When the stewardess asks me if I'd like to buy a pair of headphones for two dollars, I usually say no thanks and smile. She has no idea how good a pair of custom in-ear monitors sound.
And then I thought, "Well, I really have no idea how good her headphones sound either." So, I bought a pair, and brought them home to test.
Oh my!
David Gilbert from Italy sends this link to images of famous people (and beasts), from Bill Clinton to Chewbacca, spending quality time with their LPs. And Wes Phillips shares a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, in which Calvin’s dad teaches his son a lesson about RPMs.
Simply put, I'm stunned.
It's hard to make a good sounding sealed headphone, and much more so a small, supra-aural (on-ear) type. They all seem to falter sonically somewhere. In-ear headphones were the only way to get really good portable sound ...
... until now.
The tracks, first posted to Mahler150.com last year in honor of the 150th anniversary of Gustav Mahler's birth, remain available in 2011, the 100th anniversary of Mahler's death. While you can no longer vote on the contents of DG's 13-CD box set, Mahler: The People's Choiceit has already been issuedyou can still compile playlists of favorite movements and complete symphonies, and create your near-ideal mix-and-match performance of all Mahler symphonies and song cycles.
It appears that the way to sell a DAC in 2011 is to almost give it away, in real-dollar terms. Some people pay far more than this for a set of speaker cables, a pair of interconnects, even a power cord. The M1 DAC is a piece of kit that can transform your system. I kid you not.
That said, there's ample reason to break with tradition and offer the thoughts of an obscure English company called LFD, whose products may already have tripped your surveillance wires. In their "Charter to Product Commitment and Traditional Values"which can be read in its entirety on Frohmusik's website and is signed by Bews and Hawksford (see below)the people of LFD suggest, in so many words, that they will not manufacture goods outside of their native England; that their design work is guided by listening as much as by engineering theory; that they believe some component parts sound better than others of identical numeric value, depending on their specific role in an audio circuit; that their philosophy of circuit design is decidedly minimalist; and that they advocate the enjoyment of music on vinyl LP. That the principals of LFD have thus far avoided being burned alive as heretics is a source of wonder.
It’s not unusual to enjoy great music at DeVore Fidelity’s Monkeyhaus, but that music usually comes from LPs, loudspeakers, and tube amplifiers. Last night was a different story: While we did listen to music on the hi-fi, we were also treated to the special, comforting sounds of live, unamplified music. Zentripetal Duo (violinist Lynn Bechtold and cellist Jennifer DeVore) played three pieces—Gene Pritsker’s C17H21NO4 (the molecular formula for a drug popular among hipsters, baby boomers, and Wall Street tycoons), Astor Piazzolla’s "Violetas Populares," and Dan Cooper’s Design Duo.
I was rummaging around amongst HeadRoom's demo cans the other day, and stumbled upon a Beyerdynamic DJX-1.
"Hmm..." I sez to myself, "I don't remember ever seeing these before. I wonder what they sound like."
Once home, I pulled them out of the box and had a listen ... wow, these aren't bad at all. I wonder why I've never heard them before?
