Pretty much a copy-pasta from my RMAF post.
I spent nearly 1.5 hours at their booth talking with Dr. Andrew Demery. Ironically, Martin Roberts, the CEO of Warwick and creator of the Model One system, was there but he didn't do very much talking.
Having a background with STAX electrostatic headphones, and knowing Sonoma workstations from Blue Coast Records/Cookie Marenco, Dr. Demery and I had a lot of common ground to start on.
To start off, Dr. Demery explained to me a little bit about the system before I gave them a listen. It's basically an all-in-one unit: USB cable/voltage power supply/DAC/amp/headphones and is priced at $5000 USD. A hefty price for sure, but given that a SR-009 is $4k by itself, and most electrostatic amplifiers are upwards of $1.5k, it's actually priced really, really competitively.
That being said, this is also its bane. Having an all-in-one forces you to use their system, whether you like it or not, and it's a closed environment. The headphone connector (which looks like a BNC connection but with 8 pins) is completely different from any electrostatic headphone out there, and it's biased at over 1 kilovolt. Yes, KILO volt.
The DAC portion has a typical ESS Sabre DAC chip, so it does the usual 32/384/DSD128 processing. It can take USB and S/PDIF inputs.
For analog inputs (RCA), it actually has has an AKM 32/384 ADC to convert the signal back into a digital format.
No matter what the input signal is, it does some DSP so that the response at the headphone is similar.
If you thought that was pretty unique, wait until you hear about how the headphone is made.
This electrostatic headphone uses a single-sided diaphragm. Wait...what? Yes, single-sided. It's described here in Tyll's video:
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G12Bfa4r1o[/video]
Essentially, they created the diaphragm so that it can be mass produced. It's quite a novel method in my knowledge of how electrostats are made. It's basically a piece of super flexible and fairly thick metalized polymer ("foil," for the sake of discussion), a honeycomb-sectioned plastic grill pressed on top of that, and a piece of (orange-tinted) silk laid over that. By using this method of creating the diaphragm, it almost makes for a closed-back headphone in a sense that the driver ("foil") is facing your ear while the plastic and silk face the outside and there's no perforated metal stator. The "foil" itself is semi-transparent (like sunglasses) and you can see through the driver like you can with a typical electrostatic headphone. The honeycomb-patterned plastic pressing against the "foil" tensions sections of it when it's put into the driver mount frame, and it moves when the "foil" is charged, kind of like the top of a drum.
mind = blown
The earcups and bales are made of injected magnesium, so the headphone itself is ultra light despite how "thick" it looks. The earpads and headpad are of a sheep leather.
Everything about this system screams one-of-a-kind to me. Holy smokes, the amount of thought and R&D put into this system is just incredible.
BUT, how does it sound? To me, to be perfectly honest, it sounded kind of boring. It didn't do anything particularly wrong, but it didn't do anything particularly special either. Keep in mind that this was in the CanJam tent and not the Marriott hotel, so the source was USB-fed audio and not the mastering analog tape that they had in the hotel. The source material, and maybe the noise, could very well be a factor for these impressions. If I had more time, I would have went upstairs to their room to listen to the tape masters. This is Sonoma Acoustics we're talking about here, and analog and DSD recordings are their forte.
If I had to compare it to a STAX headphone, it sounds like a hybrid between the SR-007 MKI and the SR-009. It has the musicality of the 007, but the texture and detail retrieval of the 009.
Dr. Demery and I spent some time talking about the history of headphones and how we both think it's ridiculous to see audiophiles doing certain things to their systems just to alter the sound a little bit. Eventually we landed on the topic of headphone measurements and we discussed how the Model One was tuned. According to him, the Model One was tuned to neither the diffuse-field, nor the free-field, nor the Harman target response curves. Instead, they tuned it to how their monitoring speakers sound. Given that they directly work with musicians, artists, and recording engineers, I'd think they've got the tuning down for their preferred sound.
Perhaps the sound was boring to me, but if they need accuracy for their professional work, then accuracy is what they've got, and I think they did a fantastic job at it.
