My LCD-3 Review
I wasn’t a huge fan of the original LCD-2. There was a lot right with it - in particular a clear and transparent midrange, and a very persuasive and welcome approach to treble balance. But for me it was handicapped by what I heard as a slightly plodding, slow, and wooden bass, with significant smear and overhang. Anything worse than it was worse, obviously, but anything better than it was worse, too, because it was different.
So largely in isolation - and after taking a pair apart, all the way down to the raw components - I concluded that because the diaphragm was rigidly edge-clamped and relatively stiff and heavy (in Mylar-and-electrical-traces terms, that is) there was mechanical energy entering the frame structures and releasing through relatively small and stiff pads via bone conduction to the ears.
And it’s possible Audeze reached the same conclusion, because in my opinion the most important addition to the LCD-2 Rev 2 was the much larger and softer pads. I believe these act to mechanically decouple the frames from the head while maintaining a good seal.
And certainly the Rev 2’s bass was far better than the original. It was deep, fast, precise, and had terrific pitch definition. The lack of smearing made a largely unchanged midrange sound even better - tremendously clear and transparent.
But the Rev 2 wasn’t all good news. I felt the treble was tipped up compared to the original. My pair seemed to rise gently from about 500 Hz for an octave before shelving down again much more slowly than before, and then kicking up again around 5 - 6 kHz for a noticeable peak. Overall I felt the balance was uncannily like the HD800. Cymbals and sibilance were a little hot and fierce - not at all what I wanted from Audeze.
So ultimately I felt the Rev 2 was a detour into a blind alley. What we needed was the original, minus its faults.
And that’s exactly what the LCD-3 is.
The pads are sensational. They’re several steps beyond even the Rev 2’s. The leather is amazingly soft, and the foam inside feels like some sophisticated near-liquid gel. (I’m sure it isn’t, but it’s very well chosen.) The seal is tremendous. In effect the LCD-3 is the world’s best sealed headphone. The backwave is perfectly contained in a chamber made of heavy, dense material - except it’s the frontwave, not the backwave, and the heavy dense material is your skull, and your ear is right there in the sealed chamber.
Bass is as good or better than the Rev 2’s, and the midrange and treble is as good or better than the original’s. The original treble balance has been maintained - I would say my pair starts to roll off gently before 1,000 Hz and falls in a straight line for three or so octaves.
The effect is not dark, but distant. My main amp right now (and forever, he said rashly) is a custom hot-rod Apex Pinnacle made for me by Pete Millett. I asked him for a non-Swiss-Army-knife version of my regular Pinnacle - a single unbalanced input, a single unbalanced output, point to point wiring, no relays, no gain control, no nothing. I use the KR PX4s and a pre-GE 1942 Ken-Rad VT231 in it, and the result is about 120% of what the regular Pinnacle is - gorgeous SET loveliness, spooky clarity, total transparency, fantastic flow and dynamics. It renders frequency response in terms of dimension - loud is close, quiet is distant. The LCD-3 is right on board with that approach - the treble is 100% all there, no question, but it isn’t in your face. It’s all happening slightly further back. The singer is close to you, and the cymbals are exactly where they should be, at the back of the stage.
But that stage isn’t very deep, to be honest, which is the first of two flaws. The soundscape (or whatever you want to call it) is narrow - not much more than the width of your head - and shallow: from just behind your eyes to just in front. (To be boring: I think that’s because of the edge clamping. The diaphragm moves like a trampoline, which means it moves less and later as you look away from its center, which means phase coherency is badly compromised, and positioning cues depend on phase as well as volume.)
I think the edge clamping causes the LCD-3’s other flaw, too. No question it’s a superb headphone - real-life weight and heft; great, great bass depth, precision, and articulation; fabulous, world-class midrange smoothness and clarity; terrific treble delicacy and super-intelligent treble voicing - but in terms of nuance, shading, punctuation, and microdynamics it’s a little constrained, a little dulled, a little reluctant. I don’t want to anthropomorphize a couple of square inches of Mylar, but I feel I can hear those clamped edges wanting to break free, wanting to move, wanting to turn current into acceleration, not heat.
For about six months now I’ve been using a headphone I first tried on a whim - the Headphile Terminator V4, which is essentially a Darth Beyer 4, a woodied Beyer 770. Not necessarily one of the usual suspects in the high end arena, but whether by good luck or good judgment, it’s completely competitive - and completely addictive. Compared to my HD800s it has a radically bass-heavy sound, and compared to the LCD-3 its bass is a little sloppy and underdamped. But elsewhere it lacks absolutely nothing, and overall, if I close my eyes, it sounds uncannily like listening to a great speaker-based system in a good room - a great speaker-based system from about 1995, to be honest, with all that implies ... big, generous bass, smooth distant treble, a cavernously huge soundscape, precisely located details.
But above all the Terminators sound alive - extremely fast, propulsively dynamic, joyous, happy, exuberant, and unconfined. In comparison the LCD-3 - while being perhaps better in every academic sense - sound too timid, too smooth, a little too afraid of the ragged chaos of live music-making. Right now I love Daniel Lanois’s album “Black Dub”, which has crazy post-production swirl and echo all over it, which sound miles away but insanely lively and human on the Terminators, and a little closed-in and polite and “correct” on the LCD-3s. The kick drum sounds quick and deep and precise on the LCD-3s, but on the Terminators you can actually hear the drummer thinking, “Right, ****** it, let’s rock.”
Conclusion? If I hadn’t heard the Terminators - and hadn’t been weirdly open-minded about their different balance in the first moments - I would have put away my HD800s for good and listened very happily to the LCD-3s for years to come. I can totally understand someone like Skylab, for instance, who loved the original LCD-2, but now prefers the LCD-3, because the LCD-3 is absolutely a perfected LCD-2. For me it’s a close-run thing, but at the end of the day, when I’m all done working and the lights are low, I’m going to stick with the Terminators, just for the fun of it.
