Oh I will. I am coming here first. I like it here. 
5 Likes
2 hours with the Stealth compared to Stellia on a Hugo 2, a few quick observations.
Grades are compared to each other not absolute
The Bad
Thumping - Stellia A+, Stealth B
Call it macro-dynamics, impact, or whatever. The only way to test for it is to listen to Take The Power Back by Rage Against The Machine and Tom Sawyer by Rush.
Stealth holds its own on Tom Sawyer. No contest on Take The Power Back. Stellia is god-tier when it comes to thumping.
Compare to other DCA headphones I have owned → A2C C-, Ether 2s C+, and Ether CXs B-.
Comfort - Stellia A-, Stealth D
Hugely disappointed with the comfort. This is really bumming me out as I love everything about the comfort of DCA headphones. Stealth is not heavy but has weak clamping force, so all the weight is carried by the strap. The elastic band system makes it feel like the Stealth is pushing against the top of my head as opposed to resting and the comfort strap is very stiff.
I have a big melon, so I am pushing the elastic band pretty hard, and I am super sensitive to weight on the top of my head, so YMMV.
The Good
Separation and Detail - Stealth A++, Stellia B
It’s hard for me to think about these two qualities separately. Don’t get me wrong the Stellia has amazing detail, but when you combine separation and detail the Stealth kills the Stellia.
The separation is so good and the distortion is so low, the Stealth makes bad recordings sound good.
The studio version of Supper’s Ready with Peter Gabriel is one of my favorite songs, but the recording is so bad, it’s like murder on the Stellia. It sounds better of the Stealth than I have ever heard it before. I need to go dig out all my bootleg tapes from the 80’s and figure out how to digitize them.
Tunning - Stealth A++, Steallia B
I EQ the Stellia as I don’t love the Focal house sound. I take down the 150 Hz bump and increase everything above 5k to make them less mid-forward. The Stealth honestly sounds good no matter how much or little I EQ it.
Sound Stage , Stealth B, Stellia C-
I don’t think any headphones have a good sound stage. If you want sound stage listen to speakers. Stealth is as good as I have heard including the 800s. The Stellia are like injecting music directly into your head.
Initial Conclusion
Probably not the best headphones if you want to bang your head. But spending north of $1000 to listen to any head-banging stuff is probably a waste of money.
The stealth is the cleanest sounding anything I have ever heard. Trying to decide if that is a good thing or a great thing. But, may not keep them long enough to find out given my issues with the headband.
19 Likes
I think I need to buy these my friends. I’ll tell you why.
I have a son who is almost 3 and between work and family my time is extremely limited during the whole day, however by night time if I miraculously have enough energy I will delve pretty deep into headphone listening. Of course, I need closed backs for minimal disturbance. I honestly feel this lifestyle of mine will definitely carry on for a number of years and that owning a premium closed back that appears to be groundbreaking and elite may be the way to go. 3.5 years ago I bought the LCD XC and I think they are truly awesome, but I know they are not a truly elite headphone. At the end of the day being a responsible adult and a hands on parent do I deserve these headphones? Yeah. I think I truly do, but that price tag is always a bummer and many could never justify spending that much on a pair of headphones, especially when I already have a couple that are way above average, however the jump mainly between the XC and the DCA is probably a monumental difference and I know you could tell me for sure if what I am saying is true.
Also, given how elite sounding headphones with awesome systems can cost compared to an elite sounding loudspeaker setup is a fraction of the price, so now looming over at that DCA price tag seems like a bargain.
You can see how badly I am trying to justify buying these. Lol.
One last question. How well do the DCA’s noise isolate? Do the drivers leak a lot of sound like the XC’s or less?
Thanks for your time listening to my demented screeds. Lol.
Of course this post can be answered by any of you out there that own the Stealth and know quite a bit about them.
The sound leakage would be nice to know before buying. Thanks guys.
4 Likes
I would add, when at my desk and not using, I often leave the music on by accident as can not hear them from 1 foot away at normal listening levels.
1 Like
Hey. You’re a good guy. Thank you for showing me this. This helps a lot and they look like they do a decent job with the sound isolation. I would be fine. Very reasonable. Thanks again.
