November 2014
Like them or not, Beats by Dr. Dre can take credit for lighting a fire under the headphone market. Manufacturers of much better headphones and associated gear are now reaping the benefits as consumers explore better alternatives. While the bulk of consumers’ attention seems to be on the portables market, the increased focus on high-performance audio has also shone a light on the burgeoning market in headphone amplifiers, and buyers are taking notice.
Right now, the hottest action in the amplification segment is in the category of headphone amp-preamplifier-DAC, with examples from Benchmark Media, Grace Design, and Antelope Audio (among others) receiving rave reviews. Charging into this space is Oppo Digital, already well known for their excellent-sounding universal disc/streaming players, with their HA-1 headphone amplifier ($1199 USD).
As usual, however, Oppo has not been content to create another me-too product. The HA-1 contains some notable differences from the rest of the herd.
If someone told you that Samsung was offering new earphones and asked you what you thought they might be like, you’d probably guess a rather ordinary design with a generic dynamic driver and decent sound, for $30 or $40, right? Wrong. Like practically every other TV company lured by the promise of more lucrative margins than the 0.01% profit (give or take a few hundredths of a percent) now common in the TV biz, Samsung is pushing into higher-end audio products. Their new earphones, the Level In, cost a substantial $149.99 USD and are anything but generic.
Proof that headphone enthusiasts are a little different from other audiophiles can be found in the very name of the Brainwavz S5 earphones. Could you imagine a $10,000/pair speaker coming from a company called Brainwavz? If you had that name on your room at the Festival Son et Image or Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I bet most showgoers would silently slip past your door, assuming you’d actually intended to exhibit at the skateboarding show a week earlier.
Ever since the appearance of headphones from Beats by Dre, the gourmet head- and earphone industry has flourished. In the last few years, practically every big name in hi-fi has released its take on what a high-end headphone should be. Bowers & Wilkins, Cardas, Klipsch, MartinLogan, NAD, Paradigm, Polk, PSB -- even Musical Fidelity. I would have thought that the market would already be saturated, yet only recently has the British company KEF, one of audio’s biggest and most-respected names, launched its first headphone models. I suspected that this was due either to caution, or a lack of deep interest in headphones. Neither turned out to be the case.
Definitive Technology is one of my favorite loudspeaker manufacturers -- not only because the company is innovative, but because its speaker line consists of models that punch way above their price class. Not many other speakers costing only $1998 USD per pair can boast the full-range performance of my reference DefTech BP-8060ST towers. Not only that, they sound fantastic throughout their 20Hz-30kHz frequency response, and their footprint is very small. What’s not to like?
Astell&Kern has made quite a rumble with its earlier models of portable media players, the AK100 and AK120. With the AK240 they’ve created a model that seems to know no bounds. It’s a high-quality piece that you won’t be ashamed to plug into your main audio system, yet you can carry it with you almost anywhere. And it costs a bundle -- $2499 USD.
New Acoustic Dimension, aka NAD, is a brand well known to audiophiles. Beginning in the late 1970s with the 3020 integrated amplifier, the once-British, now-Canadian company has developed a reputation for solid-performing, high-value electronics. Like many other manufacturers, NAD is now moving beyond its traditional two-channel audio and home-theater products to address, with its Viso products, the booming market of compact desktop and personal audio gear. A recent addition to the range are the HP50 headphones ($299 USD).
Bowers & Wilkins, the iconic British speaker manufacturer, made their first foray into nontraditional hi-fi with the Zeppelin iPod speaker dock. That product was a great success with their established customers who wanted a small and simple one-box system for a second room, but perhaps more important, it introduced the brand to a whole new demographic. In 2010, B&W unveiled their first headphone design, the P5, which also proved successful with critics and consumers. They followed that up in 2011 with the in-ear 
