tl;dr: I jumped ahead of my place in line and I don’t regret it one bit.
I’m an old hat when it comes to home theater, but a complete newb when it comes to headphones and high quality audio. Late last year I started growing weary of using nearfield speakers when listening to music as I slave over a hot keyboard all day, writing code and arguing on Reddit. I decided to take the plunge into headphones. I started modestly with a nice DAC, a well-regarded headphone amp, and a set of Senn/Drop HD 6XX headphones which have been my “daily wear” headphones for the past three months or so. It’s been an eye-opening experience.
The open backed HD 6XX headphones were causing some domestic strife with my girlfriend, though, who wasn’t happy with the sound leakage when we are both in the same room. That sent me off shopping for some closed-back headphones that I could use in close quarters without disturbing the rest of the house. Emboldened by my positive experience with the 6XX’s, I decided it didn’t make sense to work my way up the food chain buying and then retiring each ladder run on the way up from my $200 headphones to (eventually) a flagship model. So I did a dumb thing and upgraded by over an order of magnitude despite not really having any clue what I was doing.
One of my other hobbies is auto racing (and instructing/coaching new track drivers). There’s a common scenario when a novice driver will show up for a track event in some ridiculously overpowered car that’s far beyond their skills to handle. It can pose a real challenge to learning – an inexperienced driver isn’t able to really feel what the car is communicating on track and it really slows their progress at first because they just lack the context and experience to learn the car. I quietly harbored some anxiety that my impulsive approach with headphones might rhyme with my experience in the cars. Are my ears even capable of understanding what I would be hearing with a pair of $3000 headphones? Would the nuance and detail be lost on me? Would I be missing out by not building familiarity with the broad and rich spectrum of headphones that exist in between $200 and $3000? Candidly, I still don’t know the answer to that question – which I’ll leave for all of you out there who know a heck of a lot more about headphones than I do.
Today the Stellia arrived, shipped rapidly with care and love from headphones.com.
So what have I learned?*
This is not going to be a traditional headphone review. Lord knows I’ve read and watched enough of them by now to know the whole stock vocabulary I’m supposed to be using. But if I’m being honest, I have no idea what “detail retrieval” is. I have no basis for comparison. Not really. All I can tell you is how these things sounded to my untrained and inexperienced ears. Hopefully there’s some value to that.
I gingerly plugged the Stellia to my desktop rig (a Topping D90 DAC and a Monolith THX 887 amp) and braced myself for the possibility of disappointment. We all know there’s a lot of… embellishment and hyperbole in the world of audiophiles. I half expected to listen to these headphones and find them to be nice. I definitely expected them to be better than my other pair, but an order of magnitude better? Perhaps that was too optimistic.
I bounced around a few tracks in my Roon library and listened with focus and intent. The first thing that hit me was the incredible amount of sound coming from the high end of the spectrum. I can kinda get how these headphones are described as detailed or sharp. There’s a lot of that there. I can tell I’m going to have to grow accustomed to the new sounds I’m hearing with these.
After the newness started to wear off, I retreated to my “five star” playlist of my most well-worn and loved tracks. Songs I’ve been listening to for my entire life. This is when my brain melted. It’s cliché but I heard things I have never heard before in songs that I have listened to easily 1000 times in my life. It’s sort of mind-blowing, even disconcerting.
Listening to Bob Moses “Like It or Not” there’s a whole treble line throughout the song full of rich intricacy that I swear wasn’t there yesterday. There’s a left-channel guitar tremolo in Band of Horses “The Funeral” that raised the hair on my arms and made the top of my head feel chilly. You know that feeling. Dodie singing in her six point font superscript voice on “6/10” held strong against the instruments in a way I’ve never experienced. Then about half-way through Norah Jones singing “I Don’t Know Why” I heard the faintest vocal crack as she sang the chorus. Has this always been there? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
I’m chuffed and disconcerted. There are some downsides – some of my favorite music feels alien and unfamiliar to me now. It doesn’t sound like it’s “supposed to” sound. I am going to have to adjust to this.
I don’t know my words resonate. I hope I’m doing a good job describing how I’m feeling right now. One thing’s clear – I’m ruined for regular headphones now. The closed-back cups are sort of stifling after growing used to the breezy open back 6XXs, but that’s just the nature of the form factor.
I have a lot of music in my library that continues to sound relatively flat (like it always has, I guess). I’ve finally got headphones that surpass some mixes that I used to think were good.
Lastly – since I am at heart an objectivist and I like data – I revisited NPR’s audio quality test. I’d previously taken this test with my 6XX as well as my Etymotic ER•4P in-ear monitors. I’ve never managed to do better than random in distinguishing between the lossy and lossless tracks. With the Stellia I hit 5/6 (the Katy Perry track confounded me) and the 5 I did get right were confident selections and I was unsurprised to get them right.
I feel validated in the approach. If you buy quality tools it only hurts once. $3,000 is a heart-stopping amount of money to spend on a luxury good. But it’s cheaper than spending $200 then $500 then $1,000 then $1,800, and then $3,000. My advice? Cut ahead in line.
Cheers everyone, and thanks for such a great community.