Wow, I definitely thought this was one of the best Bottlehead meets I've been to. A huge thank you to
Doc B. for hosting the event and
BIG POPPA for organsing the meet. Also, a big thank you to
gefski for driving me to/from Bottlehead.
Summary of my experience:
- Paid for my ferry ticket with a $10 bill and got a crisp $2 bill back (weird; these bills are quite rare from my experience)
- Harbour Pub makes some tasty Montréal poutine
- Quieter meet than usual, which allowed for more careful listening sessions
- Quite a few new people! It's always fun to talk to newcomers
- Great turn out overall; this may have been one of the larger Bottlehead meets
- K7XX gets a thumbs up from me
- atomicbob had a really impressive system overall from a technical standpoint
- I'm not convinced about the Pono's sound and it gets a sideways thumb from me
- LCD-3 Fazor gets a thumbs down from me
- Alpha Prime gets a thumbs up from me
- EL-8 closed gets a thumbs down from me
- GS1000e gets a thumbs up from me
- A12 gets two thumbs up from me
- As a result of the first point, there was too much stuff to listen to, too little time; time just whizzed right by and I didn't get a chance to record video going through the different setups unfortunately
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The morning pre-meet at Harbour Pub was certainly interesting because I ordered Montréal poutine for my breakfast, hahaha.
I hadn't had poutine in a long while, so it was nice to enjoy it again. The beef gravy was a bit on the gelatinous side of consistency which I thought was a bit odd but the flavour was nicely balanced between salty and spicy (black pepper kind of spicy). The handful of cheese curds balanced out the spiciness and added some nice texture to the dish as a whole. Usually I find the cheese to be a bit goopy or over-melted in poutine, but this place did it just right, having a gooey cheese consistency instead. That was some really great stuff!
I did have a sample of the Two Beers Brewing Company's Cold Brew (which is infused with roasted coffee). It wasn't quite up to my liking though. I'm still new to beer but the aftertaste was more like bittersweet chocolate than coffee to me and it was a bit too hoppy. Although it's a stout versus an ale, the Left Hand Brewing Company's Milk Stout Nitro has a more pronounced creamy coffee taste and it's definitely sweeter with less of the hoppy taste. That plus the Nitro has the cool cascading effect when it's poured hard. XD
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Onward to the meet. I firstly have to thank
gefski again for letting me borrow a power cable! Yeesh. I was unpacking my stuff and getting set up when I realised that I had forgotten to pack the power cable for the LH Labs Linear Power Supply. The STAX amp was tethered to the power supply, so without your power cable I wouldn't have been able to put together that setup. I seem to have brought all of the other cables I wanted to bring though. Secondly, I'll probably have a 4-pin XLR to 6.3 mm adaptor at the next meet. I only have a XLR to 3.5 mm one right now since all of my gear uses the small jack.
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Anyway, the first thing I tried out was
DrForBin's Limited Edition Massdrop AKG K7XX headphone.
For its price point of around $199 MSRP, I definitely think this a fantastic headphone. It's not quite as resolving as my K 701 and it doesn't have a sound that I would consider to be reference-quality, but it's also around a bit less expensive and likely to be targeted for a broader audience. It has a much warmer sound signature than the K 701, having more mid- and upper-bass presence and creeps into the midrange more, as well as having a slower bass response which makes it a bit thick-sounding to me; the K 701's bass is definitely quicker. What was immediately absent to me though was the ~2 kHz ringing that the K 701 is known for, and that makes the K7XX a
much more accessible headphone for people I think compared to the rest of the K7_ _ line. It got a thumbs up from me.
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Next up was
Soundsgoodtome's station. I was previously familiar with how the HE-560 sounds, but on this particular rig, it sounded smoother than I remember. Despite playing a wrong bit-depth file, Debussy sounded excellent still. I liked the overall timbre that the HE-560 produced with that particular setup.
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Since
atomicbob's setup was within arm's reach (okay maybe two arms), I got a chance to hear about his gear.
^ that's the now discontinued, beautifully-crafted Denon AD-D5000
It was quite fascinating to see how the modded capacitors within his modded Bottlehead Crack affected the 20 Hz square wave response and channel imbalance directly from the HD800. With his latest mods, the HD800 produced a nearly perfect-looking square wave with nearly perfect channel matching! That's pretty darn impressive. Upon listening to the HD800 on that particular rig, I was immediately impressed with the bass quality. Quantity-wise, I would have preferred a little bit more, but the quality was superb. When the drum pedal of Lenny White's "Stank" song was hit, the HD800 was almost able to produce the same visceral bass feeling that I usually only get from Audeze's LCD-series headphones. I've never heard that kind of sound before from an HD800. Other than that, I still can't find myself liking the HD800's sound; it sounds a bit too sizzly for me in the lower-treble area despite having a smooth and somewhat laid-back upper-midrange, and that makes the treble seem grainy-sounding to my ears. Likewise, I can't find myself getting my head around the soundstage and imaging abilities of the HD800. It seems to be a love it or hate it ordeal, but the soundstage always seems to sound unnaturally large to me (not in a good way that gives the headphone a sense of transparency), which makes imaging seem off.
