I donât think BAs as such are the culprit of this. Itâs normally caused by the cross-overs because they have to trick the different drivers to be fast enough but not too fast to play in concert with their palls. This creates issues in the time domain. Basically what Iâm saying is that if you take the very same, say, 5 BAs and you put them in similar housing, etc, but with optimised cross-overs youâll end up with a completely different (and I take it much more coherent) sounding IEM. @Dynamic mentioned the Softears RSV elsewhere in this thread, and Softears produces many BAs for Moondrop. But in their RSV youâll only find 5 BAs where the 8 BA Moondrop S8 of similar price, created by the same designers, and partly having the same BAs, sounds way different. Me thinks they spent much more time and effort on better cross-overs and tuning, resulting in what seems to be the least BA sounding BA IEM under $1,200. So I think literally anything without the need for cross-overs has a much cleaner act, better timbre, texture, coherency, whatever, and starts from pole position. Still they can screw it up during the race but they have an advantage, as whatâs not there canât produce its own problems.
Not sure if Iâm in agreement but luckily we donât have to! The transienst and decay from a signal tone are simply enormously complex. Imagine a non-amplified drum kick. If you see different kind of charts how one such pulse can be measured and evolves in time (it doesnât only decay but swells again at different stages) you simply get a headache trying to grasp what the heck youâre looking at. Thatâs one single note in isolation!
What if weâre not good enough at recording all those peculiarities while playing back the recorded version of the truth with very fast BA drivers that simply tell us about the quality of the digital recording with all its problems. Then we replay the same thing through, say, dynamic drivers, and they sound much more natural. Are they better? Probably not. They may just smear those notes in a way that we confuse with natural decay, echo, etcetera.
100% correct and you have to take that into account especially when listening to otherâs reviews/impressions of gear. For instance, I come from Hifiman planar and Focal DD headphones so I am used to âunnaturallyâ fast attack and decay. If you come from speakers and especially speakers in a room without acoustic dampening you will be used to the exact opposite.
For you, might I suggest you try getting a listen to the Sony M9. As those are pretty widely available worldwide to demo and it should give you a good sense of what all-BA sounds like.
Yeah my point was about single driver vs multi-drivers (with XOâs)⊠I used the Aonic examples as their tuning is so close.
I donât have an issue with BAâs as such. I actually found the Timeless to sound more digital or square-wavey when things for too hot for it. For instance some female Sâs, Tâs for me would sometimes develop a squeal, itâs weird. But it sounded like sibilance that was being clipped. (But thatâs probably more tuning than speed)
Absolutely, but If I spent my entire life listening to smeared notes because 99.9% of sound I hear from a speaker is from a DD, then that is going to have drilled me into thinking that is the way reproduction should be.
If BA does it âbetterâ, but it sounds really weird, because I am used to a a less capable reproduction, I am ok with that.
Also, I donât think thatâs what is going on here. The BA coherency just sounds bad. It doesnât sound like anything playing in the room. The planar and dd both sound much more like what an instrument in a room would sound like.
An analogy I like to use is RAW images in photography. They look pretty aweful. If BA gives us the RAW image, that may not actually be desirable. In reality, the photographer takes that RAW image and processes to their specifications to get exactly the output they want.
I think this is probably crossover and driver type issues.
Bringing this back to the timeless, It is the only headphone I have heard with this combination: great tuning, phenomenal presentation (speed, decay, articulation) and out of this world coherency across all those things. Even the Zen doesnât hit all those points (but there are others it does better, like bass texture and slam).
I simply find all this fascinating. I will have a half dozen IEMs of all types here in the next two weeks and plan to dig in to this problem.
I think the fundamental problem we have is that we compare with other IEMs. Leave 'em alone, visit a zillion acoustic concerts, and you realize what Iâm referring to. Only that is my reference and I have zero interest in comparing with another compromised reproduction
Dude, you have a problem. No recording of a live event can capture the guy sitting next you smoking a bong and singing off key along with the artist. You really want to reproduce that?
Seriously though, I continue to be on the side of the fence about reproducing things enjoyably, not accurately. I have something like 20 bootleg ani difranco recordings (on CDs. CDS!!!) of concerts, a few of which I was at. There isnât a way to reproduce them.
âUnauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing.â â Ani DiFranco
Yep, thats to the point. Should have said âhybrids i own sound emptyâ, but keep forgetting emphasizing that as i assume everyone already has that in mind, same for the library.
Closest price wise would be Fiio FH3, Timeless is my most expensive set so far. Dont have anything more expensive to compare unfortunately, but im very curious to do so, so i will probably get something close in price or higher to see what the deal is. Considering the Tea, so very interested in your oppinion/comparison.
Also have QOA Vesper, which ia much cheaper but if we go by crinacles opinion, theyre dead ringer for QOA Pink Lady which is $120. So i like to think i gamed the system wit that purchase, and my Vespers are worth $120 and i call them Pink Lady when theres noone around to correct me :).
And few budget ones - TRN V90, KZ ZS10 Pro, ZSN Pro .
This probably also has to do with instrument separation(same or related to coherency?), better separation, and more the feeling of holes inbetween. So might be both are great but comes down to personal preference in the end. Much more people with way more gear than me that would have more informed oppinion. Either way i know i like what was described by someone as a wall of sound from the Timeless very much.
Ive heard some reviewers praising some BAs ability to reproduce bass as good as DD.
I agree with the last point fully. What is natural?
Given that Even on live concert instruments go through different pieces of gear which would have their own characteristics, pedals, effects, speakers etcâŠ
I would like to think that you can say what natural sounding is if you compare how acoustic unamplified instrument sounds live and compare to how it sounds in iems/headphones. But this also falls apart if you consider that same acoustic instrument but different type/model/manufacturer will have different characteristics. I play acoustic guitar a bit and know what mine should sound like, unfortunately(or fortunately, as i just finished re-watching The Doors movie⊠i dont want to end like that ) im not an recording artist so cant compare even that, and who would know all the different instruments that a certain artist used and how it should sound to feel natural? Some instruments might be simpler and dont have a variation, idk.
So yeah, in the end its preference in wast majority of cases imo.
There is lots of stuff I would love to talk about in your message. But I am cooking, so this one.
In my experience so far, each driver type when implemented really well can not replicate another driver types characteristics. This has been true for me with dd vs planar. I doubt ba will break the mold here.
That is not to say it canât do something enjoyable. The timeless is basically the best planar bass I have heard. And while I still like DD in general for bass more, it is every bit as enjoyable.
I fully believe BA bass can be wonderful (havenât experienced it yet) but I donât believe it will imitate DD bass well.
Cant add anything to that discussion, just what i heard, and thats about it. How true is that i wouldnt know, but worth mentioning that some people find some BAs as good as DD for bass.
Never considered a full BA set so havent memorized what was it, but if youre interested i might do some digging around and find the review(or couple) of one with claims like that.
Itâll be good enough in reproducing DD bass SOUND but never in moving the same amount of air, so if you want to FEEL your bass in a similar then youâre out of luck indeed. Itâs about physics at that point.
I know that reviewer Michael Bruce who absolutely is a bass head claims his RSV slams like nothing else. Dynamic will probably say he shouldnât confuse speed/dynamics with slam though
Among other things, yes. I doubt anything will beat DD bass for me.
I would prefer to see a set that can show me what BA can do.
Yes you should. âsays guy that has never heard the p1.
Me?
Comes tomorrow! I am thinking I will do a dusk/tea comparison. Maybe timeless too. But it might get boring having me say âI like what the timeless does here betterâŠ.â
This logic checks out for me!
Seriously though, the timeless have a âcompletenessâ to the sound that goes way above most headphones for me. Very good.
:).
) im not an recording artist so cant compare even that, and who would know all the different instruments that a certain artist used and how it should sound to feel natural? Some instruments might be simpler and dont have a variation, idk.