1 Like
I am not able to comment on the DCA Stealth as I have not had the privilege of hearing them. However, I have had the XCs for about three years and find them to be terrific. About a year ago I added a pair of Susvaras to my little stable. They are not as far apart as one may think, at least in my opinion. Yes, the Susvara is a step up in price and listening experience. But, I have not gotten rid of my XCs yet and I am not sure why other than the inner headphile in me says “keep them, you idiot”. My point being, assuming the weight isn’t a problem for you, I find that the XCs are a great option at an “affordable” price with great isolation. Perhaps if you could get a pair of the DCA Stealth, on loan to try out before you pull the trigger, it might help you to make an informed decision.
2 Likes
the xc was the very first high end HP I bought years ago and I found them to provide literally no isolation so maybe that has changed…good HP when it came out but outclassed now by most of the better HP’s IMHO…still at a used price not a bad deal
1 Like
Absolutely. Buying power is everything. I would definitely audition first from my dealer. The XC’s are great. They offer a lot and do way more things well than bad. Honestly friend. If I bought the Stealth and thought they were the true bees knees I still wouldn’t sell my XC’s. No shot.
Outclassed. Absolutely. However the question is by how much?
You see I still haven’t tried the STELLIA’s yet either. I’ve got work to do.
Thanks for your comments. Best of luck on your future journey into headphoneville. It seems to be both a curse AND a blessing but well worth the effort.
1 Like
Respectfully disagree here. Macrodynamics to my understanding is a very clear and solid term and it describes the larger or macro contrasts between loud or perceptually punchy/loud sections of a song and a perceptually quieter or less punchy section of a song. A quick look at a waveform and real-time FR meter will tell you what is going on here.
Microdynamics by contrast are what I think of as the ‘grass’ in the waveform. How quickly and with how much contrast the peak of a waveform rises and recedes and its relative level (in dbFS or True Peak) in relationship to the waveform around it.
This is why a loud snare hit next to a soft guitar arpeggio sounds… well, loud. A driver’s ability to reproduce this may not be something we can easily trace to a FR measurement with a sine wave at 95dB input. How to measure it is a challenge though, that is very true. Start to look at how a headphone measures at 70dB versus at 106dB however and you will most likely see differences. Add in dynamic music signals and not just test tones and then its a whole new ballgame.
I should add that I learned to hear and identify this when working with compressors in music production work. You can very clearly hear how shaping a transient’s attack and decay times with a compressor effects the dynamic quality and the sensation of ‘pressurizing a space.’ A pair of Martin Logans and a pair of Vandersteens do very different things in a room, even if they are both specced as being ‘flat’ from 60hz-20khz. Headphones likewise have a ‘room’ they must pressurize, and a whole slew of traits that will effect their dynamic performance. While impulse measurements, square wave and distortion may not make an easy connection to the commonly used measurements, dynamics are not a fuzzy concept in the pro audio world. There is a clear understanding of what those terms mean and how to hear and manipulate them. I think understanding and borrowing from that terminology is a great way to help establish a mutually intelligible dialect in the hifi realm. A headphone lingua franca if you will.
22 Likes
Yes! Many audiophile debates follow from end-user uncertainty or confusion about production and recording methods versus the role of playback equipment. And beyond this, psychoacoustics and perception are shaped by biological factors, cognitive processes, and human-specific biases.
7 Likes
Well said, Grover!
I can understand why you like to run to Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire cause dang that was a terrific marathon post. 
Couldn’t agree with you more.
2 Likes
Totally agree, although I will say that I tend to think humans have a more similar hearing profile (after all the brain processing is done) than people think. While extreme variations do exist, my finding is that people more often differ in sonic opinion due to training and truly personal preference. For example - you like bright dubstep, I like classical. We might agree a headphone is warm but I want a bright one because that works well with my program material, whereas you like the warmth because it takes the edge off the edm. We both agree the headphone is warm however.
Just my personal findings. And again, outliers do exist, and training (intentional or unintentional) changes your perspective immensely.
