My current headphone of choice is Shure's E5c in-ear model. Sure, the Shures are expensive at $500, but after a year's listening, I'm convinced they're worth it. They can be surprisingly comfortable, once you've chosen the correct in-ear plug size. Their isolation rivals that of any of the electronic noise-canceling models I've heard—and whether it has to do with the Shures' lack of electronics, two drive-units per channel, or something else, they sound much, much better. Plus, the E5cs are tiny, unobtrusive,…
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Michael Fremer wrote about the Shure E5c in December 2004 (Vol.27 No.12):
I visited the Revel room on the last day of the January 1999 CES, expecting another dynamic demo of their Ultima line. Instead, I found a pair of floorstanding Performa F30s connected to a rack full of the best Mark Levinson electronics. Deeply impressed by the dynamics and clarity of this first model in the new Performa line, I called Revel's Kevin Voecks as soon as I got back to New York City, but was told that another Stereophile reviewer had already got first dibs on the F30. Would I be interested in one of the other Revels? Well, yes, sure, but...
A pair of Revel's Ultima Studios…
Setup
However, the initial results I obtained were what I had feared from the wide-dispersion specs. The speaker end of my room is fairly hard, with large windows and mostly nonabsorbent surfaces, which added some glare to the presentation. In addition, the large, reflective yew-wood credenza immediately to the left of the left speaker, and the absorbent sofa to the right of the right speaker, created a significant tonal imbalance. If I toed the F30s in so much that the left speaker aimed away from the credenza, then the right one was aimed at it. Either way, the glare was not entirely…
However, the initial results I obtained were what I had feared from the wide-dispersion specs. The speaker end of my room is fairly hard, with large windows and mostly nonabsorbent surfaces, which added some glare to the presentation. In addition, the large, reflective yew-wood credenza immediately to the left of the left speaker, and the absorbent sofa to the right of the right speaker, created a significant tonal imbalance. If I toed the F30s in so much that the left speaker aimed away from the credenza, then the right one was aimed at it. Either way, the glare was not entirely…
I hauled out the usual potboilers to exercise the F30's woofer: the drum whacks of Holst's Suite 1 (Dunn/Dallas Wind Symphony, Reference Recordings RR-39CD), the Eagles' "Hotel California" (Hell Freezes Over, Geffen GEFD-24725), organ pedals (Die Orgel Tanzt, Bayer BR150 009), and the synthesized depths of Béla Fleck's Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (Warner Bros. 26562-2). The F30 took them all on and delivered powerful, deep, impressive sounds, the bass well-extended with excellent definition. Because the low response was so clean and well-damped, the F30's low-frequency potential was…
The reproductions of good pop, rock, and jazz material were beyond cavil, but some live recordings, like the Eagles' "Hotel California" or Eric Clapton's "Layla" (Unplugged, Reprise 45024-2), offered an exciting propinquity to the performers at the expense of some compression of the depth of the crowd. Lewis Nash's cymbals on "Tin Tin Deo," from Oscar Peterson Meets Roy Hargrove and Ralph Moore (Telarc CD-83399), were deliciously true but closer than previously experienced, even though the rest of the combo sounded just right.
As noted above, strings were generally beautifully presented…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" aluminum-dome tweeter, 5.25" inverted magnesium-cone midrange driver, 10" inverted aluminum-cone woofer. Crossover: 24dB/octave slopes at 220Hz, 2.8kHz. Frequency responses: 33Hz-16kHz, ±1dB (in-room); 34Hz-20kHz, ±0.75dB (in-room relative to target response); 33Hz-15kHz, ±1dB (including first reflections); 31Hz-16kHz, ±1.5dB (listening window). Impedance: 6 ohms nominal, 3 ohms minimum. Sensitivity: 87dB/2.83V/m.
Dimensions: 45¼" H by 14 3/8" W by 16" D. Weight: 90 lbs each.
Finish:…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital source: Meridian 508-24 CD player, Mark Levinson No.360 DAC.
Preamplifiers: Z-systems rdp-1, Sonic Frontiers Line-3.
Power amplifiers: McCormack DNA-1 (Rev.A mod), Sonic Frontiers Power-2.
Loudspeakers: PSB Gold i and Revel Ultima Studio for direct comparisons; the Meridian DSP6000, Genesis 500, and Artemis EOS+Bass Module for historical reference.
Cables: Interconnects: Cardas Golden Cross, Cardas Cross, JPS Balanced Super-Conductor 2, Straight Wire Maestro. Speaker: Straight Wire Maestro, Harmonic Technology Pro-9 Bi-Wire.—Kalman…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
My estimation of the Revel F30's sensitivity was fractionally higher than specified, at 87.5dB(B)/2.83V/m, but this was within the usual margin of error for this measurement. The impedance (fig.1) hovered around the 4 ohm mark through the midrange, with a generally higher value above that region, even with the tweeter's level control set to "+1" (as it was for this measurement). The phase angle is generally low, but even when it is fairly high, as in the low treble, this never coincides with a minimum magnitude value. There is a coincidence of 45 degrees…
But the on-axis response indicates only part of the sound that reaches a listener's ear, and so I average seven measurements at 5 degree intervals across a 30 degree window on the tweeter axis to provide a "listening window" curve. Revel does something similar, though they extend the spatial averaging to include the ±10 degrees vertical angle. My spatially averaged horizontal-window measurement is shown in fig.4, spliced to the complex sum of the individual nearfield measurements. The bass seems well-extended, with the -6dB point lying at the port tuning frequency of 24Hz. But due to the 2-…
The match in dispersion between the midrange unit at the top of its passband and the tweeter at the bottom of its band is also excellent, with just a hint of an off-axis bulge in this region. All things being equal, I would have imagined that this slight presence-region excess in the speaker's off-axis behavior would subjectively compensate for the similarly slight lack of energy in the on-axis response. However, it's possible that it overcompensated in Kal's listening environment, meaning that well-damped rooms will work better with the F30 than live rooms.
In the vertical plane (fig.8…