This Week In Headphoolia, 2nd Edition

Last week we launched our brand new weekly feature, “This Week in Headphoolia”, a lighthearted round-up of things of potential interest (here is last week’s post). We now have the second edition…

INTERESTING? THINGS

Fill up the coffee machine. Researcher Sean Olive was interviewed at This Week In Radio Tech with Kirk Harnack on headphone sound quality. After the interview, Sean posted a short companion post on his blog. You can find the 72 minute video YouTube-embedded right below and at the This Week in Radio Tech YouTube Channel:

REVIEWS – OVER/ON-EARS

It’s a funny thing with hobbies, flagship or near flagship products generate a lot of interest even if only a small percentage of the dedicate hobbyists plan to buy them. Which brings us to a new edition of Katz’s Corner at Inner Fidelity, it’s the Audeze LCD-4 versus the Focal Utopia. Either way, your wallet will cry treble terrible ears 🙂

Rejoice Beyerdynamic fans, Metal571 is back with another review, this time it is the Beyerdynamic Amiron Over-Ears, which you can also find YouTube-embedded below:

Strategically it was a rather curious move by Sennheiser to price-usurp both of their legendary HD600 and HD650 headphones with a $200 newer model, the HD6xx and only make it available in flash-in-the-pan sales at Massdrop. Regardless, here’s the Headfonics take on this near-unicorn 🙂

Phil Nickerson abandoned the Android Central website to start a new Mobile Nations property, and put his more outgoing personality to good use in his reincarnation as The Modern Dad. This is his dad-take on the Bose QC35. I suppose hip dads prefer Beats, but modern dads prefer Bose 😉

Things were a lot better for Noontec’s Zoro on-ears when Beats were totally crappy. Now it’s harder to get recognition as Beats quality improves. Let’s not forget that audiophile existential crisis moment last year when the Beats Solo 2 made their way to the Innerfidelity Wall of Fame. But back to Noontec, their Zoro II Volcanic Bluetooths have been reviewed by the Headfonics, which sounds like a good name for a 00s New-York-City-based indie band competing with Interpol and The Strokes and Modest Mouse 🙂

REVIEWS – EARPHONES

Airpods, as with any major Apple new product, generate a lot of hype and discussion. Here, Ars Technica takes a look at the Airpods versus some of the competition of “true wireless”.

A few more earphones in lightning round format (not lightning cable):
+ Jaybird X3 bluetooths at Android Central
+ Beats X at The Verge
+ Here ONE augmented reality critters at Le Verge

And we close this segment with some bling, the golden Final Audio Forte X get talked about at the Verge.

REVIEWS – DAC-AMP-DAP

Fiio is not shy about releasing new and newer things, here’s the Headfonia take on their F1 and F3.

Oppo too is another company on the Chi-fi Rise, their Oppo HA-2SE amp is reviwed by the Headfonics.

MUSIC STREAMING

There are podcasts about just about everything these days, which is a surprise it took Spotify so long, but they have finally launched three new music-related original podcasts. I haven’t listened to any of them yet (only 24 hours per day so far).

Radiohead has its fair share of Debbie Downer Best sellers, so one data-driven techie decided to use data to find out what is their most depressing Radiohead. No spoilers here, you can find the answer at the Revolution Analytics blog. If you want to know how exactly this was done, here is the technical explanation.

INTO the FORUMS

The headphones sub-reddit is at the forefront of combating “magic cables”, so it’s not a surprise that now some are calling for a boycott of brands that sell these “magic cables”. I hope no one tells them food tastes a lot better if you eat it with a $2000 fork 😉

NEWSY

Cry tears of audiophile pain. The quad DAC will only be available in the Korean and select Asian country versions of the new LG G6 flagship per Android Central.

I don’t know how many science fiction writers and visionaries predicted that mainstream AI would actually come in the form of a speaker. Microsoft too is jumping on the bandwagon, they are working with Harman to develop a Cortana speaker. Great, one more place I’ll have to turn off Cortana 😉

Big acquisitions take a while to close and become official, so it’s hard to tell whether the following happened before or because of the Samsung-Harman merger. But allegedly the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 flagship smartphone will have its included earphones “tuned by AKG”. Tweet by uber-leaker Evan Blass: