Had to pop in to share some fun news. I just came through a very interesting test of two different premises that have been explored in other videos on this channel -- the first being that the XLR inputs on the Fosi Audio ZA3 are sonically much the superior connection to the single-ended RCA, and the other premise being that just because a DAC is only capable of single-ended output, that doesn't mean that it's going to sound inferior to another DAC that happens to be balanced. In my case the pseudoscientific experiment testing these two premises came out with a clear winner: My Arcam irDAC (Burr-Brown chipset) thoroughly trounced my SMSL DO300EX (AKM-based), despite the fact that the SMSL was running balanced into my two Fosis. The superiority of the Fosi's XLR connections was utterly subsumed by the Arcam. It's only a sample of one, but the SMSL has a very respectable architecture and uses a very highly admired chipset; it really should have done a much better job of holding its own against a rapidly aging piece with only RCA's.
🙃0:01 What I hope for from headphones are wireless headphones that give me strong ANC that makes me live in a bubble and have good sound and I can play my favorite music and walk around at night and I will be happier than ever in this hobby and I will wait for that day.
Is there anything wrong with the Focal Bathys? You can also have that experience with the Airpod Max. They sound pretty great in my opinion. Don't let purist ruin the experience. But, to be fair, you can spend a lot less and go for the IEM route... There you have amazing prize / sound quality options, with a goo's sound isolation, that will make you live in a bubble. The Truthear Crinacle Red are really great for their price. You can go crazy and go for the Sony IER-Z1R... End game for me. Bought them more than two years ago and I stopped looking for more.
I agree. There's no wireless option currently that will match a wired setup and IEMs are incredibly good value for money. Alternatively, going wireless is great for convenience if you're focussed more on the joy of having music and less focussed on perfection. 🙂
@gatobakuniano You are right about quality, but believe me, regarding ANC, nothing is good or close to perfect. I like ANC because you will listen to quiet music at a volume level of 10%, for example, but in headphones or IEM, you will raise the volume to the point that will block the sound, and so on. Soft music has lost its main meaning. As for the Focal Bathys, in terms of sound, it is good, but in terms of live ANC, it is significantly behind competitors or the best inAs for the Airpod, I am an Android user, so you will lose most of its features and it is not worth buying, so there are better alternatives.
@@PassionforSound As for me, when I cook or want to move or put my phone somewhere and walk around or exercise or work, I can prefer wireless elements over IEM at any price, especially with ANC.
@@MML66 well, I have to agree that nothing matches the convenience of wireless in several circumstances. At the end of the day the headphones that I am using the most are the Sony True Wireless, I don't remember the model, around 70€. I am never using the ANC. In terms of sound quality, a lot of reviewers say that the Final UX3000, sound great, but they probably don't have the best ANC. If that's important to you should check the last Bose model. I remember DMS saying that they sound great and the ANC is on the top league.
It would be cool to have more planar manufacturers try the typical dynamic build style of angling the driver and placing it somewhat more foward/away from our ears. I find that my Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless have noticably better depth staging than my Diana MRs. - I know the MRs aren't great with depth anyway compared to other traditional layout planars, but I think it would be cool to see more planars have their layout like the Yamaha nonetheless. I'm curious to see if well implemented crossfeed would help with depth staging on my MRs. P.S. I checked out your squig link and couldn't see any Abyss graphs to compare things with?
It's actually just that I need to convert all my old measurements to a different format to add to the Squig site so it's taking time. 🙂 I agree about the distant, angled driver approach. I think the YH5000s suggest some potential for that to yield excellent staging characteristics.
@@PassionforSound I see, all in good time 🫡 I can only imagine that an easy to drive/high end/well tuned/angled driver planer paired with a DAVE would be sound stage heaven. Then for it to be Vegan friendly so that I could buy it and all would be good in the world! (One can dream 😂)
Honestly, I listened briefly to these when they first came out. Granted, it was under show conditions ( almost straight out of the box) but my reaction was fairly similar to yours. My initial thoughts were loved the way they looked but they didn’t feel or sound like a $5k headphone. I’ve since heard that they do require some burn-in so I will revisit them in the future.
Hi Lachlan!! Thanks for this fascinating review. I've long been a fan of Yamaha products (I have a Yamaha soprano sax). I won't be buying this headphone however. I still have a Meze Elite, but listen almost exclusively to my Focal Bathys, due to its unique Sound Personalization feature, which customizes its EQ to match my high frequency hearing loss. I still enjoy my Burson and Chord electronics that you have reviewed in the past, thanks! -Bobby
I tightened my sliders and have had no problems since. Very easy to adjust if you so choose. And yes they're incredibly picky IME, I don't recommend to someone not willing to invest in these. But when you get it right they are far superior than something like a final or focal regardless of preference (imo at least). They're also very picky in the cable department. I did not like it with the stock cable at all. I didn't even like it with the danacable lazuli ref I have. Goes to show how important synergy is. Initially I chuckled at their marketing in their website, but now that I have them dialed in what they say is quite accurate.
Such a strange sounding pair of cans. I tried them in Akihabara along with a bunch of other heapdhones. Yamaha makes some of the best instruments in the world. What happened lol
Hey, why didn't you graph the differences between DAC/Amps with this headphone? You showed two different graphs for the different pads, why not the signal chain? If it's a significant, audible difference, we must be able to see a change in the FR.
What is your reasoning for this inference? - I see how it could maybe be so, but there is more to sound quality than frequency/amplitude respons curves - in fact you could argue that only reveals sound quantity relative to frequency. The balance there amounts to tonal quality, but there are other qualities to consider.
