Headphones Nao

Another week is in the books, and so it is time for another one of our little “e-zines”. If you missed any previous episodes, you can find them all waiting for you in the Headphoolia archives. If you want to get them as soon as they are published, we have a free full-text RSS Feed. The soundtrack for this week’s edition is Rush’s especially-steampunky “Clockwork Angels” (which is also a book written by (trigger warning for OG Dune fans) Kevin Anderson).

EXPERIMENTS

Trigger warning for Reddit Admins. A Zeos video is next! In this 35 minute video, Zeos and Chewbacca perform a Sony MDR-Z1R burn-in experiment! The first comment (pinned) in the YouTube comments includes a user-generated frequency analysis (files available through Google Drive).

OPINIONS

The Sony MDR-Z1R measurements and reviews created a bit of a kerfuffle among some audiophiles, and Tyll is back with a new post opining on the whole situation and his approach going forward.

If you have a couple of hours to spare, there is a loooooong discussion of this in the Super Bestest Audio Friends forum.

This article from 1992 was resurfaced at Stereophile and still rather relevant, “The Improvement Disease”. It talks about audio in general, not headphone-specific.

Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #19 (up to 7/2/17)”

Don’t look at the calendar now but we are exactly at the halfway point to Christmas! Time sure does fly. Time to start preparing gift lists 🙂

15 minute YouTube video, which you can also find YouTube-embedded below:

FOCAL refreshes their consumer headphones line-up

Focal has the biggest expansion so far of their consumer headphone line-up, coming on the heels of their two high-end headphones (ELEAR and UTOPIA). They have an over-ear bluetooth headphone, along with a mix of new wired and bluetooth earphones…

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #18: Neutrality discussion, Focal has a new consumer line-up, and more (up to 6/25/17)”

Another week is in the books, and we have another This Week In Headphoolia round-up. Speaking of round-ups, Father’s Day is always a good time for headphone sales. We rounded up some of them…

SONY MDR-1Z MEASUREMENT differences

Headfi published their Sony MDR-Z1R measurements using their own setup powered by GRAS and Audio Precision, and their measurements are noticably different from the Innerfidelity measurements and Tyll discusses the differences at IF.

One next possible step is for the two to exchange headphones and measure them with their own setups. This could partially help resolve the question as to whether the two headphones measured are different, or the difference is in the measurement setups.

LISTEN WITH YOUR EARS, NOT WITH YOUR WALLET

Often the price (and relative price) of a consumer good is assumed to have some correlation to the product’s quality. But that’s not always the case. This varies from product category to product category, but needless to say, it’s almost never a linear correlation, audio or not.

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #17: Sony Z1R measurefefe (up to 6/17/17)”

Time won’t stand still and another week zoomed by, which brings us to a new installment of our weekly round-up, aptly (?) named This Week in Headphoolia (all previous, and future editions there)…

AUDIO SHOWS

+ three days of coverage of the Los Angeles Audio Show at Stereophile

+ part #1 of the High End Munich Audio show at Headphone Guru

OPEN vs CLOSED VIDEOS

The videos in this segment compare and contrast open versus closed headphones. Before you scream “apples vs oranges”, note that one can compare anything with anything ~ as long as one understands what they are comparing 🙂

Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #16 (up to 6/11/17)”

Another week flew by, here’s our new weekly round-up that is “This Week in Headphoolia”, covering up to Sunday 6/4/17. You can check previous (and future) editions using the Headphoolia Archives. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments of what else you like to see here!

The Flagship Mania Gets to Grado

The $Flagship$ Mania of 2016 continues rolling into 2017, with Grado now joining the party with their brand new PS2000e Metal and Maple (but no maple syrup) headphone. It is revealed and teased at the official Grado blog.

And as fate would have it, this week Engadget posted a text, lots of pictures and a 7-minute video multimedia post entitled “Inside Grado Labs”, going back to the beginnings of the company.

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #15 (up to 6/4/17): Grado goes Metal and Maple in new $2700 Flagship”

Another week flew by, here’s our new weekly round-up that is “This Week in Headphoolia”. You can check previous (and future) editions using the Headphoolia Archives. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments of what else you like to see here!

AUDIO SHOW!

Second best thing to actually going is looking at all the nice pictures from the comfort of your home or office, without having to lift a finger (okay, you have to lift a finger to click on the link and scroll the page).

Headphonia was there at the 2017 High End Munich show and posted two detailed and visual blog-reports, here is Part #1 and here is Part #2. Enjoy 🙂

Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #14 (up to 5/28/17)”

Another week flew by, and with it we have a new edition of our weekly round-up. You can find previous editions (and future ones in the future) in the Headphoolia archives…

LEARNINGS

JDS Labs took to their own blog to opine that their new Element is not an O2 in a shiny shell. Pictures, charts and data are included!

What is Isolation? The SoundGuys YouTube channel take a 5-minute stab at explaining it.

If you missed Metal571’s live YouTube Q&A, fear not, it is saved on YouTube (except for the Live Chat, which YouTube does not save). You can watch all two hours of it at any time you want.

Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #13 (ending 5/21/17)”

Another week is in the books, and so here we have another installment of our weekly round-up. You can catch up to previous installments in the Headphoolia Archives…

Windows Store gets Spotify and iTunes

Microsoft is executing a powerplay with Windows this month. The launch of “Windows 10 S” gave new momentum to the Windows Store, and this week at the MS Build 2017 conference, Microsoft revealed that two of the most high profile music-related apps will soon become available through the Windows store, iTunes and Spotify.

On the other hand, Groove Music team members may be crying, perhaps sending out resumes to their old friends from the Zune and Xbox Music teams 🙂 Microsoft is not very musical it seems 🙂

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia (up to 5/13/17)”