SF Bay Area LCD-3 Tour

[purrin]

Purrin have you thought to contact Alex or Sankar about these to see if you have a defective pair? They sounded absolutely fantastic at RMAF.

I don't think they are defective - but it's possible that we can chalk it up to production variances. I spoke with someone from HF and there are anecdotes that some pairs may be shelved more than the others. I 100% agree with Bob regarding the thickness and veil compared to the rev2. Mr. Googleli (god help us) over at HF has said the same thing, but in this instance he actually prefers the thicker sound. I believe one or two others over at HF have stated that they returned their LCD3s because of the thickness and veil; and a few others have actually applied the TP mod. They do sound great with the TP mod though.

These impressions are measurable. The LCD3s are about 3-4 db down from 2k-8kHz region compared to the LCD2r2s: http://www.changstar...topic,51.0.html Note the perceived extra sub-bass of the LCD3 is also measurable.

Now how else do the LCD3 measure better???

As far as the distortion measurements go, fuck 'em. They are low enough and usually not a major concern for headphones, except maybe in the bass. The major strength of the LCD3 is it's smoothness. No peaky shit until the high-treble (seen in FR and CSDs). And trust me, no one hears peaks in the highest treble 1/2 octave.

Edited January 3, 2012 by purrin

[purrin]

Nope...I think you've got it the other way around.

So given the log scale, how does 0.03 distortion compared to 0.01 sound like at 100Hz?

Edited January 3, 2012 by purrin

[khaos974]

I have some problems with several aspects of Tyll's THD+N graphs, the vertical axis is in % of THD+N, it seems correct, depending on the headphones involved, high levels of Harmonic distortion is expected for the bass, however how come we have peaks at 20/200/2000 Hz for every headphone. Other transducers for which THD has been measured with a frequency sweep also don't show such peaks. Also if we look at the peaks just after 200 Hz, they appear at the same frequencies regardless of the headphone, I don't explain this.

They could be measuring artifacts, induced by the boxed enclosure that Tyll uses, or by the measuring gear, but then it would make sense to eliminate them from the final graph to increase readability.

Alternatively, it looks like FFT of the headphone's response to a tree tone signal (20/200/2000 Hz), the problem is the other peaks don't correspond to harmonics, or even IMD. Also, it wouldn't make sense to have a different floor noise depending on the headphones. And finally, I trust that Tyll wouldn't have mislabel led the axis legends.

Could I have some precision?

Also, from the LCD2-3 graphs.

Both show that the THD+N figure drop from to 80 to 90 dB SPL, there's no reason for harmonic distortion to drop when increasing volume. It means two things: that THD didn't increase because of higher level (good power handling) and that the THD+N figure is dominated by its noise component which explains the drop as background noise is constant. The second means that the harmonic distortion component of the LCD2-3 is buried in the noise and cannot be picked up by the measuring gear. And as I said earlier, there's no reason for transducer to show little peaks in %THD+N at specific frequencies shared by all transducers, those peaks should be disregarded.

[Torpedo]

Those peaks are a known issue of the analyzing software. You'll find them on many other distortion plots elsewhere.

[purrin]

Purrin have you thought to contact Alex or Sankar about these to see if you have a defective pair? They sounded absolutely fantastic at RMAF.

Seriously considering this now. I blame it all on Jude. He stole the good sounding pairs.

[shipsupt]

Just wanted to thank purrin for the chance to listen to the 3's when they made the tour through the Bay Area... via Christian and Whitney.

I finally got to listen to a pair of r2's recently that in 30 minutes had me more interested in upgrading my r1's than the 3's did after a few hours...?

Are you still thinking of exchanging them?

[visualguy]

I believe one or two others over at HF have stated that they returned their LCD3s because of the thickness and veil;

I was one of them. My LCD-3 sounded pretty bad. My LCD-2r2 were quite good.

[NekoAudio]

purrin, I sent you a PM a while ago. Looks like you haven't read it yet. Just wanted to let you know in case you missed it.