SiBurning
1000+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 18, 2005
- Posts
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I'm a bit torn on the HeadLine. It does some things really well, but falls short in other areas. It's transparent, but hard to match with other equipment, especially portable gear. It handles complex musical passages with authority, but sometimes gets stuffed up with simpler music. It can be punchy and detailed, but lacks PRAT. It has delicate highs, but they're masked by hardness in the “presence” area. It's a respectable entry for a new product by Core Sound. It isn't really designed with portable audiophiles in mind, yet it manages to do a decent job. Maybe all it needs is a few tweaks to shine in the portable audiophile space. As someone said at the NYC meet, “I'm not wowed”. Still, it's a good product that deserves an audition.
Consider what the HeadLine is designed for. Core Sound's target audience is professional and hobbyist recording engineers. The HeadLine is meant to be used as an on the fly replacement for a DAC, headphone amp, line level driver, monitor, a/b switch, and more. I imagine myself walking around a sound stage, plugging it into various components, making sure they work and are wired correctly, probably tossing spent batteries on the floor of some sleazy nightclub. The HeadLine's also meant to sound good, and be neutral with respect to the other parts of the system. Finally, you can swap it in and out of your home system at will. It's not designed as a portable DAC/headphone amp combination for an audiophile to use as the basis of a great portable rig. All of this can be both a blessing and a curse for the portable audiophile.
I've always found it hard to write equipment reviews. First, quite often, what people read isn't what I meant to write. Problem exists between keyboard and chair. It's especially difficult with a portable. I never know whether to judge it as a low end product or take off the kid gloves and go for blood. Since Core Sound invites a comparison with the Benchmark DAC-1, it's gloves off. Not that I'll make many comparisons. It doesn't make much sense to compare a portable against a high end home DAC. Or even to compare it to other portables. As much as I love HeadRoom's MicroStack, it's easy to trash it with comparisons like this. I think the MSB Link-DAC I bought used for $100 kicks its butt. It's a silly comparison. All of these are. You can't take the Benckmark or MSB with you. In the same way, the HeadLine has a different purpose than the MicroStack. Anyway, I'm going to trash the Benchmark even as I praise it, so I'll do the same for the HeadLine.
The really hard part of writing this review is that the HeadLine itself sounds hard. The hardness isn't that huge a problem by itself, but it colors nearly everything the HeadLine does, making the bad things worse, and masking the things it does right. It does a lot of things right. Unfortunately, I don't know how to write about it without constantly revisiting this problem. Keep this in mind—the hardness isn't so bad as the repeated references make it seem.
The HeadLine can be finicky. It's hard to match with other equipment, and the sound can be spotty with some tracks. I think the appropriate word to describe this phenomenon is “transparent”. My home speakers have a hole in the midrange and can be timid at the very high end. The HeadLine offers no help. I found similar difficulties using my Beyerdynamic 831, which sounds very hard plugged into the HeadLine. With IEMs, whether using the Etymotic ER4P+S adapter, Shure 5, or Westone UM2, it was also a little hard. It's not just cans and speakers. The HeadLine doesn't synergize with any of my other amps, sources, or cans, portable or not. While it's nice to have a transparent source and amp--maybe even a necessity for what this product is designed to do—it does become a liability in some situations. A more forgiving unit might be more useful to the audiophile. Because of this, I'll limit the review to how it sounds as an integrated DAC+headphone amp.
The overall sound of the HeadLine is open, detailed, with tight bass and delicate highs. The mids have a band that's a little too prominent. The result is a bit of hardness. As a portable, it strikes a good balance between sound qualities. I've had this for well over a month now, and have been pretty happy with the sound overall. That is, until I came to write this review. After all is said and done, the HeadLine is a portable. That means trade offs. Shortcomings that are easy to ignore on a noisy street can become less than satisfying in a quiet living room.
The hardness is a peak in the upper midrange like you'd get with a “presence” switch. It's this peak that makes the HeadLine sound hard. With the Etymotic ER4P + S adapter, it just sounds like a hump in the midrange, coloring the sound. It can get pretty hard through the Beyerdynamic 831. I suspect this “presence” has something to do with the “professional” audience for the HeadLine. Monitors tend to be tipped up in the midrange compared with audiophile speakers.
The first quality to stand out is an openness that lets instruments breathe. I can't abide listening to MP3 because room acoustics get lost in the compression. This is true whether listening to the Allman Brothers, Clapton's Let It Rain, or even Traffic's less than perfectly recorded Medicated Goo. These tracks all sound better when you can hear the space in which the instruments are played. They all suffer from the slightest compression-loss, which is why my DAC has nothing but FLAC. The HeadLine does a decent job with these low level details. It's a lot better than my iRiver 120. On a noisy subway, it's quite adequate. In quieter settings or with other music, the limitations become more obvious.
