Just got to compare the LCD-3 with my T1, both powered by the same Burson Virtuoso V2+. This was the first time I compared the T1 to another high end headphone, and I am really struck how different they are. The LCD-3 is surely one of the best headphones, and they must be, for the price that is about three times that of the T1, but at the moment I would not exchange them for my T1. The Audeze certainly has a lot of punch, but for my T1 ears, this is way too much bass, for example when listening to Tool. I found that over all sorts of music, there is a layer of warm fog, leading to more but less precise bass punch, and to considerably less overall detail and clarity. For example, listening to "Commemorative 9/11 T-Shirt" by Oceansize with its strange chirping sounds lost almost all of its magic to me. I also tried listening to classical music (e.g., Beethoven 7), which was not at all enjoyable, with a completely unnatural sound, and again the warm fog covering so many details. From this short comparison, I could hardly believe anybody would want to use the Audeze for anything else than rock music.
Now, I really believe that our brain quickly adapts to the way we listen to music, so we will very soon come to perceive anything else than our usual gear as being rather unnatural. Very likely, if I had a LCD-3 brain, I could hardly tolerate the T1 and its bright sound, and all the sound details must then seem completely exaggerated and harsh. To me, this leads to several questions:
- If there are such huge differences between the sound produced by the best cans, who can then tell how the music originally sounded when it was recorded? Is there even such thing as "the original sound of music"? After all, the perception of music must be highly different between listeners, depending on what we listened to in our earlier life.
- What role can headphone amplifiers play? I know there are differences among amplifiers, and I really tried to find one of the best, but if there are such huge differences among cans, it would probably make more sense buying several headphones for the different sorts of music (which of course many people do) than paying all that money for a good amplifier.
- I guess there must be some sort of regionally different ways of sound perception. It is probably no coincidence that so many central Europan cans like Sennheiser, AKG and Beyerdynamic have such a bright sound that might be more suitable for classical music, and Audeze seems to be build for rock music.