6 Likes
Yes, there’s a lot of university research on perception and the human senses are often similar between people (or children train to achieve similarity as they grow). Key factors affecting preferences include (1) individual permanent hearing loss, (2) training and experience with a wider variety of products, (3) headphone fit that changes the sound for large or small head sizes/ear sizes, and (4) individual fatigue, vitamins/minerals/nutrition, and neurological functioning.
Reviews of the same product by different people (e.g., @antdroid, @ProfFalkin, @Resolve, etc.) often confirm moderate to broad generalities. They have somewhat different opinions, but few would mistake a Grado for a Beats.
4 Likes
Yes yes and yes. I did a little psychoacoustics research work a few years ago and was astounded by how intricate our hearing mechanism is. The Otoacoustic Emission function particularly opened my eyes. Our ear measures its environment and reacts accordingly - and humans for all our diversity do tend to develop our personal ‘curves’ in startlingly similar ways.
I would say it has given me a relativist view of audio (as opposed to subjective or obiective) whats your use case? What do you use it for? What do you like?
Back to the headphone at hand though, I tend to think damping and a low FS is part of what determines our sense of dynamics. Absorption/damping essentially reduces a certain amount of energy at any given frequency when applied. Some energy is list by traveling through the damping material. what this means is that the amount of energy required to drive a certain frequency to the same dB is increased, not just that spl at a given level is decreased.
The driver fs is the resonance in free air - a larger driver will generally have a lower fs and obviously be able to pressurize a sound more easily, though at the expense of generally using more power assuming the same magnetic structure as our theoretically identical but smaller diaphragm. This isn’t a hard and fast rule but Thiele/Small parameters can help give us an idea of rolloff, resonance point and the like so we can get an idea of bass and frequency/resonance performance.
Resonance is important because once we put a driver in a room (or an earcup, which is just a very small room) the resonance is shifted, usually downwards. The ease of pressurizing said frequency now requires less energy. Adjusting the size of this cavity is an easy way to manipulate bass and our sense of its punch or pressure.
An easy example of this is a room. A big room may allow lower notes to develop cleanly, but a small room will develop nodes and become overloaded more quickly at higher frequencies. Solving the problem by utilizing absorptive bass trapping versus say a helmholtz resonator will have very different effects.
Obviously one big difference is that speakers, even in a treated room generally don’t have any absorption in between you and the drivers (other than grilles and furniture obviously) while headphones often utilize material that sits between the diaphragm and the ear.
We run into our problem here: absorptive material will obviously soak up sound and kill some of our energy - again expressed by spl or Sound Pressure Level (note the term pressure)
If we want a headphone which has a high fs of say 500hz to have bass extension we have a few tools:
- earpads/enclosure
- damping
- magnetic/voice coil structure
- diaphragm size/mass.
Since changing the diaphragm size is pretty dramatic, lets assume we can only use the first three. Of those adding damping is the easiest.
So lets say we do that. Add damping to lower treble energy and give the perception of more bass. The advantages are that this is easy to implement as it only requires a piece of absorptive material in the cup. The disadvantage is that efficiency is now lower and instead of actually producing more bass your headphone now only produces less treble. You have not increased sense of dynamic punch and in fact you have likely killed some of the sharpest transient peak capability because absorption has a naturally slight compressive effect - that is, it will tend to reduce the perceived difference between the sharpest peaks and smaller peak information.
Its pretty easy to comprehend how one might thus have a headphone with excellent FR but not be very dynamically informative. I tend to think resonant frequencies are still audible even when they dont show up on a simple sine sweep graph because they will still affect how the headphone reacts dynamically. Just because a headphone shows itself as being flat at let’s say an fs of 50hz with a sine sweep at 90dBFS, that doesn’t mean it won’t get excited by dynamic musical content that swings between say 95-100dBFS. Enter impedance plots obviously.
In the context of planars things get trickier because they’re generally resistive loads, but I suspect they aren’t as different in this regard as you might think. Just because electrical phase/impedance is resistive doesn’t mean resonant peaks have disappeared, they just express themselves differently.
