First, I wanted to thank Headphones.com for organizing this tour. It was an unbelievable opportunity to try a legendary and somewhat polarizing pair of headphones, that people seem to love or hate.
Unconscious Bias:
I’ll start with the caveat that I’ll probably write about the things I care about, like sound signature, and may ignore things that I don’t particularly care about, like stage.
And when I exclaim that something sounds “great” and forget to explain why, what I really mean is that the sound is close to my ideal:
- Tight bass as a priority over low bass, but I would ideally like both
- Warm mids
- Smooth treble, with no hint of brightness
- Vocals sound like I’m in the same room as the singer
- Guitars have a texture that I can feel
- My foot taps to music that has rhythm
And if you don’t want to read my rambling review, here were my conclusions.
I hate it… it’s OK… I need to buy one.
Listening Chain:
I used a Schiit Yggdrasil A2 DAC, and my sources were flac files, played through either Foobar (PC connected via USB) or Roon (PI2AES connected via AES).
Amps were, in order of warmth of sound to neutral: Schiit Jot 2, ZMF Pendant, Burson Soloist 3XP, ampsandsound Nautilus. Note that the sound signature of the tube amps is due to the tubes I use. More on this later.
Other headphones used for comparison were Focal Stellia and ZMF Verite Open.
I listened to a variety of music, mostly rock and alternative/indie music, with a smattering of pop and metal.
Non-Audio Stuff:
The headphones are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and quite possible the most comfortable I’ve ever used.
Whoever designed the magnetic pads is a genius. As someone who has struggled with changing pads on my ZMF headphones, the Empy was a dream to use, as I could switch pads in seconds.
The stock cable is crap. It was stiff, microphonic, and it took me a while to straighten it after taking it out of the case. The tour Empy also didn’t come with a balanced cable. Because of this, I decided that it would be easier to use my own cables, since the Empy uses the same mini-XLR connector as my ZMFs.
I used Hart cables for most of my testing, when comparing headphones or trying out different amps, because it was so easy to switch connectors, and it also enabled me to use the same cable for all the headphones. For extended listening sessions, I used a Double Helix silver Molecule Elite cable, only because this is the cable I normally use for my own headphones, and I wanted to reduce the variables.
Pads:
The Empy came with 2 sets of pads: leather and a suede-like microfiber material called Alcantara. I consistently hated the sound of the Alcantara pads, which made the bass sound bloated and introduced a veil over the treble. The rest of the review will describe my impressions of the leather pads. Thank god, because I really don’t want to have to type Alcantara again.
Amp Synergy:
I’ve never met anything as fussy, including our three cats, who consistently turn their noses up at the same food they gobbled down the previous day. The Empy is truly the cat of headphones!
I first tried it on my Nautilus, which I use more than any of my other amps. It’s never occurred to me that the Nautilus could sound anything less than amazing but the Empy just didn’t sound good. Oh dear, why did I sign up for this tour, it’s going to be a slog to get through this.
I then tried the Burson’s SE output, with the same unpleasant sound. However, when switching to the balanced output, which doubles the power, it improved quite a bit. I don’t understand this, because the Empy is very easy to drive, and I’ve never heard such a difference between my Stellia (equally easy to drive) between the SE and balanced output. I was intrigued, but still disheartened, because despite the improvement, the sound had merely gone from mediocre to average.
The Nautilus and Burson are my 2 daily drivers for tubes and solid state respectively, so I was not in a good mood. With a heavy heart, I moved onto my lesser-used amps, starting with the Jot 2.
Joy! The Jot 2 sounded really good with the Empy on both balanced and SE. The balanced output sounded a little better to my ears, but this time it was unsurprising, because each of the Jot 2 outputs has a slightly different sound signature.
Finally, I moved to the Pendant, which had been gathering dust since I bought the Nautilus, until I recently changed the tubes to push it to a warmer presentation (mostly in the mids and upper bass) than the more neutral Nautilus. As much as I enjoyed the Empy on the Jot 2, it really clicked with the Pendant, which I then used for the majority of my listening.
