One of the great things about headphones and any audio endeavor is the human ear. Well, the human perception of sound, I should say. A human's aural memory is quite fickle and volatile, especially when it comes to minute details and differences. You can barely remember what you heard one minute to the next, which can make comparisons between audio equipment a pain in the ass, but it has benefits when you have a really good audio setup. When I bought a new LCD, going from a TN panel type to an IPS type, I could immediately tell the difference, and it was striking. I could easily recall how the old screen looked, and even given the amount of time it took to set up the new screen, I had no trouble distinguishing all the improvements it made. This same ability to remember all things visual also meant that as time went on, a short amount of time actually, I got used to the IPS screen, and it was no longer breathtaking to look at. The brilliant colors, contrast, and image stability just became the norm, and the thrill was gone before a month had passed.
With audio, you can't remember shit. In the time it takes you to unplug one pair of headphones and plug in the next, which is less than a minute, you've already forgotten all the little characteristics of the sound enough to not be able to pinpoint the differences between the two, unless it truly is night-and-day (and we're talking a vast expanse between them). This is in sharp contrast to other animals, like birds, who use acute audio memory to discern the subtle differences in the sound of their mate's call from all the other birds in the flock (and in cases of domestic birds, sometimes the ability to imitate sounds with high accuracy). For this reason, every time you play music through your speakers, you're rediscovering them, and even after a long time, they can still shock and amaze you, and thrill you all over again. It's one of the things that makes audio hobbies so much fun, and why they have such a following, while computer monitors and TVs....don't.
The above really doesn't have anything in particular to do with this topic, but I just thought it would be a nice intro into an article that delves further into my growing passion for headphones. This passion has culminated recently into one of the most reckless purchases I've ever made, and this is in a long line of pretty reckless purchases. With computer hardware, it's pretty simple. You go to your favorite website (or sites), look at the latest reviews for the kind of hardware you're shopping for, pick the one with the better looking numbers in the price you want, go to the online store and buy it. It's a lot of analyzing, research, and planning, and the whole shopping experience is very intellectual and deliberate. With audio, you still do plenty of research, you might even do a bit of planning, but it's mostly compulsive. A lot of it is going on your gut feeling, you're not comparing graphs and numbers (well maybe the really obsessive do), you're not going off of really concrete data and making decisions based on logic, you're just going on what sounds good to you (in a manner of speaking). If I read a headphone has a really natural sound, full, dynamic, rich, with great detail and an immersive portrayal of music, I'm going to get really excited about it. Such are the sort of things I read about the HiFiMan HE-5LE, a headphone from a relative unknown that has all the characteristics of a super highend headphone with the price of only a...slightly less super highend headphone. It looked slick, and the price was about at the limit of what I'd ever picture myself paying for this sort of thing. So I figured, one day, I'd probably buy one, when I've exhausted all else and have nothing left to spend my money on.
Well that one day was last week, apparently, although I certainly haven't exhausted all other avenues of expenditure (or will I probably ever), nor could I really afford it. But it was a good deal, and I figured if I was ever going to buy one anyway, I might as well save $150 on it. What started as trying to talk myself out of it ended in sending a message to the seller with my offer. I need help.
When I received my pair shortly afterward, I was blown away by all the things that had been said about it, along with a sense of refinement and realism I hadn't yet experienced with any kind of speaker system before. I was memorized, and unlike my K702s, which I bought kind of knowing I might not like them, and ended up doing exactly that, I was completely satisfied, and almost instantly fell in love. They have such an incredibly smooth, silky, liquidy seductive sound, full and lush and a little warm with a tone so natural it renders instruments more like a window than a speaker. They're just so inviting you just can't help but want to listen to them all the time, and part of the reason for this is also another reason why I decided from the very beginning I wanted them so badly.
