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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…

Electronics
The AKG N90Q is a fully active electronic headphone; it can not be used passively when the battery runs out after about 10 hours. That included storage battery will come in handy on trans-oceanic flights.

Documentation for the AKG N90Q is currently very slim; only the Spec Sheet and very basic Quick Start Guide are publicly available. It is quite early on in the introduction of this product at this writing, I expect we'll see a more in-depth manual in the near future.

Fortunately, I was put in contact with Dr. Ulrich Horbach, Engineering Fellow, Harman…

Sound Quality
For the most part I'll be talking about the sound quality of the N90Q in Standard mode with the EQ set to mid-point unless otherwise specified.

Generally speaking, I found the N90Q fundamentally neutral with a tendance toward a dry and lack luster sound. There's an audio truism that an initial impression of "a bit boring" is better than "wow, exciting" as too much of anything can get annoying after a while, and "a bit boring" is often an indicator of simple neutrality that serves the music better in the long run. To a first approximation, I'd put the N90Q in the…

Plots on this page were taken in Standard Stage mode and with EQ set to the middle position. Tru note calibration was done once at the beginning of the first four FR sweeps in various positions around the ear, and once prior to the last center position FR sweep ensuring best case calibration for other response measurements thereafter.

Interestingly the response curve from 10Hz to about 2kHz matches the shape of the Harman target response (HTR) curve but has only about 40% of the amplitude of the HTR.…

[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.]

It’s nice to hear different…

Aaron Gandia’s Listen/Eval
[Aaron says his tonal bias is to prefer warm and natural presentations. Most of the time he listened without his glasses as I requested (thanks, Tyll for the pointer). These are Aaron’s own words]

Photo 14-1. Aaron Gandia contemplates Nirvana

Alejandra Robles [see Episode 13 for descriptions of these recordings]:

Both headphones have very different qualities, but both in a good hi-fi way. Each headphone is built on a different point of view of how to go about it.

The Utopia is all about the top end. It has a lot of definition…

Matt Davis’s Listen/Eval

Morph The Cat by Donald Fagen:

LCD-4: Fuller and warmer low mids. Lows are definitely rounder than on the Focals.

Utopia: Have a somewhat hyped upper band 7k+. Air frequency transient response is absolutely there.

Both cans have great air bands but the LCD-4 is more natural there. “Punch” is good on both. Both headphones are articulate. Our main distinction is their tonal contour. Both headphones sound incredible.

You Lied by 52nd Street Blues Project (Chesky Records):

Great natural live recording with a “you…

Saturday afternoon was a wake up call. The Oppo HA-2 was completely discharged. I had left it on, figuring it would charge while powered, but I was wrong. Even when fed from a USB splitter with a high current charger connected to the USB A male, the Oppo will not charge when it is turned on. So sadly, we cannot use the Oppo HA-2 as a desktop DAC or it will discharge if left on. It only takes an hour to fully charge it and then it seems to last a day, but I could not take a chance. Since the Deckard DAC’s line output is muted when a headphone is plugged in the front, it cannot be…