Openness is particularly important with jazz, but especially grand piano. I have the Ken Burns' Jazz box set on my DAP. Most of it is degraded, some tracks being more noise than music. The HeadLine does a nice job of pulling out details and playing what little hall space is left on those scratchy, hissing vinyl LPs. With cleanly recorded jazz, the space is detailed nicely, if not perfectly. To really test the limits, I put on several CDs of different performers playing Chopin. Notes ring out and echo through the piano and the hall, as they should. There is, of course, a limit to this, as there is with every portable DAC I've heard. While the openness allows a grand piano room to breathe, the harmonics go dull above some point. At this point it's either bumping against the resolution limits of the DAC, or running into the hardness masking the upper registers.
Details and resolution are quite respectable for a portable, being more than capable of handling any MP3. I suspect only details freaks would notice or care about the loss of resolution beyond those levels. This is noticeable in both complex and simple music. Instrument separation is very good—it doesn't get stuffy, even in large orchestral passages.
There is, however, a bit of stuffiness apparent in even the simplest music. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something in the mid-upper bass is a little off. This is really nitpicking in a portable. It would be an issue in a thousand dollar source.
Given the “presence”, I was expecting to hear some sibilance. I took out Queen's A Day at the Races and listened to You Take My Breath Away. If there's sibilance in a system, this song will bring it out—the recording is already sibilant. Nada. Only the barest whisper of a breath of sibilance. There is, however, some breath in the “presence” area, but it's below the sibilance area. This might actually mask the sibilance I expect to hear, the same way it masks the delicate high end.
Next, I put it up against Hillary Hahn's screeching violin, with nary a squeak. Hmm. Something's not right here. Hillary's violin SHOULD screech.
The main use of Hillary's squealing for my audio tests is how well her creaking violin hides a harpsichord accompaniment. I had a lesson at yesterday's NYC meet given by the Benchmark DAC-1. Most of the systems I've listened to in the past have failed my string quartet test. Basically, the test is how easy it is to follow each instrument without the tones melting together. The hard part is when two violins take up each others' part. It should be possible to follow who's playing which part by the different tones of the violins and by the intonation of the players. The other part of this test is hearing the harpsichord behind Hillary's squeal. The benchmark was a revelation in detail. Not only could I hear each part perfectly, but the whole thing sounded like 5 separate musicians, rather than a melding of instruments. In its own way, the Benchmark is as intimate an experience with the musicians as I've had without actually being in the room with them. I felt like I could look over and read their interpretation on their faces—see the struggle of a difficult passage, and the sweat developing when they're on edge of making a mistake. The HeadLine ain't no Benchmark. It passes this test by a fair margin, which makes this a rather detailed system, but the resolving power of the HeadLine has its limits. It does, however, have one Benchmark-like trick up its sleeve. It does sound more like 5 separate musicians than a mere blending of sounds.
This accuracy and separation of musical representation has a downside. Here, the HeadLine takes another trick from the Benchmark, this one not so flattering. Both of these units lack that organic “musical” quality. I've heard people say that the Benchmark sucks the life out of the music. The HeadLine's lack of musicality is somewhat different. The bass and midrange usually blend well enough, even if it's sometimes a bit spotty. This integration is important when listening to certain rhythm sections. The midrange and highs can get into a little trouble because of the hardness. What the HeadLine lacks here is PRAT (pacing, rhythm, and timing).
I can't really talk about PRAT. To me it seems like a complex emergent quality that comes from an intricate balance of timing and phase, frequency response, and dynamics. The HeadLine's dynamics are typical for a portable, if not the best available. The initial attack is respectable, never muddy, but never ear drum piercing the way a high power system might be. Decay isn't anything to write home about. The hardness colors attacks with an unnatural edge. For the record, I've never heard great dynamics from any portable. Serious dynamics require something portables have to live without: huge current bursts.
Listening to Copland's Billy the Kid from Eugene Ormandy 1969 (RCA High Performance) on a portable is often a disappointment. The loud staccato tympani accents cause a lot of portables to distort badly. The HeadLine holds up very well. While the tympani doesn't quite bloom, it comes through with considerable authority, while allowing plenty of space for other instruments to voice their more delicate tones. The distortion typical of portables only shows in the loudest of these attacks. Overall, bass is well defined and respectably tight for a portable. Extreme low end performance is good.
