Audeze LCD-3

[livewire]

Picked up this little gem at the other place...

[visualguy]

The frequency and square wave responses sure as heck seem to do a good enough job of explaining the "significant difference in the sound of the bass between the LCD-2 and the SR-009" to me.

Care to elaborate? The frequency response is pretty similar in the bass between the two - only a 1-2dB difference. I don't know how to translate the square wave response into anything meaningful about how the bass sounds.

Also, what conclusion do you draw from these measurements? Which headphones sound closer to what's on the recording in the bass?

[Pars]

My point is that you need a reference to determine what's "on the recording". I use full-range speakers. I was wondering what Clarkmc2 uses as a reference when he determines that people are usually looking for more bass than what is on the recording when they prefer a pair of dynamic headphones to the Stax flagship.

I always thought that you would compare that to what was heard in a hall with acoustic instruments. What I mean is something like an orchestra in the same hall that the recording was made in. My brother always uses a recording of the CSO (Bernstein/Shostakovich 1 and 7) as his reference, and I would have to agree with him. Of course this is relying on aural memory, but probably the best type of reference that you are going to get.

[visualguy]

I always thought that you would compare that to what was heard in a hall with acoustic instruments. What I mean is something like an orchestra in the same hall that the recording was made in. My brother always uses a recording of the CSO (Bernstein/Shostakovich 1 and 7) as his reference, and I would have to agree with him. Of course this is relying on aural memory, but probably the best type of reference that you are going to get.

Live would indeed be a good reference, but... One problem is that aural memory is seriously bad. Another problem is that the acoustics where you sit in the auditorium are different from what is captured by the recording microphones at their locations.

[TMoney]

Care to elaborate? The frequency response is pretty similar in the bass between the two - only a 1-2dB difference. I don't know how to translate the square wave response into anything meaningful about how the bass sounds.

Also, what conclusion do you draw from these measurements? Which headphones sound closer to what's on the recording in the bass?

As far as understanding the measurements, If memory serves me correctly I believe Tyll posted some primers on his measurement techniques back when he first started up inner-fidelity. I bet with a little searching you'll have no trouble finding them.

Once you read them, it helps to start going through his reviews and try to see if you can match up his subjective impressions with the objective measurements. Once you've looked at enough of Tyll's reviews you start to get a feel for how the measurements influence his subjective impressions. Eventually you'll be able to look at the measurements and intuitively guess how the headphones are going to sound.

Tyll can comment here, but in reading his reviews I can't really remember any occasion where his impressions haven't been borne by the measurements.

As far as what conclusions I draw, I know I hear things somewhat similarly to Tyll so between the measurements and his subjective impressions I feel like I can get a pretty good idea for how the headphone is going to sound relative to the gear I've had and heard.

[Tyll Hertsens]

Thanks, mate. I need to do a lot more of those primers .... (fucking rapper cans.)

I tend to think the reference of live sound is hard to translate to headphones. One thing I think does translate well is the human voice.

It's something we hear a LOT, so we're naturally familiar with it. I think extraordinarily so.

So I like to listen to vocals carefully, listening to the timbre of the voice and how convincingly real it is.

Other than that, I think the best thing you can have when evaluating headphones is having heard a LOT of them.

I also think Steve Guttenberg was right in his article at innerfideilty about his reference tracks:

that extreme familiarity with personal set of very good recordings used specifically for evaluation is important.

Combine lots of experience with headphones and the personal test tracks, and it can be a pretty quick process to get a "read" on a pair of headphones.

Edited November 8, 2011 by Tyll Hertsens

[deepak]

visualguy, again, your dynamic headphone bass is more likely than your electrostatic headphone bass to sound like your speaker bass because your speakers are dynamics.

This is a good point, but IMO even true full range electrostatic speakers like Sound Labs will have more impact than all the electrostatic headphones I've heard.

[n3rdling]

Agreed, but that could be due to body absorption as arnaud mentioned

[Tyll Hertsens]

^^ Sponge Bob has troubles.

[ujamerstand]

^^ Sponge Bob has trebles.

FTFY.

[Clarkmc2]

My point is that you need a reference to determine what's "on the recording". I use full-range speakers. I was wondering what Clarkmc2 uses as a reference when he determines that people are usually looking for more bass than what is on the recording when they prefer a pair of dynamic headphones to the Stax flagship.

Well, since you asked. But to preface, I was not trying to turn this into a Stax thread or ruffle any feathers. Then again I wasn't trying not to.

Like Tyll is very familiar with the voice, I am an acoustic bass junkie. I hear them live all the time, usually unamplified. For many years now. This gives me a great reference. If you want to try this, take a good version of Patricia Barber's Cafe Blue, like the Premonition Records 24K gold HDCD. (I would not recommend the Mobile Fidelity version.) It was recorded and mastered by Jim Anderson. Look him up. This recording is widely considered to have fully captured the acoustic bass experience, perhaps like never before or since.