It was equally as fun talking to him about the AURALiC Vega. I had no idea it has an "Exact Mode" feature that uses femto clocks for more accurate timing of digital audio. I'd be interested in comparing it to the LH Labs Pulse Xfi and X Infinity in the future (hopefully those units will be shipped before the next meet) since they too use femto clocks. Likewise, I didn't know the Vega has an apodising digital filter, which
Ayre explains in their white paper and is a time-optimised, linear (I think), slow roll-off filter.
The last thing that intrigued me about
atomicbob's system was that it was calibrated to approximate what sound pressure level you're listening to! That was just really awesome to see. With power calculations I've done for how much power a headphone needs from an amplifier, I'm always afraid that I listen to music too loudly and that I'd damage my hearing with a few hours of listening to music at home. Using the calibrated system, in somewhat noisy meet conditions, it looks like I was averaging 75-80 dB SPL for my listening level. That's reassuring for me.
Be sure to listen responsibly everyone:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/ear-care/en/
http://www.who.int/pbd/deafness/activities/MLS_Brochure_English_lowres_for_web.pdf
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Next up in my panda notebook of meeting notes is
Ham Sandwich's Pono Player.
I didn't really know what to expect from the Pono to be honest. I've read reviews like the one from David Pogue where people couldn't tell a difference between the iPhone and the Pono but then a bunch of audiophiles gave that review flack because of a myriad of reasons. Then there are other reviews from audio websites like from Stereophile and Innerfidelity where the reviews are positive and somewhat positive respectively.
Anyway, I read that the Pono has some difficulty driving larger headphones through the single-ended output, so I decided to try it with my K 701s in balanced mode first. I got my microSD card popped into the device and it took about 5 minutes (maybe it was longer than that because it seemed like eternity, hahaha) to scan through my ~9 GB of music. It was kinda annoying having to wait for everything to load since I just wanted to listen to the darn thing.
While I was waiting for that to load, I decided to listen to
Ham Sandwich's HE-560 with Focus A pads.
^ the difference between the stock pads and the Focus A ones are that the Focus A pads have the fuzzy material wrapped on the part that goes on your head in addition to the inside of the earpad towards the ear hole; the stock pads have the leather-like material there instead
For some reason, even though I've heard a stock HE-560 with the LH Labs Geek Out 1000, this particular HE-560 sounded really weird to me. The lower-midrange sounded a bit hollow, the upper-mids were off in timbre and were a bit metallic-sounding...it just seemed really off.
After that listening session, the Pono was finally ready. I managed to get around its user interface just fine. It is on the slow side of operation, but it didn't really bother me except for when I wanted to FF/RW tracks and I never got any mis-taps or issues of the sort that I did encounter with the iBasso DX50. I wouldn't call the user interface bad per se because of that and it actually reminded me a bit of the Microsoft Zune with a vertical menu system and you swipe left/right to change menus. Two things that did irk me though were the lack of media control keys apart from the volume and play/pause, and the inability to have a proper sleep mode. The Pono's display turns off after X time and the only way to wake it up is to hit the play/pause button, which pauses your music, or hit the volume buttons, which adjusts the volume even if you want to wake up the screen.
User interface aside, the sound is what most people are wondering about. In balanced mode, I found the Pono to have a punchy bass response and a very smooth treble response. I was pretty impressed with the smoothness of the treble and overall lack of grittiness with the K 701 and I'd say it was smoother-sounding than many desktop amps I've heard it with. However, when using the Pono, I noted that the volume level was only at around the 4 o'clock position. That's plenty of juice while in balanced mode, which effectively doubles the power output. So I decided to give the Pono a try in single-ended mode since it seems to have plenty of power for my K 701.
Switching to single-ended mode, I played through the same music from my microSD card and I immediately noticed how familiar the sound was. Wait a sec, I pull out my iPhone 4S, plug in the K 701, play the same music, and it sounded nearly identical to me! I actually said out loud "there's no way this can be right...I HAVE to do this" and I pull out the FiiO HS2 headphone switcher to do volume-matched A/B testing. Yup, the 4S and the Pono sounded exactly the same to me when using 24/88.2 and 24/96 music (keep in mind that the iPhone downsamples audio to 16/44.1 and 16/48 respectively). I literally could not distinguish the sound between the two with the A/B switcher.
After that,
Ham Sandwich said that the soundstage should be different. So I listen really hard for any difference in soundstage, like
really hard. I got the feeling that the center imaging and depth are slightly more centered with the Pono.
I then tried the A/B test with the OPPO PM-3 since I thought maybe the meet conditions aren't ideal and why not give it the benefit of the doubt (Innerfidelity measures the PM-3 to have -22 dB of noise isolation, which is quite a bit and rivals in-ear earphones, and the meet room itself wasn't all that loud). Basically the same thing happened, I had a really difficult time hearing any appreciable differences between my 4S and the Pono. After spending maybe 10 minutes with that setup I got the feeling that the Pono has a little more bass presence than the 4S, but again, the difference was extremely subtle to me.
