Hugin
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 18, 2011
- Posts
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Hello everyone.
ABOUT ME
I spend 200 days a year on the road. I want to carry my music with me. I am new to high-end music equipment. But I don't feel helpless when faced with sound-reproducing gear. I have a secret weapon - my evenings in the concert hall, listening to the symphony orchestra, the grand piano and the soloists. I may not yet know the audiophile terms for different aspects of the sound, but I certainly can hear them.
As much as I love classical music, listening to it is demanding and I often go for something lighter, such as pop and rock, including my guilty pleasure, 12inch hits from the 1970s disco era.
SELECTING A PLAYER
The consensus on the net was that the best pocket "mp3-player" was the Cowon J3. Rarly have so many people agreed about something as they have about the sound quality of the J3. I was attracted to the J3 because it wasn't really an mp3 player. I have avoided mp3 players, lossy as they are. But the J3 has enough flash memory (32 GB) to hold a music collection in CD quality, as flac files. Flac in a pocket meant that portable music has arrived.
The big shops were sold out of J3s, but I found a couple left in a mall in a more remote corner of town. I tried it briefly in the shop with some Ultrasone headphones, but the setup and the music was unfamiliar and I didn't pay much attention to the sound. I knew the J3 was the one to get and paid 300 dollars for a J3. I also bought an extra 32 GB micro-SD card to put inside the J3. This doubled the capacity to 64 GB. If a CD in flac format is around 300 mb, this should give space for 180 CDs, enough to keep me busy for a while.
The J3 is elegant to look at and easy to use. It has some bugs. Sometimes the touch screen become unresponsive. Then I have to use the buttons on the side of the player to regain control of the player. Yesterday my J3 suddenly started to display song titles in what looked like Chinese. But I can always knock it back to sense with a restart.
What was worse, my J3 "bricked" four times in the first week I owned it. Forced resets using a toothpick in the hole on the back of the player didn't work. Each time I had to reformat the player and reinstall all the music. I started to wonder about the J3. But then I discovered the cause of this problem. I had ripped CDs via my iMac saving the music directly onto the J3. This was a mistake, as the ripping sometimes went wrong, or it hanged, or the iMac had to be restarted. This would interrupt the file writing on the J3. The J3 does not like such interruptions. It wants to finish everything in an orderly manner, and leaving corrupted, unfinished files on the J made it go comatose, displaying only pink and green stripes on the screen at startup. This is the dreaded brick state. I learned that it was better to rip CDs to my iMac and only copy them onto the J3 once all was finished and ready. Since I started doing this I haven't had any more bricking. I also use a utility to safely eject the J3 from the Mac desktop. It deletes invisible Mac OS files from the J3.
The J3 has an advanced equaliser called Jet Effect. I use this equaliser to get the best sound quality out of the player. Purists may protest, saying I am messing with the original sound. But I don't think there any such thing. The digital file needs to be interpreted and turned back into analogue sound, and if electronic trickery can make the music richer and more natural (again compared to the concert hall) then I am all for it. So I apply the BBE, the MPEnhance and the MachBass, using my ears as the guide.
I avoid the Stereo Enhance (it hurts the bass). I also avoid the 3D Sound Effect (it just spreads the sound all over), and the Reverberate setting, which makes the J3 sound as if you are playing it in the bathroom. I have played with adjusting the frequency band and I used it to force some more bass out of my Sennheiser 595, but with the T1 I often end up leaving the bands at default.
The most annoying thing with the J3 is the startup time. It takes forever - or two minutes and two seconds to be exact. This is with 64 GB total memory and the player almost full. But this is a minor thing. The J3 is a marvel and I am glad to own it.
PS. Since converting all my wav files to flac to save space, the startup time has improved a bit. But it is still like waiting for a Windows computer to get up and running.
SELECTING A PORTABLE HEADPHONE AMPLIFIER
I wasn't satisfied with the sound of the Cowon J3. It was not bad, not great, only OK. If this was the best portable player it made me wonder what the rest were like. I could get better sound right out of the headphone jack on my Mac with iTunes. I tried the J3 with my Sennheiser 595s, and found the sound to be clear, but weak and thin. Maybe the J3 wasn't designed to be used with full-size headphones? I knew the solution would have to be a portable headphone amplifier.
