[cooperpwc]

Honestly Kunlun, I am not sure that I heart the relevance of your question.  I speifically don't think that your question can distinguish between quantity and quality of bass because you don't seem to be making a distinction. You seem to be taking a fast food menu attitude to IEMs. (Can I have an extra spring roll with that? And a little more bass.) Headphones are organic - they are complete systems. So if letloverule says that the ES5 are not bass shy, his point is that the ES5s have the right amount of high quality bass.
 
Anyway, comparisons will come. Just don't miss the forest searching for one big ol' fat-ass tree. 
 
(BTW I like you website. 明 is indeed a fine character.)

 

[Anaxilus]

Quote:

Honestly Kunlun, I am not sure that I heart the relevance of your question.  I speifically don't think that your question can distinguish between quantity and quality of bass because you don't seem to be making a distinction. You seem to be taking a fast food menu attitude to IEMs. (Can I have an extra spring roll with that? And a little more bass.) Headphones are organic - they are complete systems. So if letloverule says that the ES5 are not bass shy, his point is that the ES5s have the right amount of high quality bass.
 
Anyway, comparisons will come. Just don't miss the forest searching for one big ol' fat-ass tree. 
 
(BTW I like you website. 明 is indeed a fine character.)

I don't know that I'd characterize Kunlun's comment quite like that.  Some people have a very mild bass preference and some have a higher threshold.  He's just trying to get a reference w/ which to judge the comment.  Not much to go on in that regard.  There is no universal correct standard to answer his question so I don't see a problem w/ it.

 

[cooperpwc]

Really I am not attacking the good man. I had a point to make and I made it. Yes, everyone has their own threshold. I hope that he makes the right decision for what he wants. May we all be so fortunate.

 

[Kunlun]

 
Quote:

Honestly Kunlun, I am not sure that I heart the relevance of your question.  I speifically don't think that your question can distinguish between quantity and quality of bass because you don't seem to be making a distinction. You seem to be taking a fast food menu attitude to IEMs. (Can I have an extra spring roll with that? And a little more bass.) Headphones are organic - they are complete systems. So if letloverule says that the ES5 are not bass shy, his point is that the ES5s have the right amount of high quality bass.
 
Anyway, comparisons will come. Just don't miss the forest searching for one big ol' fat-ass tree. 
 
(BTW I like you website. 明 is indeed a fine character.)

Hello Cooper, you say that letloverule's point is that "the ES5s have the right amount of high quality bass". As "the right amount" is subjective, could you help me understand what he means by "the right amount"? Surely, you're not suggesting that the right amount is the same for everyone. Perhaps you could provide a basis of comparison, such as other earphones I and other readers may be familiar with... You see the idea, I'm sure. Even "high-quality" is a term that needs to be further defined to be useful.
 
A further point, if I may: Quantity does not imply a lack of quality. Quality without a quantity suitable to the listener (or too much quantity for the listener) is lower quality, whatever merits there may be along other dimensions.
 
I certainly agree with your point about an earphone's sound signature being best considered as an organic whole. However, there's no reason we cannot discuss a given iem's performance at a given frequency range. Westone is taking a different approach with respect to bass than JHA or UE, namely, the use of a single larger bass armature rather than multiple bass armatures of a smaller size. The one professional review had the ES5 behind these others in bass, whereas it led in other areas. Asking about the bass performance seems valid to me. I'm certainly interested in people's assessments of their ES5. I have absolutely no intention of discouraging discussion, rather, I had hoped by my question to elicit information that would enable me to derive more meaning from those assessments.
 
 
P.S. Thank you for looking at my website!
 

 

[cooperpwc]

Hi Kunlun, that is all fair. It certainly is possible to have too little bass although that does not describe the ES5.
 
To my mind assessment of quantity without quality is potentially dangerous. It's easy to make a headphone fart. Put leather pads on the DT880s and you have oodles of crappy reverb "bass". Oversized silicon tips on my long defunct V-Moda Vibes created thunderous lousy "bass". The Senheisser IE8s now actually have a "bass" control. Dial in the fart according to your preference! (It's not that bad but it's not that good.)
 
Everybody calls these things "bass" but much of what they are calling "bass" is actually the reverb of a bass note. It's a bloated echo which means that it is sloppy. Good quality bass is a tight low full representation of a recorded note and it is almost always produced directly by the driver or BA operating within carefully controlled pararmeters.
 
So now you see the problem. You can create a headphone with comparartively little bass but lots of bloat. You can create another headphone with a proper quantity of good quality bass and no bloat. Most people will say that the first headphone has more bass. In thumping night club terms, it does. But it's a meaningless comparison without acknowledging the full context.
 
Having said that, I do not discourage comparisons as we alll benefit from the sharing and it always interesting. Hopefully the comparisons will talk of quality as well as quantity.

 

[letloverule]

Well my point is that the Bass is certainly not the big weakness that it would seem because of the missing driver compared to the jaudio. Could there be a slight increase in bass quantity ? maybe. If that's what you are looking for than maybe the JH13s are for you. I haven't compared them both sso its hard to say. However, I can listen to rock, hip hop, jazz and classical feeling that the bass is BALANCED in the overall sound. Now everything is subjective so take it for what its worth. 

 

[letloverule]

Looking for replacement cables for the ES5 with a nice silver plating I don't see any offerings from Null Audio except the uber expensive crystalino! Thanks. 

 

[cooperpwc]

ALO is probably the answer (i.e. for silver plated copper). However I am not inclined that way myself. The stock cables are good quality.

 

[HeadphoneAddict]

Quote:

Well my point is that the Bass is certainly not the big weakness that it would seem because of the missing driver compared to the jaudio. Could there be a slight increase in bass quantity ? maybe. If that's what you are looking for than maybe the JH13s are for you. I haven't compared them both sso its hard to say. However, I can listen to rock, hip hop, jazz and classical feeling that the bass is BALANCED in the overall sound. Now everything is subjective so take it for what its worth. 

Agreed, the ES5 bass is very good, and well balanced.  They all seem to play well down below 20Hz for me, so there is no roll off there either.  I am becoming accustomed to listening to the ES5 most often, and then switching to my other customs makes it a little easier to see where they do things differently.  I'll give another sneak peak at my impressions.
 
While the JH13Pro has audibly more bass energy in the deep 50Hz region, I'm starting to think that its deep bass ring may be obscuring some of the details higher up - like in a string bass where the higher pitched plucking of the string seems more recessed than it should be in relation to the boom and thump of the string bass notes themselves.  Maybe an electric bass should hit hard like with a subwoofer, but sometimes an acoustic string bass starts to sound more like an amped bass guitar when using the JH13Pro (or at least like an amp'd string bass).  The ES5 are very accurate in reproducing something like the acoustic string bass, and they do it wonderfully.
 
With the JH13Pro sometimes I'm feeling more of the "whump" from bass impacts than hearing the notes, although this is much more preferable than the boosted mid-bass hump of the UE11Pro.  This is not a big or pervasive problem with the JH13Pro, but only something that I've been noticing more as I have grown to love my ES5.  When they talk about "brain burn-in", this must be it.

 

[cooperpwc]

Great post, HPA. The ES5s are being questioned on bass but no one who owns them is sharing the concern. (I have yet another PM to answer from a person who is very interested but concerned about the bass; happy to reply. I suppose it's to be expected with so many IEMs going bass heavy: UE11, UE18, JH16s...)
 
I am listening to my Triple-fi's now of necessity as I concluded that my high falutin recommended Hong Kong audiologist made a monster mash of my ES5 impressions. (They sound wonderful and isolated pretty well with my mouth clenched shut but I could pretty much twirl them in my ears.) So new impressions have been made at the Siemens Listening Centre here in Shanghai and back they have gone to Westone. Check this out: Hong Kong on the left, Siemens on the right. I was careful to actually make perspective favour the Hong Kong impressions:
 

 
Anyway I am miserable listening to my Triple-Fi's. Where is the bass? Where is the clarity? The Triple-Fi's are very good universal IEMs compared to the others that I have heard, no doubt.They gave me almost three years of solid enjoyment. However the ES5s raise the bar so much higher that I find it obnoxious going back to them. Thank god my Stepdance does such a nice job of driving Beyer DT880/600s. The DT880/600s remind me much more of my ES5s. I miss the latter greatly.
 
