I likely won’t be reviewing it anytime soon but we should have an article sometime soon from Grif, as well as a video once we’re able to get our hands on one.
Audiophile jargon can be a bit confusing. I may have used the wrong term.
I was referring to the spatial differences between a headphone with no angled mounting and ones that are angle mounted. Mr. Grell speaks of the delays associated with the sound first bouncing off the outside of the ear vice a driver with no angle. It seems to me that it would be very difficult to compensate for the time delays as a result of the angled driver.
It still needs to be tested as to what if any effect there is conferred by driver angle when in situ response is held constant. But given the public reception of the OAE1, I suspect it’s not significant enough to spoof the brain into hearing location based timbre in a headphone. I think there could be an argument for doing that but you’d need head tracking.
Because remember, with headphones we don’t have any cues to tell our brain the sound is coming from in front of us like we do with speakers. Subtle head movement confers nothing about any sound directivity in the sound helmet condition, absent head tracking, because the sound stays fixed with us as we move.
Like if his concept is correct, then the OAE1 timbre would sound more normal to more people. It’s a bit like trying to do an auditory forced perspective illusion, but IMO you need head tracking to make it convincing. Without that, the spell is broken and the timbre is unnatural.
Since the OAE1 is on closeout from Drop, at the selling price, decided to get a pair to find out for myself. The Head-Fi opinions are all over the place, but there are a fair amount of people who seem to like them. I’ve had the Ultrasone S-Logic in the past, and they were decent sounding. I’m hoping for the best, but not a big concern if they don’t work out. I have a lot of respect for Mr. Grell, as the HD 600, HD 650, and HD 820 are a big part of my collection. Couldn’t warm up to the HD 660 S2, as the midrange is not as neutral to me as the 600/650.
Which brings up another point: A lot of the closed back headphones seem to have angled drivers. I assume it’s to work around the issues that occur from a closed back design. The ATH-AWKT goes even further, as it has a dual baffle setup to improve the bass response. I’ve found that trying to EQ closed back is very challenging. Seems to be much harder to get it right compared to open back cans. What’s really frustrating is that even when the applied EQ for a given closed back sounds good for a specific recording, a different recording exposes the fact that the EQ settings do not work the same, and in fact degrades the sound.
Do report back on the OAE1, it’s always interesting how that gets interpreted by people. The Ultrasone line of headphones I’d consider to be totally unlistenable, with the S-Logic concept being central to that failure.
Anyone remember this?
The thing is, with Grell, he’s obviously well aware of all the things we’re saying with respect to DF, he designed the HD 6 series headphones with DF in mind. When he’s doing stuff like the OAE1, it’s his attempt at doing something novel - to see what other types of experiences he can create that breaks the mould he established. The HD 800 also did that in a way.
Though I personally prefer the HD 600 over the HD 800 - Grif did too when we did that testing.
I will definitely report back regarding the OAE1. Should be delivered by next week. I’ve watched the videos on You Tube from Grell Acoustics. I found them to be informative.
The Edition 10 from Ultrasone was definitely bad. The Edition 15 actually sounded pretty decent, although it was very overpriced. Sold it and have been using the Sony MDR Z1R instead. Pretty happy overall with the Z1R as a closed back option.
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I think I reviewed the Edition 15, it was still quite strange sounding to me. I remember having a chat with their designer and he had some… unique ideas about S-logic. But whatever they were tying to achieve, it didn’t work for me at all.
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Received the OAE1 today. Initial impressions for me are quite positive overall. I certainly hear what people have described, both good and not so good. I’ll need to spend time with them to see how things go with various genres, but so far, with Jazz, they are quite enjoyable. The objective of the designer to emulate speakers has, IMHO, been met.
If the headphones are situated so the driver is closer to the ear canal, the treble seems to increase, making the overall sound more balanced.
The headphones are well built, far better than the price would suggest. More to follow.
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Try them with something that has vocals, and maybe some electric guitars.
I took your advice and tried them with a number of different genres. Personally, I think these headphones are bloody brilliant. Vocals sound quite realistic to me. I absolutely love how saxophones and wind/brass instruments sound. Yes, the bass is emphasized, but the sonics somehow still seem to sound natural. I already prefer the OAE1 to a lot of headphones I’ve had over time.