Part of the openness of the HeadLine is due to a certain refined quality in the upper end. Unfortunately, this delicacy is masked somewhat by the hardness below. In some songs I could almost tell you which snare drum heads are used, how the drum is tuned, and just how tight the snares are attached. Keith Moon can be quite delicate on snares when he wants to.
The hardness rears its ugly head with other drums. While there's some nice body and depth to drums, they come off hard, as if played with plastic tips, or as if every hit was a slight rim shot. Cymbals sound the same, always having a bit of pie tin to them.
The Outside
The first thing you'll notice about the HeadLine is the case. It's meant to be mounted on a belt using the optional clips. Mounted like this, all of the jacks are facing up so you can see them. All that is, except the headphone jack, which is easy enough to find by feel.
The 9V batteries are hot swappable--you only need one to operate the unit--so you can pull out one battery and run off the second until you can replace the other. There's plenty of room to fit the larger lithium 9V batteries in the open-back battery space. It uses a standard 9V connector jack. The downside is it takes a bit of fiddling to find the snaps and push the battery in place when using smaller batteries. The contacts also serve to hold the batteries in place. Many of the portables have gone away from this design and use flat spring contacts. The standard jack isn't very reliable. The folded edges on the larger contact bend easily. Spring contacts require something to hold the battery in place under a bit of pressure. The open battery housing on the HeadLine doesn't allow for this, although this could be solved easily enough. It would also be nice to have the positive and negative terminals indicated on the case front so you know how to orient the batteries when swapping them without having to take the unit off your belt and turn it over.
The clips are designed to allow the unit to be easily removed. In practice, this also means the unit can occasionally slip off. It's also a bit of a pain to put the unit back on.
The case itself seems to be anodized (black) aluminum sheet bent into shape on a sheet metal brake. The two pieces are held together by 5 phillips head screws. The headphone jack is secured by a hex nut on the outside of the case. The nut comes loose easily. It would be more secure with a washer in place, but the jack seems secure enough without the nut.
There are 4 inputs on the top: standard size toslink, 2 coax inputs, and an RCA line-level analog input. There's a RCA line-level output. Finally, the dc power jack accepts a 2.1mm x 5.5. mm jack. It takes 9VDC @ 250 mA, center positive. There is no USB support.
There are four mini slide switches on the bottom, along with a volume attenuator, and the headphone jack. One switch is for power. A second switch selects between the 3 digital inputs. The third selects between analog and digital inputs. The fourth turns the headphone amplifier on and off. The line-level output is always active. The input selection applies to both the line-level output and the headphone output.
The HeadLine doesn't like static electricity. Whenever I don or remove my wool winter coat, it loses sync with the optical digital stream. This also happens at home with the coax cable. All it takes to restore the stream is to remove the cable and plug it back in. It also comes back by turning the unit on or off.
Consider what the HeadLine is designed for. Core Sound's target audience is professional and hobbyist recording engineers. The HeadLine is meant to be used as an on the fly replacement for a DAC, headphone amp, line level driver, monitor, a/b switch, and more. I imagine myself walking around a sound stage, plugging it into various components, making sure they work and are wired correctly, probably tossing spent batteries on the floor of some sleazy nightclub. The HeadLine's also meant to sound good, and be neutral with respect to the other parts of the system. Finally, you can swap it in and out of your home system at will. It's not designed as a portable DAC/headphone amp combination for an audiophile to use as the basis of a great portable rig. All of this can be both a blessing and a curse for the portable audiophile.
I've always found it hard to write equipment reviews. First, quite often, what people read isn't what I meant to write. Problem exists between keyboard and chair. It's especially difficult with a portable. I never know whether to judge it as a low end product or take off the kid gloves and go for blood. Since Core Sound invites a comparison with the Benchmark DAC-1, it's gloves off. Not that I'll make many comparisons. It doesn't make much sense to compare a portable against a high end home DAC. Or even to compare it to other portables. As much as I love HeadRoom's MicroStack, it's easy to trash it with comparisons like this. I think the MSB Link-DAC I bought used for $100 kicks its butt. It's a silly comparison. All of these are. You can't take the Benckmark or MSB with you. In the same way, the HeadLine has a different purpose than the MicroStack. Anyway, I'm going to trash the Benchmark even as I praise it, so I'll do the same for the HeadLine.
The really hard part of writing this review is that the HeadLine itself sounds hard. The hardness isn't that huge a problem by itself, but it colors nearly everything the HeadLine does, making the bad things worse, and masking the things it does right. It does a lot of things right. Unfortunately, I don't know how to write about it without constantly revisiting this problem. Keep this in mind—the hardness isn't so bad as the repeated references make it seem.
