faust3d

Microscopic Septet - Take the Z Train (1983)

Good stuff

Anthony Braxton & Richard Teitelbaum - Time Zones (1976)

Dr. John - Gris-Gris Don't know why but today I like this album, maybe I will buy it on CD or LP some day. I hope the LP that I buy smells like weed and swamp.

Peter Hammill - Over This album is so depressingly beautiful and honest, always helps me when I am in emotional turmoil.

As all new good headphones they were over-hyped, so everyone jumped on the band wagon and since these are nice but have their own flavor folks who don't like them sell them. The usual story. There are a lot of SR-007s and HE-6s for sale as well, does not entail there is anything wrong with how they sound.

She is funny I am on to Don "Sugarcane" Harris - Sugar Cane's Got the Blues (1972)

After 12 beers the only thing I will be doing is looking for a place to pee

Never heard Electromotions but ML were never my cup of tea, they always have a disconnect somewhere in the mids and strange FR response in general IMHO.

I feel exactly the opposite.

Do you live in a noisy area? Do you listen at low volumes on speakers vs headphones? Just curious. For the record I come from speaker background, that is I was about 15 years into system building audiophila thing when I got into headphones.

It does not have to be perfect, but yeah if room sucks, neighbors bitch or kids are a sleep it might present a problem to speaker enjoyment. So far I was fortunate to be able to listen in fairly good rooms without much problems. Headphones are a large part of my listening due to the fact that I listen a lot late at night and speakers are not an option with kid sleeping in the other room. Planar speakers, my ESLs for example, are better for late nights since sound does not seem to propagate as much as with dynamic speakers in my experience.

Headphones are nice for late night listening, work or commute, but for me for any kind of critical or extended listening speakers are the only way to go.

IDMish pop music with cool vocals by Róisín Murphy. This album is more pop than previous that were more adventurous.

My problem with used and new ELSs is the ability to drive them well. You will need a big powerful amp for most of the good ESLs. Hard to find one that sounds very realistic and good, is cheap and can drive ESLs well. Hope you find the right combo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Az_7U0-cK0&feature=related

Moloko - Statues

So you basically tilting them a bit backwards to get a more coherent dispersion. I did this with Apogees and Stax worked out great. When I read forward I figured to to the floor.

Never tilled them forward, but somehow think this would make them sound strange because of the floor reflections.

Van der Graaf Generator - A Grounding in Numbers Listening to random songs from this album to get an idea of what they sound like nowadays. Interesting compositions and a new sound for VdGG. I think I am going to have to buy the last 3 albums on CD in the next month or so, I for some reason was putting it a way for some time now, yet all new albums are very solid.

Yeah, a friend of a friend from MA owns(ed) a pair, I believe they where one of the larger models. I have notes somewhere, but they are not handy. I did like them a lot. They manage to combine power and finesse very well. Imaging was also one of the best I heard from planar speakers on par with larger Apogees. As I spend more time listening to various stuff I am discovering that it is very hard to get full scale, full range system with pinpoint imaging that also gets tonal qualities dead on, macro/micro dynamics and micro-detail. What I see is that big amps (tube or sand) with big full range speakers most of the time sound great with all kinds of material and are very good versatile solution if one does not obsess about total realism. On the other hand well made small tube amps with single driver or crossover-less speakers have very life like presentation and can create total illusion of small scale performance like small chamber orchestra or, even better, single performer like solo guitar, sax, singer etc., but when you feed them something complex and at the same time highly dynamic they choke and sound bad. That is why I coming to a conclusion that folks that have musical tastes all over the map must get a big system that does everything relatively well and forget about that strive for lifelike "performance in you room" stuff, or get two system. One for that occasional "you want to have a singer right there in the room" and one for recreating a rock concert. Just my totally unrelated and unasked for thread crap

They actually had them in a dedicated room an they were setup very well. I find that pinpoint imaging is a problem with most Maggies. They are very good at creating a large realistic space, but this space is populated by slightly fuzzy images. In my experience the best imaging comes from SET/SEP amps driving single driver crossover-less speakers. The problem is you give up a lot of other stuff when you go to SE amps with SD speakers. Stax ESL-F81 speakers image very well and so do ESL-57, but they also have a bit of diffusion in that big soundstage they create, as I found out from many hour of listening. They best most realistic musical event recreation I have heard came from dynamic cone driver speaker powered by SE amp.

I heard HE-4/5/6 headphones at the meet and a coworker of my has HE-4 and just got HE-6. Since the room was mostly empty I was able to listen critically. I like their ability to sound very transparent and fast, but overall sound signature is not to my liking. Overly bright with thin mids and just tonally wrong to these ears. I prefer LCD-2 although they do have slightly rolled off HF, they have much meatier and ballsy sound. Since I am coming from a lot of vintage orthos, such as Fostex T-20/30/50 and Yamaha YH-1/100 I like LCD because they are much closer in sound to that sound signature. I spoke with Fing and from that conversation I think the diaphragm used for HE phones is much thinner that traditional orthos and does not have printed traces so they are closer to electrets in this regard. Anyhow they are nice phones, but have their issues. If you like their sound signature they a have a lot to offer.

House of Pain

Visitors - Visitors (1974)