I will say it again: the ES5s have excellent bass. It's tight, deep and full.

 

[Bennyboy71]

If thats what they look like, I never want to see the inside of my ears man. Never.
 
Quote:

Great post, HPA. The ES5s are being questioned on bass but no one who owns them is sharing the concern. (I have yet another PM to answer from a person who is very interested but concerned about the bass; happy to reply. I suppose it's to be expected with so many IEMs going bass heavy: UE11, UE18, JH16s...)
 
I am listening to my Triple-fi's now of necessity as I concluded that my high falutin recommended Hong Kong audiologist made a monster mash of my ES5 impressions. (They sound wonderful and isolated pretty well with my mouth clenched shut but I could pretty much twirl them in my ears.) So new impressions have been made at the Siemens Listening Centre here in Shanghai and back they have gone to Westone. Check this out: Hong Kong on the left, Siemens on the right. I was careful to actually make perspective favour the Hong Kong impressions:
 

 
Anyway I am miserable listening to my Triple-Fi's. Where is the bass? Where is the clarity? The Triple-Fi's are very good universal IEMs compared to the others that I have heard, no doubt.They gave me almost three years of solid enjoyment. However the ES5s raise the bar so much higher that I find it obnoxious going back to them. Thank god my Stepdance does such a nice job of driving Beyer DT880/600s. The DT880/600s remind me much more of my ES5s. I miss the latter greatly.
 
I will say it again: the ES5s have excellent bass. It's tight, deep and full.

 

[3X0]

Quote:

They all seem to play well down below 20Hz for me, so there is no roll off there either.

Really? I only found the JH16 Pro to even approach acceptable response levels near 20Hz, yet it still didn't have appreciable sub-20Hz response. Personally I can't think of any music that actually has response below around 27Hz (and even these tracks are few and far between), so I don't consider extreme sub-bass response to be critical to most applications. Reference level response down to 30Hz is more than sufficient. Granted, I haven't owned the ES5, but nonetheless I have a hard time believing that they hit sufficiently below 20Hz since no practical application (music, stage) would require them to reach that low.

 
Quote:

If thats what they look like, I never want to see the inside of my ears man. Never.

It's actually not that bad (if you're talking about impressions in general, not the disastrous HK impression). Much of the impression comprises outer ear features.

 

[HeadphoneAddict]

Quote:

Really? I only found the JH16 Pro to even approach acceptable response levels near 20Hz, yet it still didn't have appreciable sub-20Hz response. Personally I can't think of any music that actually has response below around 27Hz (and even these tracks are few and far between), so I don't consider extreme sub-bass response to be critical to most applications. Reference level response down to 30Hz is more than sufficient. Granted, I haven't owned the ES5, but nonetheless I have a hard time believing that they hit sufficiently below 20Hz since no practical application (music, stage) would require them to reach that low.
 
It's actually not that bad (if you're talking about impressions in general, not the disastrous HK impression). Much of the impression comprises outer ear features.

Try Bink Audio Test CD by Michael Knowles for test tones http://binkster.net/extras.shtml I can feel/hear the 16Hz tones.  I never said sub 20Hz notes were important, I just said that these could play down below 20Hz.
 
However, the album by "Enamoured" Bella Sonus has bass notes that do go that low, and many headphones cannot reproduce the lowest notes for me.

 

[letloverule]

A question for all that know : I just got the "clear" color and am now inclined to have it changed. I needed to send them for refitting anyways because one ear is loose but i'd like to change the color as well, anyone now how much westone would charge for that and whatnot? I'm actually inclined to get the smoke color like cooper!!!

 

[cooperpwc]

Clear is pretty cool IMHO. I don't know if they let you change colours. It can't hurt to ask.
 
Merlot is also nice...