Post by Owen Y on Feb 20, 2019 15:07:15 GMT 12
Herb Reichert reports for Inner Fidelity. " In my realm, the (Abyss) AB-1266 Phi is not only the most resolving, most natural-sounding, headphone I know – it is the finest transducer I have ever fed a signal to. "  " I like participating in worldwide headphone culture. I like the age, ethnic, and gender diversity of headphone people. "  (Focal Stellia headphone, with the very cool looking SPL Phonitor headphone amp- preamp)
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Post by colinf on Feb 21, 2019 22:08:20 GMT 12
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Post by cooksferry on Feb 22, 2019 6:14:00 GMT 12
I took a look on HeadFi TV the other where forum founder Jude was running over his picks for Canjam. So many products and many are so expensive. Headfi forums became a constant babble over the current flavour of the month and in the end I jumped ship around 2010 and haven't been back since.
Like to have a decent audition of some of the higher end Focal phones though. Had a very short listen at The Listening Post last year but wasn't really in the mood and didn't have my own music.Can't even remember which model I was listening to.
I don't have what would be considered a good open dynamic phone any more, whittled down to planars (Oppo x 2 and Audeze) and a couple of closed back Audio Technicas.
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Post by colinf on Feb 22, 2019 15:18:58 GMT 12
I haven't been on headfi much either, so many contrasting opinions to wade through! I just heard the Focals amongst others at the hifi shows briefly, which got me interested. Going to the hifi shops was good to have a listen in a quiet place. It's good to bring the headphone amp you own in as you can get a better impression of a headphone that way. I brought in an early version of my Lhp1. I'm beginning to suspect that the headphone amp and dac or source makes more of a difference to long term listening enjoyment than the actual headphone! Apart from comfort of course. The Utopias are very costly and listening to them back to back with the Clears was interesting. They are very similar to the Utopias but with a magnesium-aluminium diaphragm instead of beryllium. To me they have most of the sound of the Utopias but at less than half the cost. The expensive phones do offer finer detail and harmonic resolution though. Once I heard the Focals I didn't want to listen to the Audezes anymore! It would be interesting to see what the Stellias offer. My old AKG K601s are still fairly revealing for their price though, NZ$600 11 years ago. The new Abyss Diana looks interesting as well. So, is there a difference between audiophiles and headphone-people?
AMR-iFi R&D
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Post by Owen Y on Feb 24, 2019 13:06:25 GMT 12
You can check out the FOCAL Stellia 'reference closed back design' headphone & FOCAL Arche, new DAC-Headphone Amp, in this video (at 0.41)... The latter with " dedicated amps (settings) for every single Focal headphones..."
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