Private Ear: A Bent Wire With Grain

By John Groom

October 2008

The search for perfection in headphone listening

Private Ear Until recently I really thought that I had found a formula for a bit of hi-fi heaven when it came to headphone listening.

At the end of my last column in June I was enjoying the Quad CD player. By using an adapter cable I was able to drive the high impedance Sennheiser 650 headphones directly from the Quad’s variable output without a separate external headphone amplifier.

If you try a classic simple vocal track such as I Had A Dream from that great Joss Stone album The Soul Sessions then it is hard to imagine more of a sense of being there in the studio. Presented this way, her voice is warm, expressive and intimate while dripping information: it is a voice to curl up to. On the Chet Baker Quartet’s Jazz At Ann Arbor this 1950’s recording still lets us fully and cleanly into the nightclub with precise percussion, open vocals and solid bass.

The K.I.S.S. principle

It took me a while to realize what I was doing with the Quad. I was trying to find the most direct sound by having the minimum components between the headphones and the disc. This was an experience more like a race car rather than a comfortable sedan. It has been said of the Mazda MX5 for example that if you drive over a cigarette butt then you can tell what brand it is. If you want a smooth full comfortable and effortless cruise however then, for my money, go for a Lexus.

One advantage of this approach to headphone listening that I discovered is its sensitivity to component changes. The substitution of a gold fuse brought a significant increase in smoothness, weight and resolution and switching to a Crystal mains cable with a Furutech plug gave much greater speed and agility.

The rot sets in

I still wasn’t happy however and with more critical listening realised that the sound became congested when the music was complex. Take that classic Oscar Peterson track from the We Get Requests album, namely You Look Good To Me. By around the three-minute mark when the piano, bass and percussion are really rocking, then the sound gets shiny and smeared. To try and fix this problem by dropping the volume creates another challenge. When the volume control is lower than the three quarter level the drop in resolution and detail is significant. Boring is too harsh a word but the sound certainly recedes and becomes less focused.

A lesson in humility

All of this frustration drove me to pull out the headphone amplifier and interconnects again. Sure enough, the sound relaxed and complex material now held together. What was added of course by the Stealth cables and the Perreaux amplifier was some significant warmth. This sound is not at all unpleasant and great for long term listening but certainly not the ultimate in neutral or critical listening.

Over this period I have had the extended loan of an American DIY headphone amplifier. To be honest I had tossed it in the wardrobe as it pushed three of my prejudice buttons: I don’t like equipment that looks like it was built in someone’s garage, that uses an external ‘wall wart’ power supply and that works off op-amps. Three strikes down for this one.

I could not have been more wrong on all three. Firstly the appearance is simply something that I had to ‘get over’ and one advantage of the ‘wall wart’ it to remove the potentially noisy power supply well away from the other sensitive electronics. When it came to the use of op. amps it seems to be a statement of faith in some quarters that these are inherently inferior. I am not qualified to get into that conversation. All I know is that this crudely finished grey box blows my socks off.

With the late Eva Cassidy singing Tall Trees In Georgia from her Live At Blues Alley CD her folk-like purity is fully captured and I am right there with her in the nightclub lamenting the aging process for a woman of a certain age and rooting for her to find some consolation in her loneliness. The capture of that fickle emotional quality is remarkable. Okay, it does not have the full rock solid bass control of the Perreaux and may not be ultimately as clean and certainly it is not as pretty but I like it as it matches my current way of listening.

Tried and true

It was time now to address the interconnect issue and currently I am using one of my all time favourites which is the Chord Signature cable. When this cable was released, Roy Gregory of Hi-Fi+ magazine described it as “like taking your foot off the singer’s throat”. This dramatic metaphor is so apt particularly in the context of headphone listening. To say that it opens up the sound seems limp.

With Eva Cassidy I am so close to her on the stage that I just want to throw my arm around her shoulders and tell her not to worry: it will all work out. Again it is not a perfect cable as it can be a bit coloured on some material however in an imperfect world this is a brilliant compromise.

We all need a friend

I started this more recent exploration with a purist approach to headphone listening. I genuinely believed that ‘less is more’ and that with a headphone plugged into the back of a CD player I had achieved that goal. I am discovering that it is in fact more complicated. Quality headphone amps and interconnects may seem expensive but they have been developed for ‘sound’ reasons. While all electronic components add their own signature they are also solving a problem.

It is all about deciding what faults you can live with and which you cannot: a bit like relationships really. With headphone listening I have to have a sense of presence on simple material and of weight with an orchestra, the rest is optional.

Enjoy the journey

On reflecting back I am reminded of the great Peter Walker of Quad fame who said that the perfect amplifier was ‘a straight wire with gain’ and now realise that I was trying to create something similar with the headphone experience. In the process of reproducing recorded music however, it is inevitable that there are sonic compromises.

I am going to have to wait to get to heaven for perfection. In the meantime I am learning to accept that we are involved in a hobby, which is not so much about a straight wire with gain but more like using a bent wire with grain.

John is an executive coach and mentor who lives on the North Shore of Auckland

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