Nice review!
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Thank You
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Well said sir. I’m glad I’m not the only one! Thank you for not being a lazy and snarky old coot like me and taking the time to elucidate. 
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Great review.
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I kick myself in the ass for not coming up with the Stockholm syndrome reference! I’m glad you said it because it’s a very apt analogy!
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Haha. I’m glad you’re enjoying them so much. I really am looking forward to hearing them as I haven’t seen a review that has much negative to say.
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The Empyreans really tap into the emotional side of music. They make most recordings sound like they’ve been processed by a pair of $25k SET monoblock tube amplifiers. Feed them with superbly measuring solid-state equipment with the highest resolution DAC and they will ooze emotion without sacrificing detail.
This is quite a trick.
I’m a big SET tube fanatic. I use them to great effect in my main audio rig because they make recordings (even poorly recorded ones) more organic, emotional, and enjoyable. They are simply masters of midrange, but often times are a bit lose and flabby in the bass because powering all, but the most efficient speakers, with an 8-10wpc 300b SET is too damping and power limited.
My solution to this in my reference system was to use a pair of powerful 60wpc quad parallel SETs which use 4x300bxls tubes per channel. This is not a cheap solution, but I’ve got great bass and a liquid midrange that is too die for!
My point is, for significantly less money you can get all that with the Empyreans coupled with the most ruthlessly honest ancillary equipment.
For a pair of headphones and ancillary equipment costing under $5500 (which costs considerably less by a 10x factor less than my main system) to achieve this level of performance is amazing to me. Meanwhile my main system is currently collecting dust.
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That’s pretty amazing. The cost ratio of headphone vs. two channel stereo is what attracted me to become more involved in headphone listening. Along with family. You shouldn’t blast music late at night whilst others are sleeping just cause’ you got an inkling to rock out!
You’ve really encouraged me to look into the Empyrean. Though this coming year I’ll be focused on purchasing a ‘good’ dac, as I feel that’s the weakest part of my current setup. The LCD-X will have to do. 
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I completely agree! Yeah, I originally got into headphones so I could play very early in the morning (especially when I have insomnia) or later in the evening without disturbing everyone else in the house. Up until now I’ve always preferred my 2 channel setup to any headphones. I’ve had the HE1000V2 for my main listening/ and the Anandas for my pc/gaming rig, and I recently had the Raals Sr1a for a couple of weeks, but none of them really sounded good enough to me to replicate what my main system could do until I tried the Empyreans. Don’t get me wrong they all do things I liked, but none of them draw me into the music like the Empyreans. I’m using the Matrix XSabre Pro MQA DAC. It’s the cleanest and lowest distortion measuring DAC at any price. I like my source to be pure and then I add the preferred 2nd order distortion for tailoring the sound with my tube amps. I don’t recommend stacking tubes on top of tubes. It can be too much of a good thing and make things sound too mushy.
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Haha. The Matrix is on my short list! And I absolutely agree in regards to source/amp and distortions/coloration.
Now I really want the Empyrean’s.
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Well, it’s the cleanest and lowest distortion measuring DAC at one site. Which hasn’t remotely measured everything.
Which doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent (it’s the best sounding ESS 9038 based DAC I’ve heard).
But let’s keep the absolutes where they belong - grounded in reality.
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Point well taken. I should have qualified that statement.
They’re cheaper dacs that measure excellent too and even that measure worse and they would still sound as good because human hearing is only so good.
I look forward to any highend company that submits their offerings to ASR for review because it shows confidence in their engineering prowlness, but some won’t because they wouldn’t fair so well and that by no means automatically indicates that they sound bad. They may employ a different DAC implementation that is more difficult to execute with exceptional measurements even with good design and parts. Some may have a particular house sound they are going for to differentiate themselves by using distortion to their advantage.
I’ve heard DACs that sound great despite their measured performance and vice-versa.
I ultimately went with the Matrix XSabre Pro MQA over the Benchmark DAC3 HGC because it sounded a tad smoother to me, but just as resolute. I’ve owned several Benchmark dacs in the past and used to sell them years ago. They’re also great measuring and sounding, but there’s a very minor glare in the upper midrange at higher volume that I didn’t hear in the Matrix so I bought it instead.
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With my two amps I enjoy the Empyrean more on my tube vs ss. I don’t know what the tube is doing but it seems to come alive. So for people who have tried and not enjoyed the headphone on ss might end up liking them on tube amp. The two amps are gsx-mini and Pendant.
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It’s funny that people say the lcd 4 has a ton of bass. I have to disagree as I find the Empyrean to have more quantity. Unless the lcd 4 I got is bad.
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Though I have never heard the LCD 4, in my review of the Empyrean’s I compared it to my LCD 2C (Classic) and the Empyrean’s IMO definitely had more, quantity and much better quality of bass compared to the LCD 2C.
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You’re absolutely right, if you look at the frequency response for the LCD-4, you see that the bass actually sits slightly lower than the consumer target below 100hz, and the Empyrean has more bass throughout that region. In my mind this was actually a downside for the Empyrean because it gets a bit thick down low but maybe some will appreciate that quality. I think the main reason people talk about the bass of the LCD-4 is because of how articulate and detailed it is, not so much the quantity. I personally left the LCD-4’s bass un-eq’d but I know some people who do boost it to get it in line with the Harman target.
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Did you find the sound to be slightly disjointed (an apparent artifact from the “Isodynamic Hybrid” drivers) as some have described?
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Yeah that’s a good description. It almost feels as if there are two different drivers handling different frequency ranges. But then again that’s kind of the point of ‘optimizing’ the trace for different frequencies. I do think it’s a good idea, it’s just that there’s clearly still some daylight between something like the Empyrean and other double-sided nano scale planars out there when it comes to technical ability. The isodynamic hybrid array is at least an interesting solution to the weight problem faced by high end planars in general, so I’m looking forward to what they do next.
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I was looking at the trace design and it’s seems as though if they placed the circular high frequency portion of the coil centrally that may alleviate the issue*, similarly to how coaxial drivers work.
The reason for doing so is to improve imaging, which seems to be the issue at hand.
*Some dude on the internet
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