Headphone Enhancements and Additions

My audiophilia embraces fabulous room-dominating speakers (Fasolt & Fafner, the mighty B&W 803D towers in my living room), but also extends inwards to the relatively private and rarefied world of headphones. I’m really quite the little headphone whore when you get right down to it; always have been, always will be. My propensity towards music listening as an undisturbed solo activity has quite a lot to do with that; it isn’t so much that I don’t want to bother other people as it is that I just don’t want them snooping into my music of the moment.

I refuse to sacrifice anything by way of sound quality, however. Now, of course headphones can’t give you the full-body experience of sound that only a fine loudspeaker can deliver. But they can make amends via detail, intimacy, clarity, and a vibrant personal-space soundstage. Cheap headphones can do little except shake, rattle, and roll. Crappy headphones can sap all the life out of a decent recording with almost unseemly efficiency. But good headphones offer audio pleasure in spades, and really great ones—well, most people just don’t know what innerspace audio can be, if you’re willing to think through the process and plop down your shekels. Lots and lots of shekels.

It isn’t just the headphones, either. Feed slush into the world’s greatest cans and you won’t get a soufflée back. And even if the original material is high quality, if must be properly amplified and processed. If your audio is digital, you must take care that the digital stream is converted into an analog signal with class, panache, and musical intent. A fine analog signal having been achieved, it must be amplified enough to encourage one’s headphones to sing, and not violated along the way. Then it must get to your fine headphones.

My home headphone-listening setup delivers the goods, and how. A Macintosh Pro acts solely as a transport and feeds its digital stream into a Benchmark DAC1, a superbly designed device that both converts the digits to an analog signal and provides a high-class headphone amp. My regular headphones are lordly Sennheiser HD 800s, the top of the line from an ultra-posh marque.

As much as I love that setup, I had read a few occasional jabs to the effect that Senn 800s have a slight blare to the low treble range. I wasn’t at all sure about that—everything sounded utterly grand to me—but it was recommended to me that I consider buying an aftermarket pure-copper cable to replace the stock cable on the Sennheisers. Normally I don’t put much faith in cables — an awful lot of that stuff seems like pure snake oil to me, but the fine folks at Cardas Cable offer a return if you’re not happy. So I ordered their 10′ Sennheiser HD 800 cable and have been giving it a go.

To my surprise, the Cardas cable does make a difference. The sound comes out somehow smoother, a bit more refined — and there is no blare anywhere, not that I can say for sure that I ever heard any with the stock cable. I did a bit of comparison listening, easy enough to do given that the Senn 800 cable is designed to be easily removed and reconnected. Am I just imagining the overall improvement? Possibly, but I don’t think so, given my cable skepticism.

The Cardas cable adds another fat roll of greenbacks to an already expensive proposition. But a marvelous thing has become even better.

But Sennheiser HD 800s aren’t even remotely portable headphones. There’s no wearing them outside. They’re huge. They make you look like Princess Leia. Trying to power them with an iPod is like sticking a Volkswagen Beetle engine into a Maybach. The car will roll but not very fast — and the iPod will make sound through the Senn 800s, just not very much nor of very good quality. Senn 800s are home headphones, pure and simple. They need high-class amplification to sound their best, and there’s no point in investing in such pricey cans and then hobbling them. For portable listening, I must look elsewhere.

Since I can’t abide those horrid things that squeeze into your ear canal, I need over-ear types that I might be able to wear in a more public surrounding. Up to now I’ve used the Grado SR80i, a very nice model that performs far better than its modest price tag would suggest. However, the Grado SR80i is completely transparent to the outside world; everything gets in, everything gets out. I needed something more closed off, but still reasonably portable.

Thus the Bowers & Wilkins P5 headphone to the rescue. These are, amazingly enough, B&W’s first foray into headphones. B&W being who they are, one expects the P5 cans to ooze with class, and they do. They’re drop-dead gorgeous, svelte and sleek and sexy. But they also sound fabulous, not ultra high-end like the Senn 800s, but with a really marvelously detailed and rich sound, even powered by nothing more than an iPhone.

So now I’m set for all my listening, both in-house and on-the-go. The P5s aren’t sound cancelling jobs like those Bose QuietComfort models, but personally I can’t abide the sound that comes out of the Bose things, or really any cans employing active noise cancellation. My ears become muddled, my head unhappy. There’s just too much being done to the sound, and at some level I’m hearing the manipulation and reacting to it negatively. So I prefer the P5 solution of cushy leather pads that go far to shut out external noise and keep my listening private. The sound coming into my ears hasn’t been doctored in any way, and so my head stays happy and my ears unmuddled.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.