I recently won a pair of Audeze EL-8 headphones via a Richer Sounds Facebook competition, something I shall be eternally grateful for. At £600 they are far beyond anything I would normally have paid and are a million miles away from my current (good if slightly old) Sennheiser HD555 headphones.
I have now put a good 10+ hours of music through these headphones and can hopefully put into words my impressions.
It has been a little while since I have added any new equipment to my music listening as I don’t have the space to set up a proper listening room these days and the way in which I listen day-to-day has changed over the years. I’m a big radio fan, I love to listen to my favorite BBC station throughout the day and Classic FM of an evening but this sort of listening doesn’t necessitate sitting in front of a pair of speakers or wearing headphones. I have a Tivoli Model One table radio, the very table radio that kick started the modern fashion for these devices which sits in the conservatory playing at relatively low volume which does a remarkable job of providing good quality sound to go with general activities. If I’m not listening to the radio I tend to stream music in one form or another either via Apple Music from the iPhone or from my NAS drive via a Squeezebox.
I do at times sit and listen to music in a little more formal and serious way through my Sennheiser HD555 headphones that while a good few years old are still decent quality. These have been my reference for a while as to how well an album is engineered and how immersive an experience it can be. I thought I was getting everything recorded through them – I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is where the Audeze EL-8’s come in. I have sat immobile, stunned, slack jawed if you like at some of the revelations they have presented. Albums I previously though I had heard everything from have depths, levels, whole sections that simply weren’t there, or more likely were so hidden within the clutter as to go unnoticed. The soundstage they present is vast, deep and astonishingly clear.
I sat in the dark last night with Piece by Piece by Katie Melua playing. The very first track had me mesmerized. The bass isn’t forward but it is deep and tight, the instruments sit precisely within the soundscape that is otherwise vast and utterly silent while Katie’s voice is bang in the middle. I could have sworn she was there in the room, right in front of me singing for me and just for me. The experience is oddly relaxing because the quality of the sound is very neutral; there is no emphasis on any particular frequency or bias. The bass may be strong on occasion but only in the way it was engineered to be and not in a forward way. Highs are crisp but not harsh and voices hold your attention one hundred percent. In comparison I have discovered the Sennheiser’s were a little bass heavy. Not in the way a pair of Beats would be and not in a way that made it distort but they pushed the bass forward in their attempt to make it…well bassy. The Audeze headphones produce a note that is far deeper yet not forward with fantastic leading edge attack and a rich timbre. They’re like very, very expensive floor standers and the way they thump through the floor as much as they put out sound.
I have a fairy wide and varied taste in music so I’ve put everything from Katie to Black Eyed Peas to the LSO to Jarre to Eno to Massive Attack through them over the last couple of days and every single track has amazed me with extra clarity, increased scope and hidden gems within the mix. Little sounds that had previously been hidden pop out and bring a smile, emotions from the singer seem more real and even the occasional thump from a bumped orchestral instrument or the pedal from a piano coming back up add to the realness.
What has also become evident is how compression affects the music we listen to. Many of the albums I have on my NAS drive are in MP3 format and not all of them are at a particularly high bit rate and you can really tell they have been ‘mucked about with’ when you compare them with a flac file or music direct from a CD. I have noticed this before when I have sat down with good headphones but not to the same degree that at the end of the day is the best indication of just how transparent, how detailed and just how utterly superb these cans can be.
robinhunterblog 