So all in all, I don't blame people for not being able to hear a difference between the iPhone and the Pono. Even with my decent headphones and somewhat experienced ears, I could barely make out appreciable differences when comparing the two side by side. For now, I'll give the Pono a sideways thumb.
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Next up was
SpongeRob's setup with the LCD-3 Fazer and Woo Audio WA7.
I previously hadn't given the LCD-3 a careful listen before despite it making appearances in previous meets. I'm not sure if it was due to the Fazer design, but I felt that that LCD-3 was rather bright and sizzly-sounding that made upper-mids sound metallic to me. It still had the visceral bass that is typical of the LCD-line, but from the mid-midrange and above, it just sounded weird. Overall it was a thumbs down from me. I've been adding on overlays of the widely-accepted diffuse field headphone-related transfer function and Olive-Harman suggested headphone response curves over the raw measurements from Innerfidelity:
^ the 5 kHz spike, gigantic ~ -7 dB drop between 6-9 kHz, the giant 10 kHz spike, and relatively on-target treble could very well explain the bright sound I was hearing (5 kHz spike) and the sizzly sound (which I almost always associate with a peak at 9-10 kHz)
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After listening to the LCD-3, I turned around and
jbarnhardt's Alpha Prime was at
gefski's rig with the Woo Audio WA6.
Through
gefski's rig, I thought the Alpha Prime sounded spectacular. It had a smooth and warm overall sound signature with a laid-back midrange and polite treble. Some vocal jazz was playing through the music system and it was a sublime experience with the Alpha Prime. I then tried it on my rig with the Geek Out and it was a bit less warm-sounding. Its bass and lower-midrange seemed similar to the OPPO PM-3 but a bit slower, so it made the sound a little syrupy, which I found to be the case with the original Alpha Prime too (great for male vocals and soul music). The midrange as a whole is definitely a bit subdued compared to the PM-3, having less energy and less ringing from what I could hear (I find the PM-3 to sound a bit shouty). Just like the Alpha Dog, I thought the Alpha Prime was able to render a pretty well-spaced soundstage being a closed-back headphone and it sounded almost transparent to me. The Alpha Prime got a thumbs up from me.
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Up until this point, everything I listened to was in the same room I was set up in. By now, the meet was 3/4 done and I decided to venture outside of the room. I came across
labrown's setup in
Doc. B's office and saw the Audeze EL-8 closed being unused. I decided to give it a try on my rig since it looks so pretty.
^ those are Audeze's Fazer elements
Argh....just like the LCD-3 Fazer, I didn't like the sound coming out of the EL-8 closed at all. The bass seemed lean and it lacked the visceral feeling of the LCD-series headphones, the midrange was super bright for me, and the treble was a bit sizzly but not as much as the LCD-3 Fazer. The one single thing I did like about its sound was how spacious it sounded for a closed back headphone. With all of its other sonic attributes though, it sounded pretty far off from being transparent to me. I thought the EL-8 closed was a disappointment; thumbs down from me.
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In other news though, I tried
blownaway's portable rig (RWAK120 and Vorzüge VorzAMP pure II) and I was blown away at what I heard. I've never heard the Grado GS1000e before, but on
blownaway's rig, I didn't think it sounded like a typical Grado at all! It had a nice bass punch and decent extension, a somewhat bright midrange that wasn't shouty and didn't cause the timbre to sound too off, and a smooth but detailed treble response. Good stuff and it gets the thumbs up from me.
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Next up in the same room, I got to listen to
xtreme4099's monstrous rig.
^ I didn't fully capture the size of the rig, but you can see some of it in the background there; the laptop was basically being balanced on a giant stack
Connected to that giant rig was a HiFiMAN HE-500. I've heard the HE-500 before and I previously didn't like it too much because of a very large 9-10 kHz spike in its frequency response that made the treble sound artificially sizzly. On this particular setup though, I didn't hear as much of that sizzle and I actually quite liked the HE-500 out of that rig. The midrange still sounded a bit metallic for Ottmar Liebert's music, but at least I could enjoy listening to it.
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And lastly, with about 10 minutes to spare before I started packing up, I got a chance to listen to
ericr's "demo" 1964|ADEL A12.
I thought this was the star of the show for me and it gets two thumbs up. From my quick listen, I liked its sound more than any previous in-ear earphone I had previously tried (including a demo Noble K10) except for maybe the Ultimate Ears Reference Monitor. I'll have more to say on this at a later time. Part of me wishes that I had backed this on their Kickstarter campaign, but for certain reasons, I opted out.
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Some miscellaneous photos.
Someone brought a vinyl rig to the meet, but I wasn't sure who they were on Head-Fi. I didn't get much of a chance to listen to it since there was a channel imbalance with the headphone output. It looked really cool though! I don't recall seeing a vinyl rig appear at a meet before apart from
Doc B.'s setups.
ericr's Project Ember
