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JBL Everest Elite 700 (MSRP $299; Street ~$224)
Sean Olive and his crew of researchers have been at it for a while now, and I reckon some their work should have trickled down into JBL products by now. One likely candidate is their recently released JBL Everest Elite 700, a wireless, noise canceling, over-ear headphone, which contain Harman's whiz-bang TruNote technology that is claimed to calibrate the headphone to the wearers ears. Let's check it out.

Styling, Build Quality, and Comfort
Like most headphone geeks, styling…

Sound Quality
Generally speaking, the JBL Everest Elite is a fairly good sounding, neutral balanced headphone...for a noise canceler...at this price.

When wired and unpowered, I found it to be somewhat upper-mid forward and a bit hard sounding. Somewhat "cupped hands" and shouty right in the middle of the female vocal range. Also, mid-treble range is somewhat de-emphasized. This is good because this area can be quite annoying if over emphasized, but when missing leads to a lack of nuanced resolve. Cymbals are relatively normal sounding, they're just missing some of their…

Measurements Wired Active

Measurements Wireless Active

Raw frequency response plots of the wired passive mode show respons between 400Hz and 2kHz somewhat above target response giving this headphone an emphasized and forward upper half of the midrange. Bass response is fairly on-target and punchy sounding, but is a bit overwhelmed by the midrange…

[Editor's Note: Through a long and tedious process it was found that the Focal Utopia and Audeze LCD-4 reviewed here at InnerFidelity in numerous articles were found to be not representative of currently manufactured product. This article is therefore not entirely indicative of our current impressions of this product. To get a complete understanding of our evaluation the reader should start with this summary article and work back through the articles leading up to our current understanding.]

Introduction
In my previous…

Audio Technica ATH-A2000Z ($649)
I've got to admit I'm not a big fan of the Audio Technica line of headphones with the 3D Wing Support System headband. My previous experience is that they tend to be far too bright and lacking bass response for me, and the headband just never fits right; I've found it very difficult to get a seal. I've also had horrendous problems getting them to seal properly on my measurement head. Well, something must have changed because the A2000Z fit's my head, and my measurement head, quite well...and…

Measurements

Raw frequency response plots show a headphone quite close to the Harman target from about 40Hz all the way up to 2kHz. Remarkable! Unfortunately, above 2kHz, things begin to go awry. The peak at 4kHz is somewhat high, which I felt gave them a sharpish character tonally. The drop after 4kHz is probably a good thing to steer energy away from the piercing 5-8kHz area, but response 5kHz and above is a ragged mess. This clearly makes its appearance in the 300Hz square wave and impulse response.

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Beyerdynamic T 51 i ($299) and T 51 p ($289)
Quite a few years ago now I reviewed the Beyerdynamic DT 1350 ($289) quite positively. This headphone is sold into Beyer's pro audio distribution channel, primarily to DJs. Subsequently, Beyer produced a T 50 p to sell into their consumer channel that looked quite similar, but didn't have the split headband. It didn't sound nearly as good, either...I was bummed. Then, a couple of years ago, Beyer updated the model to produce the T 51 i, which I heard at a show and thought sounded quite a bit…

Sound Quality
You know what's weird? A headphone that falls short in a number of ways, but still ends up being an enjoyable listen.

Mainly, this is a warm, somewhat veiled sounding headphone. Bass is boosted quite a bit and is somewhat loose and mildly distorted sounding; bass boost intrudes on the mids somewhat to about 300Hz. The midrange is on a mild warm tilt throughout, but is otherwise smooth and well behaved. Midrange to treble transition is a bit abrupt, and the treble doesn't seem to continue the warm tilt but rather seems to flatten out allowing the headphones to…

Raw frequency response plots show a 10dB bass hump centered at around 120Hz, and extending upward to 300Hz. This is the predominant artifact in listening as the bass blees excessively into the midrange and makes for a bass heavy listening experience.

Midrange 300Hz to 2kHz slopes downward 4dB, which is continued by a slightly too short concha peak at 3kHz. There's good argument for a -5db warm tilt overall on a headphone, but this is significantly steeper than that as can be seen on the diffuse field…

AKG N90Q ($1499)
Oh my! What an extraordinary headphone. The N90Q represents the first real effort to deliver seriously good sound quality using DSP corrections. It's my feeling that in the long run this type of headphone may eventually be able to deliver a superior subjective listening experience compared with passive headphones of the same price. On the other hand, I also have a little saying, "The first one is usually the worst one." Seems to me the proper perspective here is that the N90Q will be a good indicator of where we're…