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For the past 15 years or so I've been happily grooving with my Grado RS-1 and AKG K340, I've heard other setups during that time but never felt the urge to upgrade or buy anything new. Then I made the mistake of reading through the Head Case LCD-2 thread and decided that I needed to get my hands on an Audeze to hear it for myself, a couple weeks later an LCD-XC showed up on the local classifieds and that was that. First impressions; WTF is this alien tech?? This was a like a replay of my first headphone meet where I heard Biggie's dialed in RS-1 system and had a bunch of preconceptions shattered. How is something this fast while having the bass weight & impact of a Grado PS-1 Pro? So I threw in the next CD and...where the heck is my bass? That big thumping bass from before was gone and the damn thing sounded like an AKG K701. It took me a lot longer than usual to understand what this headphone is about and what it does. I'll begin with what bothered me. On some orchestral works the soundstage puts me in the conductor's position or maybe a couple steps forward of that, I'm in the orchestra instead of having the orchestra in front of me like I'm used to. Technically it's "right" since that's how some of those pieces were recorded & mixed but it's still annoying. There's also a slight shoutiness or resonance of some kind in the midrange which shows up once in a while on electric guitar or large choral works. It's very slight though and it turns out that a lot of the time it's actually the recording itself or my imagination since it's still there when switching to my RS-1. There's been only around a half dozen tracks so far where the colouration is there on the Audeze but not the Grado, and even then it's still pretty minor and way less noticeable than any of the other closed headphones I've heard to date. Also, weight. The LCD-XC is a lead brick so you better get you neck workouts in if you want to wear it for more than an hour or so. Fortunately I'm pretty used to wearing fullface helmets for DH mountain biking so this isn't an issue for me. Other than that, everything else is pretty damn good. It's fairly neutral so unlike the RS-1 it won't butter up shitty recordings by adding warmth & colour to them. But it's also not like the AKG K701 or Senn 800 which make everything sound too dead & flat, even music which isn't supposed to sound that way. What you put into the LCD-XC is what you'll get out of it, you'll hear every last flaw if you want but it's not going to highlight and shove those flaws in your face the way many "analytical" headphones do. I can put my brain in critic mode and easily hear every last glitch in the recordings if I want to, the detail & resolution is there, or I can just chill & enjoy the music which is what I do almost all the time. Actually, that's not entirely true, but I'll get back to this later. I think the coolest thing about the LCD-XC is how it portrays space in a recording. This is the first headphone I've owned where I can hear the individual sound space of every instrument in a recording. Sometimes this gets really weird and somewhat annoying, let me explain. On a good enough recording you'll hear the room boundaries of every single instrument, you can place where the walls are, how far away the microphone was, and how dead or live the room was. And then you start to notice things like the guitar & keyboards were recorded in different rooms, and when they did the mixing the room boundaries overlap each other and the reverb is different. I end up hearing multiple overlapping rooms of sound within the overall soundstage of the headphone. The soundstage is where things can be really good, really crap, or really annoying depending on the recording. Sometimes it feels like it goes on forever with no real boundaries, sometimes it collapses into a tiny blob inside my head, and the worst is when one side is really wide & deep while the other is closed in & cramped. There are times when it makes me want to slap the mixing & mastering engineers and go "WTF are you doing??" I was pretty surprised at how much of my music has an uneven soundstage, one side is often deeper or wider than the other and it keeps changing from song to song in an album or sometimes within a song itself. It's not like a Senn 800 or my AKG K340 where the soundstage is fairly large at all times even when the recording calls for a small one or my RS-1 where it's always going to be small to medium at best, with the Audeze you get what's on the recording and if you don't like it, too bad. Another cool thing is I finally hear clear differences in how instruments project sound. A trumpet for instance will blast a cone of sound at whatever it's pointed at whereas a timpani will radiate a sphere of sound in all directions. With most headphones everything sounds like a ball of sound, sometimes it's bigger, sometimes it's more focused, but it's almost always a ball of some sort. My RS-1 can sometimes get the shape right and have cones of sound coming out of trumpets, but it's kinda rare and there's not enough resolution to get the full effect that I do with the LCD-XC. The Audeze is able to do the projection trick more consistently & convincingly with more of my music, I'm fairly certain I've hit the point where I'm recording limited and not gear limited. Dynamics suprised me, the LCD-XC hits shockingly hard if you feed it enough power, top to bottom, it just slams. It's more punchy & hits harder than my RS-1 and seems fairly close to the Focal Utopia I heard at an audio show last year. But it needs the power, if I plug it into my TEAC UD-503 the dynamics drop back down to around RS-1 level, which is still pretty good but noticeably off from what I'm getting with the transformer output tube amp I built for it. Drive it well and reggae gets that big heavy thump which I've only heard from the PS-1 Pro way back in the day, but only if it's on the recording. Which leads to an issue I had that took a while to fix. A lot of the music I like has rather questionable recording quality, with a dead neutral amp the LCD-XC is too crispy up top and the midbass and lower midrange need some filling in to warm up the sound a bit. This is why I like my flat pad RS-1 as much as I do and still think it's the best headphone for a good chunk of my music, it colours stuff the right way for my tastes and makes everything sound better. I ended up building a new amp with different tubes to roll off the top and fatten up the sound a bit so it sounds more like my RS-1. Once that was done the poorly recorded music sounded a lot better, though still not quite as good as the RS-1. Of course, if I give it good recordings it'll easily beat the RS-1 in pretty much every way. So where does the LCD-XC stand overall? Once I built an amp for it and got a better DAC it's close enough to the flagship mega-buck setups I listened to at the audio show that I don't even think about upgrades. Can the flagships do some things better? Sure - the Focal Utopia has better bass texture, the Audeze CRBN has a nicer soundstage, but to me the differences aren't that big, IMO it's last few percent kinda stuff. I've owned my LCD-XC for almost 5 years and I'm quite happy with it, I've been in the headphone hobby for ~25 years and the only other headphone I can say this about is the RS-1 and possibly the K340. But it definitely took more work than usual to get the full potential out of the 'phone and tune it to where I want it.

This is a mindfuck:

@Voltron - no doubt Al. If she was hundreds/thousands of miles away I'd be a bigger mess. That's for sure. But I'm very much trying to give her the space that she needs to grow so it'll likely be a while before we visit. @recstar24 - these things all hit us differently, but I literally feel your pain on the 'what am i good for' side of things. Do yourself a favor, spend deliberate time with her these next two years before things change even more. You will not regret spending more. @Dusty Chalk - the only thing we can't buy in life is more time. I feel that more each passing year. I do my best not to dwell on it since it is the inevitable but I'm also a softie and can't help myself at times.

Close enough. Live Theater, with The Bard in a redwood grove in Mill Valley. The Curtain TheatreThe Curtain Theatre | Free Shakespeare in Mill Valley - T...― William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost The Stage under The Redwoods

Interesting bit of history here:

Somewhat in Nate’s area of emotions - my daughter turned 16 on Friday. She unfortunately failed her driving test that day (did well but on way back to DMV she tapped a curb pulling into the DMV which can be an auto fail). Very big emotions lol. Got her signed up for a retake yesterday and she passed! First day of independence for her and she drove to Walmart for an sd card, drove her younger brother for 7brew, and drove some friends for bday dinner. Basically I was incredibly nervous and worried even with my son reporting she is a great driver lol. also apparently somewhat sad to know there’s a thing I’ve been useful for I no longer am needed as much. Goes to say parents never stop worrying they just worry about different things lol