Gu Sensei

Awesome work Tyll, your efforts are much appreciated! Thank you to those that contributed gear as well. What an excellent community. If I were stateside, I would love to contribute to the project and send over my SRM-717 or 323S to compare with the Blue Hawaii. Shipping to and from Japan would be brutal though. I and likely quite a few others would be very interested to see how the 007s and 009s perform on a Stax amp and what differences show up in the measurements in comparison with the Blue Hawaii. There already is a bit of discussion on whether the 009s are $5000 phones or a $10,000 system. I feel perfectly content with the two amps I have but would like to see if the measurements reveal any deficiencies. TMoney, if there is a Stax amp not too far from Tyll, that might be a reason for him to hang on to your 009s a little bit longer.

(I read the welcome message two years or so ago and have been lurking since. I finally joined up as I figured this would probably be the best place for information/discussion on the 009s but have held off posting until I had something substantial to contribute. I’ll briefly summarize some impressions but am guessing these frequency response measurements will be of more interest.) As I have posted elsewhere, I have found them to be quite simply the most resolving, capable, and transparent headphones I have ever owned or tried. I have never experienced such precise imaging nor been able to so clearly observe dynamic shifts or soundstage differences in recordings. Everything sounds effortless. Probably, I am most impressed with just how voiceless these phones seem. Every other ‘neutral’ pair of headphones I have tried has had some character beyond simple frequency response variations that seems present going from track to track. I am at a loss to describe any sort of sonic voice the 009s are adding to the listening experience... except in one area; their treble response. I do find the treble to be a bit troublesome and with their extreme resolution and clarity, issues with poor or bright recordings get exacerbated. I have been tinkering with equalization to smooth out the treble and pull it back. These graphs are very helpful to that end but I am completely new to this and hope some others will be equalizing and posting about the gear they are using with graphs of their adjustments. Since their release, I have done the occasional google.co.jp image search for some frequency response measurements and finally found some. These were posted in this thread which is a discussion forum on Stax but I am not too clear on the methods for getting the measurements. (not sure why but the measurements are not all being shown. clicking on them brings them up though)