I started by looking at 20 dollar amps on the Internet. Soon I had a budget - 100 dollars max. I went to the big hi-fi store, where the staff wondered where I had gotten hold of the J3 they could not sell me. Then they lined up their portable amps for me. I tried the iBasso D2, D4, D6 and D12. I tried an iQube.The D6 had a strange fault. When I touched the outside of the D6 with my fingers it made a hissing sound. Apart from that the sound kept getting better as I tried the amps, and the price kept going up. I tried an iQube. And then I tried a brand I had not heard of, an ALO Rx Mk II. I knew I had to have the ALO. If produced the richest, fullest sound of all. The sales guy grinned and said it was 500 dollars.
SELECTING A HEADPHONE
With the J3 and ALO giving a quality signal I went looking for a better headphone. My Sennheiser 595 Is a decent, fine headphone, but I suspected it was now the weakest link. I went to the hi-fi store again, bringing my J3 and the ALO. The staff, now with dollar signs in their eyes, promised to let me try all the high-end headphones they had in stock.
First we killed a rule about portable amps. This rule says "A desktop amp is always better than a portable amp". Maybe this was true earlier, but things have changed. I tried my J3 with a 300-dollar desktop amp (we shall not name names) and compared it to the J3+ALO, and contrary to my expectations the ALO made much better sound.
Then the dealer rolled out a rig worth 180,000 dollars while mumbling about "Swiss engineering". This ultra-high-end setup outshone the ALO with a margin as wide as the ALO had outdone the budget desktop amp. This was no surprise. Any other result would have been a scandal. The ultra-high-end made lovely sound. I would not mind owing it. But the difference was mainly in separation and soundstage, and the quality gap down to my ALO wasn't as large as the price gap. The ALO makes what I would call "attractive" sound. It may not be perfect, but it is easy to like.
I tried their headphones. I listened to them both with my litte J3+ALO combination, and with the dealer's expensive big rig. The headphones tested or discussed were:
Stax 007. I was mystified by this Stax. It was accurate, but somehow it left me cold. Where's the beef? Maybe it would have been better with a different amp? I didn't understand the 007, so I shall not pass judgement. I didn't know the high price of the 007 when I tried it. This was true for all the headphones - listen first, ask about price later.
HiFiMan 5. This headphone needed a turbo amp. My ALO could not drive this headphone, unnless you count a faint whisper. The dealers's budget desktop amp could not power it either. Hence I don't know what the HiFiMan sounds like. It was out of the race.
Sennheiser HD 650. I had read on the net that the affordable 650 was in the same league as the high end ones. I was eager to check if this was true. I found it to have more bass than my HD 595. It was good for the price. But I am sorry, back-to-back comparison with the big boys showed that the 650 didn't reach their league.
Sony R10. I got to see a wooden R10 in its vast sarcophagus. But I did not get to touch it. Getting to hear it was out of the question. This was not a demonstration, it was product worship.
Sennheiser HD 800. This was a headphone I had expected to buy, based on the hype, the advertising and years of brand loyalty to Sennheiser. (I bought my first Sennheiser 25 years ago.) The 800 was an impressive piece of gear. It brought the symphony orchestra to life. It played the most amazing Beethoven's 9th symphony I have ever heard in a headphone. But it didn't bring the rock band. I considered the 800 to be a specialist classical music headphone. It seems tuned to bring out the sparkle in violin, piano and tenors. (That would explain the extra treble some people complain about). With pop music the 800 didn't sound right. The headphone is light but big for travel, and it looks like a prop from Star Trek. The silverish surface is easy to scratch. Have you seen a well-worn one? I have, the owner has used it extensively since he bought it, and it isn't pretty. Still, if I had lots of cash I would have bought the 800 exclusively for the Sunday afternoon playing of Vivaldi.
Sennheiser Orpheus. This headphone was only spoken of, always in hushed and respectful terms. It was not for sale and nowhere to be seen. At the price that was just as well.
Grado PS 1000. The odd-looking Grado was love at first sight. This Grado was easy to drive for my ALO. I am not sure if the deep, satisfactory bass was realistic, but it sure was fun. This was the headphone for pop and rock. With classical music it didn't convince me as the 800 had. And the Grado was big and heavy and expensive. In my shop it was over two thousand dollars. It looked like a prop, not from Star Trek this time, but from "The Empire Strikes Back". Still, if I had the money, I would buy it to play rock for me.