For me, what Alex Grell has achieved here is quite noteworthy. The sound extends outside and in front of the headphones, along with showing a bit of depth as well. It really does sound more like listening to speakers than regular audiophile headphones.
In summary, the OAE1 is a excellent headphone, one that will get a lot of use with me. The Topping D900/A900 is an ideal sonic match to drive the OAE1. The Chris Botti LIVE in Boston CD, upscaled to 705 KHz/108 Bit via PGGB sounds incredible with the OAE1. They capture the hall acoustics like no other headphone I’ve tried. I think I actually prefer the OAE1 over the HD 650, and I don’t say that lightly. To me, the time/domain aspect of the OAE1 is one of the things that sets it apart from the majority of headphones.
I realize others may demur, and that’s fine. We all hear differently. For me, the OAE1 works as the designer intended.
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Well that’s because it’s not the time domain aspect of it, it’s the frequency response. If it were time domain separate from frequency response then there would be something seriously wrong with the device.
This is the excess group delay for the OAE-1. Sure enough, it’s behaving as expected and is minimum phase - meaning there is nothing time-domain related that we need to be concerned about.
This may be another case of audiophile jargon definitions. An internet search of the subject points out that transients are best reproduced when both time and frequency domains are reproduced accurately.
So, I agree that the OAE1 has no issues with excess group delay. It’s one the better headphones at being able to reproduce the effects of the venue the recording was conducted in.
Search headphones and minimum phase to understand this. Like this is not really a matter of opinion when we see EGD data like the above. If you don’t see anything significant there, then the headphone is behaving in minimum phase, which means time domain is directly proportional to FR, and what you’re hearing is a result of the FR in situ at your ear drum, not FR and time domain factors as separate measureable traits.
And really, FR can have an infinite range of combinations that can create venue effects like you noted.
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Thanks for showing both the left and right channels in your latest review of the Thieaudio Cypher, to give a little better idea of its symmetry/channel balance. (Now if we could just get some EGD and distortion on all these too…)
If the imbalance is consistent, as your video suggests, then this is fairly easy to correct by adjusting the volumes of the channels a little in your source. Based on your graph though, the imbalance on the Cypher is not really consistent across the entire frequency range. The left channel is softer across most of the bass and mids. But it gets closer to and even slightly louder than the right channel in the mid-treble. That is not as easy to fix, because it requires separate EQs for each channel. We are only looking at one unit here as well, so we don’t know if the imbalance will be the same on other units.
Q: Why is this important?.. A: Because it can affect and potentially impair the accuracy and precision of the headphone’s stereo imaging. As has been mentioned in some other posts on this topic, some mfrs do a better job of QC and matching their drivers than others, so there won’t be as obvious imbalances. This is why the symmetry data is important to see, especially on lower cost headphones. But really on all headphones where there are imbalances of around 1/2 dB or more imo.
All headphones will have some imbalances in the treble. But most will be fairly narrow in bandwidth, which is harder to hear (and also to measure accurately). The imbalances on the Cypher are fairly broad in bandwith though, especially in the bass and mids, based on your plot.
I’ve cued the video below so others can see a little better what I’m referring to…
Also, your graph of the OAE1’s EGD would be alot more helpful if the vertical axis was in 1 millisecond steps, rather than the 50 millisecond steps shown. Because delays of less than 1 msec can be audible.
The plot looks nice and flat because the scale on the vertical Y-axis is much too large imho.
At that point though you run into questions of audibility vs measurement artifacts / noise. Yes, there are places where headphones might not be strictly min phase, and there are tiny areas you can see on EGD that might indicate something. But you can take any of the 20 seatings of these and see slight variations in those features when zoomed in. Does that mean the headphone is not min phase? Not necessarily. I’m sensitive to the fact that there are ways to represent data to make things appear a certain way, but not necessarily be indicative of anything. And when all is said and done, it was frequency response all along, because nobody bothered to control for that in situ.
I think you’ve posted other EGD graphs with smaller scales though, more on the order of 2 or 5 msec steps. And there didn’t seem to be any issues with noise on those.
Could be. I didn’t change anything with the scaling deliberately, but I also don’t post EGD unless there’s a reason to.
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Understood. And thanks for looking into this a bit.
hello resolve, i am working on a headphone with a 70mm driver. if you could choose, which pads would you want on a headphone because of the formfactor. audeze?beyerzmf? other? and why?