Starspicker room @ Northern Audio Visual Penang show
I auditioned the new Audeze 5 planar magnetic headphones at Starspicker's open plan listening station. Unlike the preceding LCD series of headphones, the LCD 5 planar headphones were surprisingly light weight. Also Audeze have dropped their usual wood cups in favour of something that looks like acrylic. Nice touch.
The Starspicker's staff on duty were super nice and let me try out several other headphones on the new Chord Mojo Gen 2.
Post Script & Disclaimer
I am in my mid-60s and have lived with tinnitus for 40+ years. Like most seniors I probably cannot hear anything above 10kHz. But I am thankful there is still a lot of music genres that I enjoy that don’t have higher frequencies than 10 kHz.
In my opinion, planar magnetic headphones with their low distortion attributes , are the way to go. But of course it’s possible to achieve good sound quality also from headphones with dynamic drivers. I’ve owned and enjoyed classic headphones with dynamic drivers from Sennheiser (HD650 and the over ears Momentum Gen 1) and AKG (k712 Pro version made in Austria, k702 Quincy Jones edition, k512 made for use in mobiles with a jack for a 3.5mm termination).
The key to getting good sound out of a pair of headphones seems to be proper amplification. For example, you can probably drive a Sennheiser HD650 from a mobile but the sound quality will improve if you run it through a tube amplifier like a Woo Audio WA6 SE. For years I thought my HD650 lacked bass slam because I was using solid state headphone amplifiers like the Lehmann Audio StudioCube. Then I took a chance on a 2nd hand WA6 SE I found on Carousel that had a balanced output. I bought cheap balanced cables for the HD650 from another Carousel vendor. And suddenly the HD650 had tons of bass.
As the owner of the Audeze LCD 2 , LCD 3 and LCD MX4, the iSine10 in-ear planars (despite the need for Eq to make them listenable, I liked the in ear iSine10 planars enough to buy two pairs) and the Oppo PM3,2 I've become a late planar magnetics convert. There is something right about the deep and fast bass slam (eg bass guitar and plucked double bass notes sound natural) that only planars can convey. But the trade-off is the weight of most planar headphones. The LCD series weigh like a ton.
I also own a four year old Chord Mojo Gen 1 headphone DAC and the Chord Poly streamer for the Mojo. But I got tired carrying around the weighty all metal Mojo, connecting cable, headphones and my smartphone.
Recently I got a Hidiz AP80X Pro Digital Audio Player to use with a cheap wireless Bluetoohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Paoth IEM. The sound quality from the Hidiz is of course not as good as the Mojo which costs 2.5x the price of the Hidiz. But the latter scores in portability, it doesn't get hot in use (the Mojo Gen 1 got hot after two or three hours) and it uses a microSD slot to store FLAC files. It's also a Bluetooth 5.1 streamer - it Is capable of streaming CD quality FLAC files to wireless IEMs
