruments. With the Elex, by 1:25, these sound totally like horns!
And that's it. Ultimately, the Elex is an extremely interesting and capable headphone. Nothing else I've heard quite sounds like it. It's strengths dominate the listening experience, and I think it makes a wonderful addition to my deliberately minimal headphone collection.
