Unbelievable, and I thought it would take at least two weeks. At first I was pissed Canada Post charged me $200 in taxes for what I thought was the EMU, but it turned out to be the Staxes which I was surprised arrived so early. Things turned out so well, soon after I got home, FedEx arrived with the EMU, and I was already settling in for one of those 'have new hardware but can't use it' days.
Anyways.
The
EMU 0404. Very good so far, to my surprise not the slightest problem, no illegal operations, no reinstalls. One install, one restart and it's all set up. MIDI in works like a charm, ASIO set at 10ms.
But this is just a little icing on the cake, the real treat is this:
Stax 3030!
These are the
OPEN kind of open headphones. At around 35% they could easily be heard from down the hall and in the bathroom with the door closed.
How do they sound? Heh
.For this kind of cash, it's obvious to assume I had very high expectations. I can assure you I was not let down!
My first thought was 'what the hell is wrong with the bass'. It was slightly chubby, as if exaggerated around 100-200Hz, and quite considerably. And then I noticed the acoustic guitar coming out from the sky
. And when I say sky I sure as hell mean it, this wasn't the believable type of out of body experience. If someone had told me I was wearing headphones at that point, I would have slapped them silly, it was unreal. Basslines and various instruments, depending on the song were completely externalized... I had to check to make sure the speakers were turned off. However this was not perfect, make no mistake these are headphones, and there was a constant reminder throughout that I was wearing them. Certain sounds float in the sky like little fluffy clouds, certain others never let you forget you're wearing headphones. After this, I let them run freely for a while at pretty high volume, leaving them unattached to my head. Once again, despite this there was no mistake knowing precisely what was being played from the kitchen. After some 20 minutes, it was getting all the more difficult to resist putting them back on. So I gave in, turned up some Tangerine Dream - Yellowstone Park. After the spectacular light airy entry, which was to no surprise brought out with the upmost definition, the drum kicked in. A pure clean beautiful punchy solid holy kick! No chubby bass, what the hell just happened? I went back to the stuff I listened to previously and sure enough, all the kick drums sounded just right. It was as far as I could ever tell, perfect.
I moved on to Atreju's Quest from the Neverending Story, and I almost, note
almost
shed a tear. The lead string instrument was so remarkably dreamy, and the resolution was so spectacular you could almost audibly disect it by nuance. Moving on from this, I had a listen to various assorted acoustic instruments/acoustic music, and I must say this is where one separates the man from the boys of audio transudcers. The Staxes were the biggest man I've ever witnessed. The attack on these headphones is instantaneous, the plucking of a guitar string for example goes beyond explaining. There's more audible transient information in a pluck than one would expect in an entire riff. Nothing escapes, absolutely nothing... which BTW I found slightly irregular in JMJ's Velvet Road. The 1-2-3 bassline as I have ever heard it before almost flows from the lower note to the upper, giving quite a nice soothing backdrop. On the Staxes, the plucking on the bass is effortlessly noticeable, and rather than flowing from bottom to top, it's as if the bass line cuts out before moving to a different note. So this is the inevitable downside. If something's not quite right in the mix, it won't come out quite right out of the Staxes. Extremely unforgiving, they don't leave any room for error. Ofcourse with this, comes the exceptional presentation of an exceptional piece of music. If everything is just right, one is bound to experience a thrilling performance, whatever it may be. Moving on to trance, the integrity of synthesizers is spectacular, the texture of a rough lead comes through like sandpaper on the eardrum, absolutely no decay smoothing. There's no other way to describe it, it's as if you're directly hearing the voltage swing of the electronic device. It can be unbelievably harsh when needed, yet so smooth and entrancing.
Then I tried some live firework recordings
. Oh boy, what a ride, and almost completely externalized (checked to make sure, yep, it's coming from the headphones). The rippling sound from a cracker once again reveals how spectacularly precise every little nuance is.
So in the end, I've got what I bargained for handed to me on a silver platter. And they are still without a doubt getting better by the hour, reportedly up to and over 100 hours.
All this was run through a Steinberg Externalizer VST. It's the best one I have found, and it just so happens to come with Cubase. Externalizer is a crossfeed/delay/spectral filter. Basically an all in one package to get the headphones out of your head, and I found it to be a crucial piece of the puzzle, just wouldn't be the same without it.
So in conclusion, would I sell my YSMs? No chance in hell. The 3030s are certainly not the superiors to my monitors, but they bring so many wonderful and new things to the table. I almost forget how realistic everything sounds until I go back and hear it again. I'm very happy indeed, very natural, unbelievably detailed, and depending on the source, can be remarkable externalized. And the fluffy leather padding is a treat on the ears. A thousand bucks can and does bring unimagineable performance to the table.
It's 12:30PM BTW and I forgot what hunger is, I think it's time to eat something even though I've suddenly lost the urge to get up.
