I found this with laptops, I used to think that a few ounces didn't make a difference, what's the big deal? But.. it turns out that a few ounces is a big deal, we immediately seem to notice. So.. this is a roundabout way of saying that the weight and use of materials in the PM-1 makes them almost non-noticeable. They stay put on your head, but not tight enough to make your ears hurt or ache. Even after an hour or two, you just forget about them. I remember getting up from my computer to get the phone, and all of a sudden I noticed something was tugging at me, doh.. I still had the headphones on and the cord was plugged in.
So, I'm finding them really comfortable. Yesterday my son (15) was holding them, and feeling the ear cups, and I asked him what he was doing, and he said that they were the softest thing he had ever felt! Really funny, but they really are pretty soft and cushy!
Everyone's fit is different, and the Oppo distribution model is such that it isn't as easy to just go find a pair to audition as with mass-market brands, but it's worth the effort to see how they fit you. We review earphones all the time, and you know it always struck me as pretty much impossible. I mean folks can attempt measurements, describe the fit, feel, and sound, but ultimately, since they are wholly dependent upon a persons actual ear canal construction, it is somewhat meaningless until you try them yourself.
A case in point is some earphones by two major manufacturers, and my colleague and I were both given a set of identical models from both companies to try. I liked them both (What's not to like?) but there were differences in the sound, one model was a single driver, the other multiple drivers, but my colleague only liked one, and in the end, it was due to fit. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get a proper, or at least a comfortable proper fit with one set, but the other, was an easy fit. So... being a good friend I accused him of having alien ear canals, but it was a reminder that metrics and other folks opinions only go so far.
In terms of gear I'm using a variety of Mac's running Snow Leopard (I still need Rosetta, and don't love sandboxing) with Amarra, Decibel, AudioGate, Pure Music, running into an AudioEngine D3, Korg DS-DAC 100, the Oppo BDP-105, and most recently the new Oppo HA-1 to audition the PM-1's. For source music, a combination of high-res files, mostly FLAC from HD Tracks, Society of Sound, Cedille Records, Naxos, Linn, DSDs from AIX and Blue Coast, assorted SACDs, and also lots of files that are lossless rips from CDs.
The combination of the PM-1 and HA-1 really reveals the shortcomings in a lot of recent high-defination remaster releases, which is to say, on albums (why do we still use that term btw?) where I expected significant improvements, its been kinda "meh" not worth the hassle, but on others, it's amazing. Case in point. A couple of years ago we reviewed the Jethro Tull "Aqualung" remaster, and it was amazing. Not a mere remaster, but a complete remix from the original tapes, a complete restoration and revisit of the source. Compared to the recent release of Moondance by Van Morrison, which revealed fantastic remastering of the unknown material, but the actual album was better, but not amazingly so. Why? Well, those tracks represented a remaster that was done 10 years ago, so contained things (dropouts in "And it Stoned Me") that could have, and should have been fixed and restored properly for this release. Further muddying the waters is that the high-res versions for the DVD and HD Tracks release were prepared specifically for the remaster release.
Of course, anyone with even the most basic set of decent earphones or headphones can hear this. The nice thing about the PM-1 and HA-1 is that it doesn't feel that they are coloring the sound. They are exciting when the source is exciting, and laid back when the source is laid back. I'm still trying to figure out if there is a genre of music they favor, but haven't found it yet.
