December 2011
Shenzhen SoundMagic Technology Development Co. is a Chinese company that develops and manufactures earphones under their own SoundMagic moniker as well as for other, better-known brands. (I’m not being coy, nor are they. Keeping mum about such matters is usually part of any sourcing contract.) They have earned, on the various headphone-related forums, a reputation for producing exceptionally nice-sounding earphones at attractive prices. For this review, they sent me two very different models: the PL50 ($55) and EH11 ($50). Each comes in a hangable white box with a display window for the earphones, and includes a handy leatherette carrying pouch with a drawstring -- a nice bonus at these modest prices.
PL50
The PL50s are in-ear ’phones -- instead of resting against the pinnae (outer ears), they’re inserted into the ear canals. Since not all ear canals are the same size and shape, they come with a few sizes of foam tips and a set of silicone tips, none of which need to be inserted very far into the canal. Listeners new to in-ear ’phones may find the shallow insertion comfortable, but it means that the PL50s provide only modest isolation from ambient noise -- and if you wear them with their cord hanging down, they tend to fall out. However, a small piece of foam is included that routes the wires comfortably up, over, and behind the ears, and does a fairly good job of holding the ’phones in place. All in all, the result is a good if unexceptional balance of comfort, security, and isolation.
Located in Esbjerg, Denmark’s fifth largest city, Densen Audio Technologies has been making hi-fi components since 1992, when it was founded by Thomas Sillesen, who built his first amplifier at the age of 13. In his teens, Sillesen worked in audio retail, and later began importing and distributing audio in Denmark while attending business school. Sillesen wasn’t particularly excited about the products he was distributing, so he decided to try to make something better.
HiFiMAN is the creation of Fang Bian, a headphone enthusiast with the knowledge and contacts to turn his enthusiasm into commercialized products. His firm designs, manufactures, and distributes high-end portable music players, headphone amplifiers, in-ear earphones, and full-sized headphones. The latest offering among his full-sized cans is the subject of this review: the HE-500 headphones ($899 USD).
Over the last several years, Polk Audio has fought hard to earn its reputation as one of the scrappier speaker companies around. Never a darling of audiophiles, Polk has persevered through a combination of technical innovation and savvy marketing to become one of the leading high-volume speaker makers in the world. Well, we’re writing about them, aren’t we?
Ask an audiophile for a list of iconic speaker brands, and Britain’s Bowers & Wilkins is likely to be at or near the top. Since its founding in the 1960s, B&W has produced a range of loudspeakers offering truly exceptional performance at their various price points. Their flagship 800 series delivers a world-class listening experience for what is, in high-end-audio terms, a relatively reasonable price. Use of B&W monitors in many of the world’s preeminent studios makes them a literal reference for how recordings are supposed to sound. 
April Music is a name with which frequent readers of the SoundStage! Network will be familiar. Based in South Korea, this audio company has been building high-end components since 1998, and over the years several of their products have been reviewed on the SoundStage! Network websites. 
The headphone market is dominated by a few very large professional-audio companies, but there are some smaller firms -- e.g., Grado and Ultrasone -- that offer significant products at various price points. What haven’t historically been seen in the headphone world are the one- and two-person garage operations that make up a substantial part of the rest of high-end audio. Designing and making your own headphones generally means designing and making your own drivers, and neither is a trivial task. The mounting structures/enclosures can be very different for different driver types, and their production requires either dedicated tooling or substantial amounts of labor. When a small company comes out with a pair of headphones, these are usually modifications, or even mere rebadgings, of someone else’s product. That’s not the case here. The Audeze LCD-2 headphones ($945 USD) were designed from scratch and are built entirely by Audeze in the USA. That’s a huge undertaking for a small company, but Audeze thinks they’ve got something special and can directly compete with the big boys. 
PSB’s new CS1000 ($499 USD per pair) isn’t the first outdoor/indoor speaker on the market, but it’s the first from PSB, which automatically makes it one of the most interesting: it was engineered by Paul Barton, one of the world’s leading speaker designers. Barton told me that he didn’t want to offer a merely decent product, but one that produced the legendary sound quality and possessed the high value that PSB is known for worldwide. 