In any case, I’m clearly bored this morning and thinking out loud too much, but I do hear most DCA headphones as being lacking in dynamic information and sounding kind of overdamped albeit with exceptional frequency responses. I own the Ether 2 and an og Aeon closed, so it certainly hasnt stopped me from buying them, but other things tend to get more headtime nowadays.
13 Likes
The yellow tooltip on the right side confirmed this is … my first post in this community. I often receive summary emails with interesting conversations , etc but I’ve never gotten to the point of “contributing”. I’ll blame Grover for his pleasant writing for now and also Dan Clark for making an innovative use of smart absorbers ;-).
I’ve been thinking about use of tuned absorbers for a while and, while I haven’t seen enough of the design itself to make a valid numerical proof, I have a guess on the reported lack of perceived contrast between micro and macro dynamics.
In particular, from an acoustic standpoint, it seems a smearing of the acoustic wavefront from the driver is inevitable as you are making this acoustic wave go through a bunch of channels of varying length, effectively yielding various amounts of phase shift at the other end of the absorber (earcup side facing). Physically, you’re no longer exciting the earcup with a planar wave but instead a deformed waveform which, in an anechoic earcup cavity would measure as a train of pulse in terms of impulse response, with the higher frequencies more affected than the low and mids (as the wavelength gets closer to the tubes length).
Note that I actually have no knowledge of how we actually perceive dynamics but am simply guessing that it must have something to do with transient response of a headphone. The use of these tuned absorbers in a headphone is a very clever idea I thought since they make efficient use of space relative to the broad frequencies they target. However, this experiment may suggest that, just like thick foam liners in front of driver are often detrimental, it may be best to stick with this kind of novel absorbers for the back wave (earcup walls)?
It’s worth to note in particular there’s no free lunch with absorbers, they have both absorption (i.e how they reduce sound reflections by absorbing some of the incident waves) and insertion loss (i.e. how they reduce sound transmission by absorbing some of the incident waves). The sound dissipation mechanism is different but you’ll introduce phase shifts and attenuation of sound waves going through the absorber regardless of it being a simple open cell foam or a complex network of tuned pipes. The latter is expected to introduce much more phase shift though which may be to the point of becoming audible.
My last experience with this kind phenomenon was Ultrasone and their promoting of shielding metal plates between the driver and the earcup, effectively having the incident wave channeled through which some could perceive as helpful to sound stage perception (at least attenuating feeling of a driver close by the ear) but mostly sounded like wild mess in mid-/highs (I can criticize, I did own Edition 9 
).
Cheers,
Arnaud
6 Likes
The main thing you’re doing here is increasing the mass. Mass being the determining factor of FS. The reason big drivers have lower fs than small drivers is they are simply heavier. You can achieve the same thing with a heavier diaphragm (thicker or heavier base materials) but of course, you sacrifice speed. It’s why a sub won’t play 20K very well.
1 Like
Yes, just one of the ways, but potentially an easier way depending on the desired results for the rest of the tuning. But… I think for the DCA stuff they’re designed around being smaller, lighter and more portable. So maybe that’s the tradeoff.
2 Likes
@Resolve Thank you for the review. Your closed-back headphone shootout started me in this hobby (TBD if that is a good or bad thing).
Given the price, I understand why you had to compare the Stealth to other ope-back flagships. But, I think you undersold how good the separation/staging/imaging is on the Stealth by doing so. I may well be in the minority, but I think comparing open-backs to closed-backs is missing the point as they have fundamentally different use-cases. I think it’s more appropriate to lump closed-backs with IEMs and open-backs with speakers.
I have gone thru most closed-backs, with the notable exception of the VC, over the past 18 months and don’t think any comes close to the Stealth with the exception of low-end thump by any closed back-made by Focal.
I do think the point you made about how good closed-backs need to be is really important.
If the goal is just to play music while you’re doing something else, then something like the Noire, Celestee, or T5Ps are more than good enough.
If you want something to block out the world on your commute then a decent pair of custom IEMs are a better choice.
But, if you also want to do all of the above and some critical listening in a noisy house then all the above are good choices, but Stealth is the best choice.
But, it is not good enough that I am going to sell my 2-channel system anytime soon.
8 Likes