An alternative disc, almost there, is Super Double Bass, by Gary Carr ( LIM XR007, xrcd24). Don't use vinyl, by the way. It craps out at 35HZ, not good for acoustic bass.

Now listen to it on as many systems as you can, headphone and speaker based. Do this for years, frequently comparing to live music, and get back to me. I'm not trying to be a smart ass, just saying what it takes get a handle on this.

As well as many systems not my own that I have heard, I have a nice "lab" right here in this room. The JBL 4345 speakers are high efficiency biamped four ways anchored by 18" 2245Hs, one of the most high fidelity woofers ever designed*. Believe me, they wax most high end offerings in the bass reproduction department, at any price. Then I have a Hammer Dynamics Super 12 system powered by a FirstWatt F2 JFET. This amp renders these single driver speakers linear in tonal and dB response at least down to 30HZ. Lastly I have a pair of Stax Sr007mkII, with several amps to choose from. When I put this CD on someone else's system, I don't need a week to tell what I am hearing.

Don't want to go through all this? Trust Tyll. He's earned it.

This experience and the fact that I have been listening since the 1950s gives me a bit of background to at least put my thesis forward. I'll stand by it. The Omega series Staxen give you what is in the recording, no less and no more. Bassheads always have and always will prefer more bass than is on the recording; it follows naturally. So they almost always prefer good dynamic phones to top flight Stax. Also, while many are willing to settle for lower sound quality to get more bass impact, I am not. To each his own.

Me, I don't care much about any of this. It's all about the music. Which I like to hear like the original source. No more and no less.

*A little background. JBL, love them or not, has for many years devoted a lot of R & D and experience to reproducing bass full and true, on both studio monitors and high end home systems. The Everest II system used the latest of JBL's high fidelity engineering to make woofers and compression drivers that produce distortion at amplifier level specs. That would be a small fraction of the distortion in any other designs I am aware of. All this passed mostly unnoticed; JBL is sniffed at by high end buyers.

If you have ever lived with the large blue face studio monitors of the 1980s, you know how loud, accurate, high impact, low distortion bass sounds. I have never heard anything to match the experience. It is like a carefully kept secret or something. I can talk about it all year and I still feel like I belong to a secret society.

Edited November 9, 2011 by Clarkmc2

[robm321]

^^ Sponge Bob has troubles.

[DefectiveAudioComponent]

There are some other parts missing of the Wikiphonia page for the LCD3, but the waterfall and frequency response graphs are there at least:

http://wiki.faust3d.com/wiki/index.php?title=Audeze_LCD-3

[arnaud]

There are some other parts missing of the Wikiphonia page for the LCD3, but the waterfall and frequency response graphs are there at least:

http://wiki.faust3d....le=Audeze_LCD-3

There's no standard which doesn't help but at least, we can say that Audeze is taking no chance with the LCD3 waterfall graph:

• Long time window (6ms) => That's not bad in itself as some (bad) headphones do ring down to 6ms but among the well controlled phones (HD800, SR009), 3ms scale would be more reasonable
  
• High truncation floor (-25dB) => Although there's no easy way to tell what is audible, I think 35dB should be the very minimum (esp. when the mid/highs are ~10dB down from the 0dB point...)
  
• No equalization => This may be right depending on the test rig, but in this case, it helps the LCD because the highs are shelved down from 0dB so you see 15dB worth of decay at most in region where resonances occur
  
• Very heavy frequency smoothing => You won't see sharp ridges even if they existed
  

Not saying the headphone measures bad actually, but that makes me appreciate Tyll's work (and motivate me to help him get waterfall plotting capability)

[johnwmclean]

Here is comparo with LCD-2 rev2, the bright red line is the LCD-3.

Edited November 14, 2011 by johnwmclean

[RudeWolf]

I think that I've seen a bigger difference between two LCD-2's.

[morphsci]

I think that I've seen a bigger difference between the left and right driver on LCD-2s.

FTFY

[Voltron]

Harsh.

[morphsci]

I will mellow out after the beer starts to take effect.

[Voltron]

Thank heavens.

[swt61]

I gotta go with Jim on this one. That's a whole lotta extra dough, for what on paper seems to be very little difference.

But I'll hold my tongue until I've gotten to compare the two myself.

[Voltron]

I gotta agree.

[shellylh]

FTFY

LOL

[shellylh]

I gotta go with Jim on this one. That's a whole lotta extra dough, for what on paper seems to be very little difference.

But I'll hold my tongue until I've gotten to compare the two myself.

Same here. Although, I cannot see myself buying one unless it can grade homework.

[seacard]

Surprisingly little gushing so far from the people that have received it. I would have expected a more dramatic celebration, even this early in the process. I'm sure as more people receive it, the glorification will become more prevalent, but I am a bit flabbergasted that anybody on head-fi would receive a $2,000 headphone and not proclaim it the greatest thing since sliced R10s.