Off topic: personal/portable audio

From left to right: Sony XBA-A2; Astell & Kern AK100 player; UE Triple.Fi 10P with custom cable; Audio-Technica IM50; Audio-Technica IM03; B&W P7; 6G iPod Nano.

I spend a lot of time on the road. Probably quite a lot more than the average person*. This has always been the case because I’ve almost always been in the service industry in a client-facing role, which means plenty of air miles. In a bid to make the commute a bit more pleasant – possibly even enjoyable – I slowly sank into the world of portable audio. This was 2003. I’m sure like horology, cars, cigars and the like there are more than a small number of people here who’ve also made that journey. Today’s post is a sort of meandering of thoughts – there are a number of parallels between photography and personal audio, both in the industry and the hobby, and perhaps some thoughts to take away. Plus, which serious listener isn’t always seeking the ideal setup? 🙂 Read on, or skip forward if you’re not an audiophile.

*According to my frequent flyer statement, 540,000 miles in 2014.

Unfortunately, I’m also tone deaf; karaoke parlours are one of my biggest fears along with finding all your batteries dead or cards full of un-deletable images or that all of your tripod screws are loose. But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a variety of music from modern trashy pop* to something a bit more baroque 17th century. I suppose that’s the equivalent of Instagram to Daguerre, or something like that. Finding one setup – headphone, player/source and at a push, an amp, I suppose – to cover them all is like expecting one presentation medium to be great for every genre of image and photography. A tintype doesn’t work as a jpeg. And an Instagram image doesn’t work as a large format Ultraprint, either. A similar argument can be applied to lenses, hardware, rendering styles and the like.

*Not everything; it seems that much like modern images, we’ve been slowly deceived into believing that turning everything up to 11 is better; it isn’t. It makes it very fatiguing to listen to, not to mention very difficult to play cleanly without strange artefacts and sibilance. Empty space – air – is noticeably lacking in everything after around the turn of the millennium.

Whilst I’m willing to carry an inordinate amount of equipment to make the perfect image, my tolerance for audio bulk is rather less. In fact, in an ideal world, I’d just like to plug in a really good pair of headphones to my iPhone and be done with it. Fortunately, unlike with images, I honestly lack the ability to discern much above the diminishing return point, which makes life much easier (and cheaper). But I do know what I like, and unfortunately I’ve also found that’s not so easy to achieve for whatever reason.

There is a difference between technical accuracy/ transparency and enjoyability. I’m very much in the latter camp; listening to music is a very passive activity. You are presented with the content and must take it in, absorb yourself – or not; I suppose it’s much like image viewing in that sense. Audio hardware is a consumption device, not a production one – unlike a camera. I realise how much of a challenge this presents, because it’s like perusing a photo book and making a judgement on the images without knowing what the original intention was, or what the ideal presentation of that image could be; a lot of the time, a bad medium can really spoil the photograph. Similarly, I’ve found that there are songs which I’ve simply not enjoyed for whatever reason that just came alive with the right playback.

Another lesson I’ve learned is that more expensive is not necessarily better; this is again linked to the idea of enjoyability. For reasons of portability and isolation, I’ve mainly used IEMs rather than full-size circumaural headphones; the biggest improvement in sound quality you can get from ‘normal’ earbuds is by doing nothing more than improving the seal, thereby isolating yourself from outside noise and at the same time allowing the extreme lower and higher frequencies to be delivered with less attenuation. I started with single driver dynamic drivers, but found those eventually to lack the detail – and thus immersion – I was looking for. I like picking out the details and feeling as though I’m sitting in the front row or at the conductor’s stand. (If this sounds like my approach to presenting images and printing, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.) I tried a couple of open circumaural setups at that point; they improved soundstage but weren’t practical at any level for a traveller. And the one I really liked the most was not practical at all for anybody – Stax SR007II Omega Mark IIs, with a tube amp. Ouch.

It’s interesting to see just how fast personal/portable audio at a sort of prosumer level has taken off in the last decade – I remember it being nearly impossible to find replacement Shure tips; now just about mobile accessory store seems to have several varieties of headphone up to the several hundred dollar range. Tips? Cables? Interconnects? Even amps? Take your pick. 2005-6 was the era of quite noticeable improvements with more being better; sort of the D700/D3 analog, I suppose. The IEMs I bought at that point – a first generation set of UE Triple.Fi 10Ps from the numbered, Jerry-Harvey-tuened edition, with a copper/silver hybrid cable – are still my reference for versatile enjoyability. Accurate? Not by a long shot; their resolving power has long been exceeded by the latest designs (12 drivers in the JH Roxannes, anybody?) and the bass extension isn’t that low, nor is the treble that high. But they have a great speed of attack that can keep up with even the fastest drums, and they’re not fatiguing to listen to – but have enough detail and a wide enough soundstage to be very immersive. I’ve yet to find a pair that are more enjoyable across such a wide range of music.

Unfortunately, these little things are pretty delicate in general. And sadly, my pair began a long, slow fritz about a year and a half ago, which can be especially frustrating when you’re nicely zoning out on a long haul flight and suddenly the snores of your seat mate start intruding into Einaudi’s Islands. Thus began the long journey to Find Something Better: much like the eternal upgrade cycle photographers seems to be locked into. More drivers was not better: I didn’t find the quads and fives to be any more enjoyable or transparent; in fact, they tended to be either too bass-heavy and lacking definition, or treble-sparkly and fatiguingly bright at the high end. It seems my ears don’t have much tolerance between too bright/sibilant and not detailed enough. There has been an explosion of custom headphone makers recently; it probably has something to do with the enormous margins (drivers typically cost $10-20 bought singly; a complete headphone, $1,500 and up) more than anything.