Why did the Empy sound better to me with the Jot 2 and Pendant? No idea! The only thing I can think of is that both of these amps have a little more “flavor” in the sound than the Nautilus and Soloist.
How Did It Sound?
The Empy sounded great with all types of pop and rock music, and didn’t seem to prefer any particular genre over the others.
With the leather pads, the Empy had a warm and very smooth sound. Despite the Pendant using warm-leaning tubes, the Empy didn’t sound too warm to me, and in fact music just sounded more euphonic.
The bass was tighter than with the other pads, but still not as tight as I would have preferred. The mids were slightly recessed, which didn’t bother me, because my Verite has a similar dip in the mids, and when I’m not listening for it, it’s not noticeable to me. The highs were very smooth, maybe even a bit rolled off. But there was a curious emphasis in the upper-treble, particularly on things like cymbals. This was a little distracting at first, and I forgot about it after a while, but it did come back to my attention whenever I was listening to music with a lot of cymbals.
Another curious thing that I noticed about the Empy was the way it was able to stretch the soundstage vertically for compressed “loudness wars” era modern music. This kind of music doesn’t have a lot of dynamic range, meaning that all aspects of the recording have a very similar volume. With my other headphones, I got a wall of sound that was all jumbled up together, but the Empy somehow managed to separate out the highs, mids and lows vertically, which tricked my brain into thinking that the music had a little more room to breathe. I thought this was a useful trick, but I can see others complaining about it being unnatural.
Other than the weird upper treble emphasis (which I was able to ignore for the most part), I found the Empy to be supremely musical. Technically, that means it was very close to the ideal sound that I described above. Emotionally, it meant that I frequently forgot that I was testing it, and just listened to music for hours on end.
I thought that it was tonally pretty close to the slightly warm presentation of my Verite (with Universe pads) but the Empy sounded a little smoother in the mids and highs. The Verite had a much tighter bass.
When switching from the Empy to the Stellia, the latter was a lot less smooth. The Stellia also sounded brighter in comparison, which is not something I’ve ever thought before. I’m guessing that this is because the Stellia’s highs are a little more even than the Empy’s, so you’re hearing more of the treble across the frequency range. And yet despite having more treble overall, the Stellia didn’t have that emphasis on the upper treble that I keep mentioning about the Empy.
Return Of The Stock Cables:
As my time with the Empy drew to a close, I thought that I’d better use the stock cables before I packed it all up, just so that I could say “I used my own cables, but they didn’t sound any different than the stock”.
Well imagine my surprise when the previously enjoyable Empy sounded a little bloated in the bass, with a slight veil in the highs. I double checked that I hadn’t accidentally switched the pads, but confirmed that the leather pads were still attached.
I A-B’d several times between the stock cables and mine, and the difference was consistent. Thinking that my custom cables might be the problem, I pulled out 2 sets of ZMF stock cables, and they sounded consistent with my custom cables, so the Meze cables were definitely the outlier here.
I’ve noticed tiny differences between cables before, but they have always been tiny, nothing as drastic as this. I have no idea if this is how they’re meant to sound, or if they were somehow damaged on the tour. Irrespective of how they sound, I would still recommend immediately replacing them with something less stiff and microphonic. This can be done at very little cost with Hart Audio cables, or you can spend as much money as you want if you prefer audio jewelry that matches the aesthetic of such a beautiful pair of headphones.
Conclusions:
I’ve never been so annoyed by a piece of audio gear than I was by the Empy, because it was so hard to get it get it to sound the way I wanted. And yet when I did find the right synergy, I was in musical heaven.
There are things that the Verite and Stellia do slightly better technically, in my opinion, but at the end of the day, when I wasn’t thinking about frequency curves and various audiophile minutiae, I spent many hours absolutely loving the music I was listening to.
Are they good value? It’s hard to argue that any headphones are good value at this price, and I’m hoping that people only buy things that cost this much with ‘fun money’, and are not taking out loans or using their emergency funds. They represent the same value to me as the upper tier ZMF and Focal headphones and I’ll leave it as that.
Would I recommend them? Given my issues with synergy, I would recommend listening to them first, to see if they’re a good fit.
Would I buy a pair? Yes, they are definitely on my short list.