IkSak
100+ Head-Fier
This is one of the most amazing analogies I've read in my life. You really know how to explain things.
After reading your post and @Ojisan I wonder, do you think the Elex is a great headphone for classical?
After reading your post and @Ojisan I wonder, do you think the Elex is a great headphone for classical?
While I wait for a couple of items to come in the mail for a mod I'm anticipating to perform on my Sundara, I've been using the Elex as my daily driver at home. I want to add a few additional thoughts that I've realized when using this headphone over time.
Also in my longform review, I mention that the "Elex's sonic experience is overwhelmingly driven ... by a feeling of empty, black space around sounds and instruments." After all my mental adjustment to the Elex sound, this continues to be true, and surprisingly it's both a good and a bad thing. The good aspect of it is resolution--how clearly and well defined I can hear the different sounds in the music. The bad aspect of this is that the Elex's resolution can often come across as too egalitarian, as in it presents contextual instrumentation too distinctly and too forward relative to perhaps the primary performance (typically vocals), and thereby distracts from it.
- Its blistering transients and hardness of sound is something that my brain has adjusted to. These sort of sensations don't nearly stand out as much as before, and, as a consequence, I find myself no longer getting fatigued either.
- In my longform review, I mentioned some subtle faults to the Elex's sound, but I don't typically notice them when listening unless I deliberately look for them. However, on certain songs like Varien's Kamisama feat. Miyake, the loss of magic in Miyake's immediate vocals is clear due to the Elex recessing those frequencies and making her voice go from lush to brittle.
The best way I can describe this feeling is imagine the songs we listen to as dishes we have for dinner. For some dishes, like steak and potatoes, you want your foodstuffs distinctly separated on your plate. You might give the steak a couple bites of attention, then give your potatoes a few bites as well, and then alternate. And overall, it's a delicious meal. The Elex really shines for these sort of songs.
Then there are dishes like pork fried rice, where the Elex will effortlessly lump your rice, peas, carrots, and pork into their respective mounds and push them into their respective corners, like a master class in grouping Skittles. This makes eating my fried rice... certainly more interesting, because I've never had fried rice like this before, and one can argue it still kind of works.
Then there's my mac & cheese, and the Elex keeps the macaroni and cheese separated like water and oil, and I feel like in these sort of cases, it's a detraction from the music. By all means, I want the two smeared together, or maybe I want one to shine while the others are deliberately muddied a bit, or perhaps I want one stacked on top of another. I don't recall the random song that popped up on Spotify the other day, but in it there was this guy singing and talking, but there was this cymbal just constantly going off very clearly in my left ear. I was at a loss as to what to listen to, and for some reason I couldn't listen to both at the same time. In times like this, I can't help but muse to myself that the mastering engineer definitely mastered the track with probably something sensible, like a Sennheiser or something.
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting sensation worth sharing with the masses.
