Hear, Hear
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday July 10, 2000
Tony Davis eases on a set of $2,800 headphones and reassesses everything he's ever heard.
Nearly three grand for a set of headphones? For a 10th of the price or less you could buy a set most people would rate as excellent.
Purists will argue that's cheap compared with the cost of an amplifier and speakers capable of delivering the sound that is achievable with top-end headphones. Mind you, hi-fi purists are often happy hocking their first born in the pursuit of those last few percentage points that for most of us show up only on a complex graph or in a strange expression on the face of the family dog.
What does such top-end performance mean to the average listener? Finding out was the objective here.
The headphones in question are built by Stax Limited in Japan. The Signature System II package comprises the SR-404 headphones and a Dual Triode Vacuum Tube output stage, which for those who don't speak techlish, is a small valve amplifier tailored to the characteristics of the headphones. This can be connected directly to a CD player.
The SR-404 phones are large, square and almost weightless. They use electrostatic technology, which means that instead of a conventional speaker cone pushing forwards and back to move air, an impossibly thin polymer film vibrates under the influence of alternating voltage to produce a sound the brochure describes as "rich and powerful yet delicate".
With this mini concert hall strapped to my head, I pushed the play button with the intention of working through a broad selection of discs. The first discovery was pleasant: if something has been well recorded and lovingly transferred to compact disc, it can sound surprisingly fresh even if it's 40 years old.
On Charles Mingus's Diane, recorded in 1959 (and digitally remastered in 1998), the baritone saxophone is so deep and clear you're liable to swing your head to see if a musician is sitting next to you. The clarity and intimacy of the whole CD are a revelation. Could it ever have sounded better than through these cans?
Recorded only a short time later was the Beatles' first album, Please Please Me. But here the amazing capabilities of the headphones served only to highlight the thinness and flatness of the sound, and bring to the fore extraneous noises such as microphones being opened and closed. In Anna, Lennon's towering vocal hits the wall of what the microphone or tape can handle very early in the piece and you just want to turn it off.
Even later Beatles material can be grim. Hey Jude sounds haphazard in a way it never does through speakers. The effect is magnified by the broad separation of the stereo image, originally designed to come out of an Astor all-in-one, with speakers 60 centimetres apart. Instruments slide in and out of time, cymbals reverberate harshly and the overdubs sound obvious and clumsy (it's surprising how many times McCartney's voice has been tracked, and how many times they all muck up their lines). On a brighter note, in George Harrison's Old Brown Shoe, McCartney's amazing bass playing is the clearest I've ever heard it.
There's a collector's version of the classic Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album available that offers a mix with only the voices. In the Stax private auditorium you can hear the brothers Wilson breathing between the lines. You can also hear irritating pops and hisses on the original master tape, but the purity and immediacy of the voices are such that you're almost expecting Mrs Wilson to walk in with a tray of sodas.
A decade on brings us to the digitally remastered Elvis Costello debut, My Aim is True. The song Less than Zero proves to have bad distortion on the first couple of lines of vocals, something I never previously had noticed but which will annoy me forever now. Watching the Detectives, however, sounds better than I ever believed possible and, for a song heard hundreds of times, suddenly brand new.
At 1.27 a backing vocal arrives very low in the mix and ends sloppily, the individual voices uncertain about where they are going. Normally this dissolves into the overall sound. With the cans, it is perfectly apparent and returns at 2.31. Such detail is a blessing and a curse. At 3.18 there is a glitch, rather like the tail end of a vocal overdub track which has been clumsily edited out. Elsewhere there is a tiny hum on an acoustic guitar buried somewhere in the left channel. It's only strummed once per bar, but that's enough to annoy.
In Herbert Von Karajan's 1982 recording of Puccini's Turandot, the music seems to just hang in the air, surrounding the listener delightfully and completely. But a music stand is quite clearly bumped 50 seconds into Nessun Dorma!
English band Portishead is almost made for the headphone listener; you get the warmth of the vinyl samplings and the absolute clinical purity of the digital stuff mixed in with it. Along the way there are phenomenal peaks of treble and bass, never heard more clearly than here.
More raucous things such as The Clash's White Riot are diminished; they need to be heard blaring out of slightly distorted speakers. The same seems true of remastered 78s, best heard through speakers with a bit of ambient noise to disguise sins of sonic omission.
In Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit (from 1939) you can make out the bass; it's just that it's not actually deep. There's an aural campfire burning as Billie sings yet the sound is warm and relatively expansive. Conversely, Louis Armstrong's Muskrat Ramble from 1926 (from the CBS Jazz Masterpiece Series) is crackle-free but entirely one-dimensional. Perhaps that's the result of removing too much during the remastering process. With every click goes a bit of the music.
When things are going well - be it classical, jazz or screaming guitars - there is simply no better way to listen to music than with top-end headphones. But the majority of compact discs disappoint when exposed to the Stax treatment. It's often a case of too much information. The danger is that you find yourself not wanting to listen to favourite albums because the sound quality doesn't stand up to such clinical evaluation. You often opt for music ordinary in substance but extraordinary in sound quality.
Then at some point, presumably, you mutate into a sound buff and even the $2,800 Stax won't seem good enough. If you get to that desperate state, you'll be pleased to know Stax makes a $8,000 set as well.
Headphones kindly loaned by Coda Fidelity (ph 9969 7500). The range of Stax electrostatic headphones starts from about $1,000.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald