Channel: oluv's gadgets

Category: Science & Technology

Description: Thanks to kopfhoererboutique.com for allowing me to record inside the store. The Kii Three speakers in the shown setup cost around €40000, the Dan Clark Stealh headphone around €4000. My idea was to compare the perceived responses of these two playback devices, as the Kii Three speakers are regarded as ultimate studio monitors therefore are supposed to sound neutral, while the Stealh is striclty tuned towards the Harman target according to the first published measurements. The Harman target on the other hand should represent the sound of neutral speakers in a room, thus both should sound similar... you get the idea? As I always had the impression as if this target sounded off, I just wanted to prove my theory by also throwing the Focal Elex into the game which I personally would definitely regard as rather neutral and although not equal to the perceived sound of the speakers, it was definitely way closer to me that the Harman-tuend Stealth. Which headphone sounded more similar for you when comparing it to the speakers (ignoring the bad acoustics)? Let's be honest I was actually speechless how bad the Stealh sounded to me. First of all the sound varies extremely dependent on how you put it on. The earpads are huge and you can move the headphone around like on a rollercoaster, but I couldn't find a single position which would sound acceptable to me and the most acceptable one I managed to find was very uncomfortable and not consistent as the headphone tended to slip down to its own preferred position after some time. To me the Stealth had some weird treble coloration which sounded really cheap. There was no single element or aspect within the sound which would somehow capture my attention, it sounded just cheap and off to me, I cannot quite explain the high praise about it already posted in many forums and youtube reviews hyping it as "The world's best closed headphone?", WTF! The more I listened inside the store and tried other headphones like the Grado RS-1, or the Master&Dynamic MW65 that I always loved because of its classy looks, they both sounded so unbelievably bad, I wouldn't even want to take them for free. On the other hand I finally found a headphone which I really liked most: The Focal Utopia, but go figure, it looks and sounds nearly the same as the Elex but costs 6 times as much. The best thing: I have both at home now and can compare a $700 headphone which sounds the same as a $4000 one... Everything is becoming really more and more mysterious to me the more I am trying to dig into this soup of audiophile headphone world...