Audeze LCD-2. The craze of the year. My dealer said he could not get this headphone for sale in his shop. He spoke of rationing and waiting lists and customers doing all sorts of things to get one. My dealer had tried it, and he said the LCD-2 had a bass so deep and vibrating that listening to it was better than having sex. But apart from that bass he was not sure if the LCD-2 was necessarily better than the competition, only different. In any case, the Audeze was not available for me to try or to buy, and I didn't want to wait. I could also see from the photos and the specifications that the LCD-2 was large and heavy, a bit much for my travel needs. The LCD-2 is so massive it is like hanging living room loudspeakers on your ears. Well, almost. My dealer said the LCD-2 was "dark-sounding" and "uncomfortable" to wear. Still, I would like to try it one day. If I like it I might buy one for home use.
Beyerdynamic T5. This hopeful candidate, whose selling point was that it was easy to drive with portable equipment, was left behind when I discovered the fuller sound of its brother T1.
Beyerdynamic Tesla T1. Unlike the Sennheiser HD 800 and the Audeze LCD-2, I had barely heard of the T1 before I entered the shop. But as I compared headphones I kept returning to the T1. There was something nice about the Tesla. The T1 was easy to become friends with. It had a clear, natural sound, rich across the entire spectrum. The T1 did everything from Michael Jackson to Pavarotti with effortless elegance. It was small, light and elegant looking. It didn't shout "high-end cans worn by a hi-fi geek" in the way the Sennheiser 800 and the Grado did. The Grado did good rock and the Sennheiser did good symphonies, but I could not afford to buy them all. The T1 would do all kinds of music and as I kept listening to it I began to like the delivery of the T1. Listening to the T1 was like driving a Mercedes, at first you wonder what the fuss was about, but then it grows on you as you discover its built-in quality. So the all-rounder won. I paid my 1150 dollars (tax included) and bought a Beyerdynamic Tesla T1.
USING THE GEAR
The dealer said I had to burn the T1 in for 200 hours. 200 hours? I wasn't even sure if I believed in this burn-in thing. But when I came home and unpacked the T1 I could swear my T1 was flat and lacking in dynamics compared to the T1 I had listened to in the shop, and I was using the same J3+ALO setup for both. Was this due to the lack of burn-in?
Now two weeks later my T1 sounds better. The bass in particular improved. The highs sound less harsh. The overall sound is more open. If this is due to changes in the headpone or in my own head I don't know, but I like the improvement and I still have most of the supposed burn-in period left.
I have used my new gear in my hotel room over the last week, neglecting sleep because I can't stop listening to the music. I carried the headphone around my neck and had the J3 and the ALO in my pocket twice through airport security. No problem.
There were some tricks I had to learn. Reading here on this site I learned about the European Union save-our-ears setting on the J3. At first startup the J3 asks if you are in the EU. The EU is the default answer and I clicked on it, not knowing this would limit the sound output. But the T1 is 600 ohm and demanding to drive. I had to put the ALO in "hi gain" mode to get enough power. But "hi gain" isn't as smooth and nice as "lo gain". Deleting the para file in the systems folder made the J3 ask again, and this time I answered "Outside of the EU". After this the J3 delivered a strong enough signal for my ALO to drive the T1 in "lo gain",and all was well.
My new gear has brought new relevations. I hear the low rumbling at the start of Wagner's "Also sprach Zaratustra". On my earlier equipment this part was an unexplained silence till the music started. In other music, I even hear the tape hiss change in one recording as the producer has put together different pieces.
The T1 makes me aware of the difference in recording quality betwen albums. Sometimes I feel the T1 is getting strangely flat, only to discover it is back to normal with the next recording. This means the unconvincing sound was on the original CD. At other times something is odd about the sound, and I find I have put the T1 backwards on my head. Only the left side is marked, discreetly with an "L".
I am happy with my new travel sound system. It came to two thousand dollars. It is an international effort. Cowon is Korean, ALO is American and Beyer is German. I am amazed this level of sound pleasure is available in such a small package, and at a not-too-high price. These are good days for music lovers. Technology has improved since my first music device, a mono Phillips cassette player.
But I still have a thousand dollars left over. Is there anything I can do to improve my travel kit further?
In case you switched to an ipod you could ofcourse also include a CLAS - to me thats just too clunky to have in my pocket all day 