You see they use a speaker technology completely unlike anything in conventional speakers, where instead of using dynamic drivers, where a big magnet pushes and pulls on a voice coil attached to a speaker cone, it uses what's called orthodynamic drivers (or isodynamic, or magneplanar, or magnetostats), where a voice coil is laid out flat on a diaphragm and has an array of magnets on either side of it pushing and pulling as the voice coil changes polarity. Wikiphonia explains it better than I care to, but basically you get a much faster moving diaphragm with less resistance, creating less distortion and better transient response. It's often described as a hybrid between dynamic drivers and electrostatic drivers, the latter of which uses static electricity to push and pull on a diaphragm instead of magnets, resulting in even finer response but requiring a shit-ton of electricity to work. Orthodynamic drivers aren't going to be as responsive as electrostats, but they'll be potentially a lot better than dynamic drivers by their nature. You can also power them with conventional headphone amps, making them directly competitive to dynamic headphones. The whole notion fascinated me.
Orthodynamic technology hasn't really taken off in the speaker world because you need a lot of moving mass to create serviceable bass response and force in the full-size configuration, and that requires a lot of power and a lot of magnets. But headphones live off of small drivers and low sound pressure requirements, so it doesn't take much to get great bass response and dynamics in such a configuration. Yamaha was one of the first companies to make a successful push with this idea, and in the late 70s to mid 80s produced several models with this technology. Since then, the only company to really continue with the concept was Fostex, a company better known in the professional audio segment than with regular audio enthusiasts. But orthodynamic drivers have accumulated a large following over the years, with many still snatching up the old vintage Yamaha models and modifying the modest Fostex orthos into real audiophile-grade headphones.
But starting in 2009, orthodynamics have been thrust into the limelight yet again, for a whole new crowd of enthusiasts to discover, and the buzz has been off the charts. HiFiMan is a relatively new player in the market, as I said, and from what I gather a subsidiary of Head-Direct. In late 2009 they released the HE-5, their first foray into highend headphones, the brainchild of China-native Fang Bian, to much acclaim and warm critical reception. A few short months later, in April 2010, they released the HE-5LE, an updated version of the HE-5 addressing some of the flaws of the original design, and cementing itself as a staple of highend headphone paraphernalia. But by then, hype was already building for another newcomer, this time from an even smaller company called Audez'e (pronounced odyssey), essentially run out of a garage by two enthusiasts named Alex and Sankar. They were fast approaching the release of their second iteration of an orthodynamic headphone, this time intended for widespread availability. It would be called the LCD-2, and despite being essentially a DIY amateur production with barebones design and materials, was a creation of the headphone community, and has become a massive success (as far as the top-shelf headphone enthusiasts are concerned). This sub-$1,000 headphone would go on to be called one of the greatest ever made, competing with the likes of the Sennheiser HD800 and Beyerdynamic T1.
So here's where the industry needs to pause and think about things for a moment. How is it a couple no-name companies can produce reference-level audio equipment that rivals the multi-million dollar investments from venerable giants in the audio world? These are headphones that have taken several years, using revolutionary designs to achieve what they do, being equaled or surpassed by tinkerers and oriental upstarts! Clearly there's something out of balance here, and if these companies were any larger, the industry moguls would certainly stand and take notice.
Now, of course we can't sell the dynamic driver proponents short. Dynamic drivers have inherent disadvantages in their design, and the fact that they're able to keep up so well only shows how far they've been able to push the design over the many decades it's been in use. For companies specializing in all aspects of speaker production, with a large part of their market being full-size models, I can understand the desire to continue to pour into the dynamic approach. But for companies that make their whole business out of headphones, it would seem to me the time has long passed to start looking closer at other approaches to sound reproduction. Certainly both Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic have dabbled into electrostatic drivers before, but outside of that, they haven't brought anything else to market. Headphones are a very flexible and agile speaker type, and by their nature are very open to out-the-box thinking. I'm not going to say that dynamic speakers have hit a brick wall, but it only took two nobodies to show the world there are extremely promising alternatives out there that were prematurely abandoned by the industry that pioneered them. They're not a completely flawless advancement in driver techniques, of course. For one thing, they'll always be on the heavy side, which can be difficult to make comfortable, and they're intrinsically harder to drive, which while common in the highend segment, makes them impractical in more mainstream markets (but improvements can be made...).
Because these small companies have exploited an opportunity in technology, I have no doubt their future will be very bright. As they continue to grow, so will their profile in the market, and sooner or later the big boys will have to reevaluate the feasibility of this driver type, and possibly release their own variant sometime in the future. Until then, I and many others out there will continue to enjoy the orthodynamic headphones already available, and extol their virtues to the audio community. They truly have a character all their own.