The HeadLine can be finicky. It's hard to match with other equipment, and the sound can be spotty with some tracks. I think the appropriate word to describe this phenomenon is “transparent”. My home speakers have a hole in the midrange and can be timid at the very high end. The HeadLine offers no help. I found similar difficulties using my Beyerdynamic 831, which sounds very hard plugged into the HeadLine. With IEMs, whether using the Etymotic ER4P+S adapter, Shure 5, or Westone UM2, it was also a little hard. It's not just cans and speakers. The HeadLine doesn't synergize with any of my other amps, sources, or cans, portable or not. While it's nice to have a transparent source and amp--maybe even a necessity for what this product is designed to do—it does become a liability in some situations. A more forgiving unit might be more useful to the audiophile. Because of this, I'll limit the review to how it sounds as an integrated DAC+headphone amp.
The overall sound of the HeadLine is open, detailed, with tight bass and delicate highs. The mids have a band that's a little too prominent. The result is a bit of hardness. As a portable, it strikes a good balance between sound qualities. I've had this for well over a month now, and have been pretty happy with the sound overall. That is, until I came to write this review. After all is said and done, the HeadLine is a portable. That means trade offs. Shortcomings that are easy to ignore on a noisy street can become less than satisfying in a quiet living room.
The hardness is a peak in the upper midrange like you'd get with a “presence” switch. It's this peak that makes the HeadLine sound hard. With the Etymotic ER4P + S adapter, it just sounds like a hump in the midrange, coloring the sound. It can get pretty hard through the Beyerdynamic 831. I suspect this “presence” has something to do with the “professional” audience for the HeadLine. Monitors tend to be tipped up in the midrange compared with audiophile speakers.
The first quality to stand out is an openness that lets instruments breathe. I can't abide listening to MP3 because room acoustics get lost in the compression. This is true whether listening to the Allman Brothers, Clapton's Let It Rain, or even Traffic's less than perfectly recorded Medicated Goo. These tracks all sound better when you can hear the space in which the instruments are played. They all suffer from the slightest compression-loss, which is why my DAC has nothing but FLAC. The HeadLine does a decent job with these low level details. It's a lot better than my iRiver 120. On a noisy subway, it's quite adequate. In quieter settings or with other music, the limitations become more obvious.
Openness is particularly important with jazz, but especially grand piano. I have the Ken Burns' Jazz box set on my DAP. Most of it is degraded, some tracks being more noise than music. The HeadLine does a nice job of pulling out details and playing what little hall space is left on those scratchy, hissing vinyl LPs. With cleanly recorded jazz, the space is detailed nicely, if not perfectly. To really test the limits, I put on several CDs of different performers playing Chopin. Notes ring out and echo through the piano and the hall, as they should. There is, of course, a limit to this, as there is with every portable DAC I've heard. While the openness allows a grand piano room to breathe, the harmonics go dull above some point. At this point it's either bumping against the resolution limits of the DAC, or running into the hardness masking the upper registers.
Details and resolution are quite respectable for a portable, being more than capable of handling any MP3. I suspect only details freaks would notice or care about the loss of resolution beyond those levels. This is noticeable in both complex and simple music. Instrument separation is very good—it doesn't get stuffy, even in large orchestral passages.
There is, however, a bit of stuffiness apparent in even the simplest music. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something in the mid-upper bass is a little off. This is really nitpicking in a portable. It would be an issue in a thousand dollar source.
Given the “presence”, I was expecting to hear some sibilance. I took out Queen's A Day at the Races and listened to You Take My Breath Away. If there's sibilance in a system, this song will bring it out—the recording is already sibilant. Nada. Only the barest whisper of a breath of sibilance. There is, however, some breath in the “presence” area, but it's below the sibilance area. This might actually mask the sibilance I expect to hear, the same way it masks the delicate high end.
Next, I put it up against Hillary Hahn's screeching violin, with nary a squeak. Hmm. Something's not right here. Hillary's violin SHOULD screech.
The main use of Hillary's squealing for my audio tests is how well her creaking violin hides a harpsichord accompaniment. I had a lesson at yesterday's NYC meet given by the Benchmark DAC-1. Most of the systems I've listened to in the past have failed my string quartet test. Basically, the test is how easy it is to follow each instrument without the tones melting together. The hard part is when two violins take up each others' part. It should be possible to follow who's playing which part by the different tones of the violins and by the intonation of the players. The other part of this test is hearing the harpsichord behind Hillary's squeal. The benchmark was a revelation in detail. Not only could I hear each part perfectly, but the whole thing sounded like 5 separate musicians, rather than a melding of instruments. In its own way, the Benchmark is as intimate an experience with the musicians as I've had without actually being in the room with them. I felt like I could look over and read their interpretation on their faces—see the struggle of a difficult passage, and the sweat developing when they're on edge of making a mistake. The HeadLine ain't no Benchmark. It passes this test by a fair margin, which makes this a rather detailed system, but the resolving power of the HeadLine has its limits. It does, however, have one Benchmark-like trick up its sleeve. It does sound more like 5 separate musicians than a mere blending of sounds.
This accuracy and separation of musical representation has a downside. Here, the HeadLine takes another trick from the Benchmark, this one not so flattering. Both of these units lack that organic “musical” quality. I've heard people say that the Benchmark sucks the life out of the music. The HeadLine's lack of musicality is somewhat different. The bass and midrange usually blend well enough, even if it's sometimes a bit spotty. This integration is important when listening to certain rhythm sections. The midrange and highs can get into a little trouble because of the hardness. What the HeadLine lacks here is PRAT (pacing, rhythm, and timing).
I can't really talk about PRAT. To me it seems like a complex emergent quality that comes from an intricate balance of timing and phase, frequency response, and dynamics. The HeadLine's dynamics are typical for a portable, if not the best available. The initial attack is respectable, never muddy, but never ear drum piercing the way a high power system might be. Decay isn't anything to write home about. The hardness colors attacks with an unnatural edge. For the record, I've never heard great dynamics from any portable. Serious dynamics require something portables have to live without: huge current bursts.
Listening to Copland's Billy the Kid from Eugene Ormandy 1969 (RCA High Performance) on a portable is often a disappointment. The loud staccato tympani accents cause a lot of portables to distort badly. The HeadLine holds up very well. While the tympani doesn't quite bloom, it comes through with considerable authority, while allowing plenty of space for other instruments to voice their more delicate tones. The distortion typical of portables only shows in the loudest of these attacks. Overall, bass is well defined and respectably tight for a portable. Extreme low end performance is good.
Part of the openness of the HeadLine is due to a certain refined quality in the upper end. Unfortunately, this delicacy is masked somewhat by the hardness below. In some songs I could almost tell you which snare drum heads are used, how the drum is tuned, and just how tight the snares are attached. Keith Moon can be quite delicate on snares when he wants to.
The hardness rears its ugly head with other drums. While there's some nice body and depth to drums, they come off hard, as if played with plastic tips, or as if every hit was a slight rim shot. Cymbals sound the same, always having a bit of pie tin to them.
The Outside
The first thing you'll notice about the HeadLine is the case. It's meant to be mounted on a belt using the optional clips. Mounted like this, all of the jacks are facing up so you can see them. All that is, except the headphone jack, which is easy enough to find by feel.
The 9V batteries are hot swappable--you only need one to operate the unit--so you can pull out one battery and run off the second until you can replace the other. There's plenty of room to fit the larger lithium 9V batteries in the open-back battery space. It uses a standard 9V connector jack. The downside is it takes a bit of fiddling to find the snaps and push the battery in place when using smaller batteries. The contacts also serve to hold the batteries in place. Many of the portables have gone away from this design and use flat spring contacts. The standard jack isn't very reliable. The folded edges on the larger contact bend easily. Spring contacts require something to hold the battery in place under a bit of pressure. The open battery housing on the HeadLine doesn't allow for this, although this could be solved easily enough. It would also be nice to have the positive and negative terminals indicated on the case front so you know how to orient the batteries when swapping them without having to take the unit off your belt and turn it over.
The clips are designed to allow the unit to be easily removed. In practice, this also means the unit can occasionally slip off. It's also a bit of a pain to put the unit back on.
The case itself seems to be anodized (black) aluminum sheet bent into shape on a sheet metal brake. The two pieces are held together by 5 phillips head screws. The headphone jack is secured by a hex nut on the outside of the case. The nut comes loose easily. It would be more secure with a washer in place, but the jack seems secure enough without the nut.
There are 4 inputs on the top: standard size toslink, 2 coax inputs, and an RCA line-level analog input. There's a RCA line-level output. Finally, the dc power jack accepts a 2.1mm x 5.5. mm jack. It takes 9VDC @ 250 mA, center positive. There is no USB support.
There are four mini slide switches on the bottom, along with a volume attenuator, and the headphone jack. One switch is for power. A second switch selects between the 3 digital inputs. The third selects between analog and digital inputs. The fourth turns the headphone amplifier on and off. The line-level output is always active. The input selection applies to both the line-level output and the headphone output.
The HeadLine doesn't like static electricity. Whenever I don or remove my wool winter coat, it loses sync with the optical digital stream. This also happens at home with the coax cable. All it takes to restore the stream is to remove the cable and plug it back in. It also comes back by turning the unit on or off.
