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The problem a…

V-MODA True Blood and "Endorse Yourself!"
This article is about celebrity headphones. Websters defines celebrity as "the state of being celebrated." I see nothing wrong with applauding and cheering for favored artists and sports stars, but I think V-Moda takes celebrity to a new and greater level when they allow you to choose whoever you want to celebrate ... even yourself.

Not only are these great sounding and well built headphones, but you are also able, at extra charge, to choose the color of the earpiece "shield" and submit a graphic to have custom engraved on your…

Celebrity Headphone Deathmatch Winners and Losers
I reckon that since this is a deathmatch, we need to declare some winners and losers.

Winning Headphones
Soul by Ludacris SL150 - Of the big three rapper can company headphones (Beats by Dre, Soul by Ludacris, SMS by 50), I found the Soul by Ludacris SL150 to be the best of the bunch. And fairs pretty well when compared to all headphones of it's price/type. I like this headphone.

V-Moda Crossfade M-80 & V-80 True Blood - When it comes to the concept of celebrity itself, I think V-Moda nails it by giving you the…

Audez'e LCD-2 Rev.2 ($995) and LCD-3 ($1945)
I'm calling this a preliminary investigation because I like these headphones quite a bit and I want to give them a glowing review. But under the current circumstances, I just can't.

Currently, there's a lot of controversy about the Audez'e LCD-3 in this thread at Head-Fi. There have been some driver failure problems, which Audez'e seems to have been quite responsive in addressing. But more worryingly, the idea has been developed that the LCD-3 comes in two flavors: veiled…

THD+noise Measurements
Here's where things start to get a bit messy. I mentioned at the start that I've been measuring some Sennheiser HD 800s for a system characterization experiment. Here are the left and right THD+noise plots for the HD 800 with measurements taken on three different days during the same period I was measuring the LCD-3 headphones.

Here are the THD+noise at 90dB measurements of the four different LCD-3 headphones.

First, you'll notice the LCD-3 measurements are a lot more noisy and erratic than the HD 800. This measurement…

Summary
It wasn't easily apparent, but I eventually found that with female vocals the 2312341 and 2312454 sounded a bit more present than 2312260 and 2312476, which did sound a bit veiled in comparison. It was at that point that I decided I needed to average all the measurements of each headphone and compare them. The next two plots are the left and right channel of all four headphones. Each headphone frequency response shown is the average of all measurements taken of that headphone.

Though more apparent in the left channel, both plots show about a 4dB difference…

Philips Introduces a Broad Range of Headphones
If you've read about my visit to the Philips display at CES you'll know that they've been working very hard to refresh their headphone lines, and that they've managed to do a proper job of it. Over the next few months you'll start to see products available in five different lines:

Sound Quality
The sound quality from the Philips Citiscape Downtown is very good indeed for a $100 headphone. My favorite can at this price is the Creative Aurvana Live! and it does outperform the Downtown in terms of clarity and lack of mid-range coloration, but the Downtown bests the CAL! in powerful bass response and isolation.

The bass response of the Downtown is very good, having very good impact and extension without bloom, murk, or mud. I would characterize these headphones as slightly warm sounding, but more because the highs are somewhat polite rather than because of…

The Sennheiser HD 800 ($1499)
I had the good fortune of a factory visit to Sennheiser's campus in Wennebostel, Germany sometime in 2005--four years before the HD 800 made its appearance at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, the HD 800 was already heavily under development. We'll never know, of course, but I reckon these headphones have more R&D hours invested in them than any other on the planet. The engineers at Sennheiser were given a "clean slate" to develop the world's best dynamic headphone. At the time of my visit,…

Sound Quality
Brutally honest sums it up. Some might use words like "analytical" and "detailed," but those words typically point towards some fault of the headphones being overly bright. I'm not entirely sure this is the case. Because these headphones create a sense of space and image so incredibly well, I tend to believe they've got to be delivering a very coherent and well balanced signal. No headphone, in my experience, sounds as much like a scientific audio instrument as the HD 800. If you are an audio professional an have an application where using an open headphone is possible,…