Gramophone Dreams

I reread the Innerfidelity review of the Clear. Not for me. For starters, fabric earpads - hate 'em. Secondly, the response looks a little ragged and bright, as he noted in the review (but downplayed). Then there's the approximately 60 ohm nominal impedance that hits a whopping 330 ohms in the bass, centered around 50-60 hz. No wonder the bass has issues! I'll be on the lookout for something similar that doesn't have a big impedance spike, that gets its best response with pleather pads, and looks a little smoother in the treble.

I wish I still had the Sennheiser HD800 and a couple other headphones I didn't measure when I had them - I have a pretty good mental frame of reference as to how they sounded (slightly bright or peaky), but I don't have any good reason to get them back.

With most headphones for most users, by the time they have 500 hours on them they're already being replaced, not to mention deterioration of sound due to earpad wear. With the NightOwl and most premium headphones, a shorter break-in period of 30-40 hours takes most of the edges off, but rarely if ever changes the basic frequency response or cures obvious resonances.

In the specific case of this NightOwl, with a carefully applied EQ the sound is surprisingly good. In fact, playing the amazing Tutt-Keltner Drum Improvisation track, the razor-sharp detail is so good and with the upper harmonics stretching out to infinity, I'll bet it would compete with the Focal Clear. Very few headphones have that clarity and resolution well above 10 khz as the NightOwl does, and I didn't apply any EQ above 8 khz.