It seems that headphones are one area in which reviews are actually quite useless because the listening impressions are about the most subjective thing I can think of – not only do people listen to different music, but our ears all respond slightly differently, too. So, IEMs that were highly rated – FitEar 334s, JH Roxannes etc. just didn’t work for me. I see that as a good thing, given their price points. The only way to really figure out if something works for you is to go listen to it. Many times, with many sources. Unlike previously, even the custom makers are sending out universal demos to stores for people to try. Better yet, there are more and more stores – at least in Asia – that let you audition to your heart’s content. Even Sony’s flagship store in KLCC has a very large section dedicated to personal audio, with even their top end models out for demo – commendable.

I landed up having another dalliance with full sized closed headphones – B&W P7s – but found that my portable source really didn’t have the juice to drive them properly, which is a shame as they sound fantastic when properly amped. In the end they stayed home most of the time for the simple reason that the case was so large it was either that or a spare body. And I know where my priorities lie. Going lower down the price scale lead me to two recent discoveries: the Audio-Technica IM50, which has a dual dynamic driver in each enclosure, and some of the richest vocals and lowest bass extension I’ve ever heard in an IEM. They’re unfortunately quite large, and not that comfortable to wear, but for velvety jazz with that throaty texture – wow; for $60, a bargain. The second headphone was my first experience with a balanced armature/dynamic driver hybrid – the Sony XBA-A2, which has two of the former and one of the latter. (The newer XBA-Z5 sounds even better.) It seems you can have the low end smooth punch of dynamic drivers with the definition and soundstage of balanced armatures. Granted, it’s a little bass heavy and feels like the mids are a bit recessed, but somehow it finds a great sonic synergy with the 6th generation iPod Nano (the little square one), transforming it into one of the most all-round enjoyable listening experiences I’ve had. Competition or replacement for the Triples, finally? Yes and no; they’re not great for everything, and the soundstage is too narrow and lacks air to really work well with classical tracks.

And this is where we need to consider the whole workflow again: looking at just the headphones is akin to getting fixated on a lens or printer without thinking of the rest of the chain. Obviously the quality of source matters; iTunes has gotten a  lot better in recent times, and is actually unlikely to be the weakest point. It’s probably going to be your player and amplification. The player contains the digital to analog converter, which drives the output signal; the amplifier turns this into enough current/voltage to move the diaphragms or armatures to displace air and create sound. A bad DAC will result in harsh sound or poor resolution and separation with lots of base noise; a bad amplifier will be nonlinear and lack punch across the entire range, making one section of the spectrum too prominent (or not prominent enough). And then we must remember that response of the headphone components (and thus headphones) themselves are never linear, so the DAC and amplifier circuit must pair well for the final music to sound good. Let’s not even talk about how our ears respond, and assume that when auditioning there’s self-consistency and a good seal can always be achieved.

Thinking holistically about the approach has made me take a step backwards and look at good pairings for the sources and players I have; there’s no point in having a really great headphone that requires a large amp and pure DSD files to drive because it simply has too narrow a range of deployment and doesn’t fit my needs. On the other hand, a headphone with perhaps less detail resolution but more pleasing tonal response paired with the right player might well prove to be a much more enjoyable experience; fortunately, I think this is actually easier to achieve with a mid-to-low end headphone than a really good one. My surprise has been that the little square 6G iPod Nano (with screen, which people are prone to wear as watches and that probably proved the demand for the iWatch to Apple) appears to be one of the most pleasing players I’ve listened to – without resorting to any equaliser tweaking. It does well with the IM50s; transforms the XBA-A2s into something fantastic; the Triples pair well with anything anyway and certainly don’t gain as much as the others but don’t sound any worse. It won’t drive the P7s at all though, but that’s no surprise given their higher impedance and 40mm drivers. And the 6G Nano – to my ears at least – sounds much better than the iPhone 6+ as a source.

I’ve also got an Astell & Kern AK100 player which is able to drive the P7s to a ‘good enough’ level, but again nowhere near what they’re capable of; the bottom end still sounds thin. On the other hand, if paired with their own MM1 USB speaker/DAC line out, they open up again and start to acquire the kind of richness and texture you’d expect from a pair of cans that large.

In a moment of weakness, I hit the buy button on Amazon for what I hope will be the final pair of headphones for a while; they’re Audio-Technica IM03s; they’re triple driver balanced armature IEMs. So far, so good. They don’t have quite the bass punch of the Sony XBA-A2s, the vocal texture of the IM50s, or the physical inconvenience of the P7s, but they seem to pair pretty well with just about everything and really come alive on the AK100 player; vocals are at a level the Triples can’t quite reach, but we lose none of the soundstage. Transparent but involving is perhaps the best description I can think of. I tried to shoot with them in a couple of days ago and just landed up getting distracted and listening to the music: I see that as a very good sign. I suspect a better cable will open them up a little more and find that air I’ve been looking for, much like how the Triples improved. 7N Copper is on the way…in the meantime, I’m just enjoying the journey. MT

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