Private Ear: The Journey So Far

By John Groom

June 2008

Private Ear Okay, I know that we have to be obsessional to follow this hobby. However, when I agreed to do this column on the headphone experience I still had no idea how addictive and fascinating the journey would be. The truth is I have been spoilt. The exploration has exposed me to a level of auditory resolution and intimacy that I could never afford in a main system and which few of the world’s ‘best’ system even come close to. Nowadays my capable lounge system (Cyrus/Royd/Chord and Naim) spends lonely weeks being ignored.

For all occasions

Of course convenience is part of it all. I often have my ‘sports’ headphones at the gym to drown out the sonic gunge they promote. A quiet moment at the office means I can slip into some comfortable blues via modest headphones without bothering anyone. When flying the first thing that I throw into the bag now are the sound cancellation headphones from Phitek. It is the best and cheapest travel ‘upgrade’ that I have found. At home is the real ‘killer’ however: where I spend hours on the computer and find it is a wonderfully intimate way to enjoy music during the time spent cruising the web. Yes, you could say I am hooked.

Pick of the bunch

With all this gear to review, what do I chose to listen with? Well, even though I am very impressed by the liquid quality of the Stax and the dynamic impact of the Grado headphones for long term listening up close and personal, I have stuck with the Sennheiser HD 650s. They are on the soft side: not as ‘sharp’ as the Grado or as valvelike as the Stax but a good all rounder and with a strange ability to resolve remarkable detail while still being very forgiving. To top it off I use a Cardas cable brought in from Australia and well worth the extra $300. The standard cable sounds hard, electronic and fatiguing in comparison.

Bang for your buck

The next step in my journey was to upgrade the CD input. The trusty ‘stable platter’ Pioneer CD player has now been relegated to the garage where it serves duty ‘running in’ new equipment. In its place is the Quad CD player. This was chosen as ‘life is too short for boring hi-fi’ and the Quad is far from boring. It is also something of a sonic bargain as with its solid bass, intimate midrange and smooth tops: - it is hard to believe that this is a mere $2,000 worth. What clinched the deal for me however was the variable output.

Keep trim

The Quad has an internal, modest but very capable digital volume control. I am very fortunate that the Sennheiser HD 650 is a high impedance headphone, which can handle high line voltages. By using an adapter cable that plugs into the two RCA outputs I can drive the headphones directly out of the back of the Quad. This ‘mainlining’ removes an additional power supply, interconnect cable and associated connections.

This also removes some of the warmth, forgiveness and extra weight that the Stealth cables and Perreaux headphone amplifier were adding. What it does give though is a remarkably direct and honest window into the recording with more of a sense of ‘being there’ than I have experienced for many a long year.

Learn acceptance

This spartan set up has also highlighted for me that yes, headphone listening is also affected by all of those tweak factors that besot so many listeners to conventional systems. Like all hi-fi equipment the headphones sound best when they have had a few weeks to run in and when the cable is not lying on the floor. I even persuaded myself that the whole system benefited when I ‘zapped’ it with a demagnetising gun.

The CD players and headphone amplifiers all benefited from careful attention to supports (I use a dedicated solid wooden stool). Experimenting with interconnects is well worthwhile; I settled on the Stealth for now as I liked the compromise between detail and warmth. My playing with various contact cleaners suggests they are best left alone as they ‘smear’ the sound.

No panaceas

Headphone listening is not the answer to all hi-fi ills. Power supply is a big issue at the moment. Even with the wonderful resolution of good quality headphones, this does not solve the problem. Much of the Auckland power currently gives a harsh, glassy sound to CD. An experiment with an inexpensive power supply simply changed the problem to one of rounding off the sound. Having a heavy-duty dedicated spur simply means when the power sucks you can hear the defect more clearly. Experiments with ‘piggy back’ plugs and various mains cables suggest that these two elements are important. It has been argued that much of what we are listening to is the impact of the power supply. My own experimentation supports this view and in future I would like to try a power regenerator.

In July I head for Europe via Hong Kong. The latter is a ‘hi-fi’ stop- off where I hear rumours of a whole building full of top quality second hand gear. If the rumour is true then I am likely to think that I have died and gone to heaven. Who knows what headphone related gems this might unearth. I might even be tempted yet to go for a valve headphone amplifier or quality DAC.

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

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