@@arrowzen7433 Yes, a frequency response graph describes volume relative to frequency. What are the other qualities to consider, exactly? What can you hear that a measurement microphone can't detect? How do you demonstrate and/or quantify that?
Hi Lachlan, just wanted to say that thing you are describing about not really hearing it as music, but being able to focus on specifics of microphone distance and things, well I quite like the sound of that, if I could afford these, that’s probably the kind of different experience I would be looking for I reckon. Such a cool looking headphone, hope they adopt that design in more affordable stuff. And that matching amp looks cool. Good review!
Yeah, it's got a lot of potential. There are other headphones that will give you the same kind of insight as these if you want it. My point with the Yammys was that they kind of give it to you even if you don't want it. 🤣 The HEDDphone 2 is probably the best option I've tried for maximum insight without going to flagship levels.
Mine too, on another video yesterday, someone alerted me to it and kindly reposted the comment that I left, on a different channel. What an insulting joke eh? Some algorithm.
last year I tried it in the shop and after just 30 sec... i found the tuning seriously wonky..... instrumental and vocal sounded kinda weird... nothing i can call it natural at all....
@@PassionforSound i understand summit fi HPs have their own characters but not to the extent it's unnatural or i need to EQ the shxt out of it to be listenable then it is not quite worth the asking price.... The other end of the scale imo is the Drop x Grell OAE1..... another wonky tuned HP... anything above human voice frequency is recessed.... some say it's their best HP ever... i think they believe electric guitar can sound natural lol....
I put it on avg. volume and with song like Astrix - Adhana, drivers started to fart, i immediately put down the headphones at the store xD for me they would sell like hot cakes for around $500 but there's an extra zero there which is unfortunate, also Meze Elite for me much better headphones, but still when something like he1000se exist for %50 off at 1699, they are overpriced.
Thanks for this, I heard it a few times with both pads on a few rigs. There are just better headphones out there for less, better luck next time Yamaha.
Besides the very wonky FR, it has also high distortion measured by ASR, especially for a flagship planar. It is a scam product, way inferior to a 200usd FT1 Pro.
At 1:33 you say Yamaha calls this driver iso-dynamic. That is actually Meze. Yamaha calls it ortho-dynamic. I guess it is just a 'verbal typo'. ;)
Oops, yes. Verbal typo is a perfect explanation for it! Thanks for the correction!!
Had to pop in to share some fun news. I just came through a very interesting test of two different premises that have been explored in other videos on this channel -- the first being that the XLR inputs on the Fosi Audio ZA3 are sonically much the superior connection to the single-ended RCA, and the other premise being that just because a DAC is only capable of single-ended output, that doesn't mean that it's going to sound inferior to another DAC that happens to be balanced. In my case the pseudoscientific experiment testing these two premises came out with a clear winner: My Arcam irDAC (Burr-Brown chipset) thoroughly trounced my SMSL DO300EX (AKM-based), despite the fact that the SMSL was running balanced into my two Fosis. The superiority of the Fosi's XLR connections was utterly subsumed by the Arcam. It's only a sample of one, but the SMSL has a very respectable architecture and uses a very highly admired chipset; it really should have done a much better job of holding its own against a rapidly aging piece with only RCA's.
🙃0:01 What I hope for from headphones are wireless headphones that give me strong ANC that makes me live in a bubble and have good sound and I can play my favorite music and walk around at night and I will be happier than ever in this hobby and I will wait for that day.
Is there anything wrong with the Focal Bathys?
You can also have that experience with the Airpod Max. They sound pretty great in my opinion. Don't let purist ruin the experience.
But, to be fair, you can spend a lot less and go for the IEM route... There you have amazing prize / sound quality options, with a goo's sound isolation, that will make you live in a bubble.
The Truthear Crinacle Red are really great for their price.
You can go crazy and go for the Sony IER-Z1R... End game for me. Bought them more than two years ago and I stopped looking for more.
I agree. There's no wireless option currently that will match a wired setup and IEMs are incredibly good value for money. Alternatively, going wireless is great for convenience if you're focussed more on the joy of having music and less focussed on perfection. 🙂
@gatobakuniano You are right about quality, but believe me, regarding ANC, nothing is good or close to perfect. I like ANC because you will listen to quiet music at a volume level of 10%, for example, but in headphones or IEM, you will raise the volume to the point that will block the sound, and so on. Soft music has lost its main meaning. As for the Focal Bathys, in terms of sound, it is good, but in terms of live ANC, it is significantly behind competitors or the best inAs for the Airpod, I am an Android user, so you will lose most of its features and it is not worth buying, so there are better alternatives.
@@PassionforSound As for me, when I cook or want to move or put my phone somewhere and walk around or exercise or work, I can prefer wireless elements over IEM at any price, especially with ANC.
@@MML66 well, I have to agree that nothing matches the convenience of wireless in several circumstances. At the end of the day the headphones that I am using the most are the Sony True Wireless, I don't remember the model, around 70€. I am never using the ANC.
In terms of sound quality, a lot of reviewers say that the Final UX3000, sound great, but they probably don't have the best ANC. If that's important to you should check the last Bose model. I remember DMS saying that they sound great and the ANC is on the top league.
It would be cool to have more planar manufacturers try the typical dynamic build style of angling the driver and placing it somewhat more foward/away from our ears.
I find that my Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless have noticably better depth staging than my Diana MRs.
- I know the MRs aren't great with depth anyway compared to other traditional layout planars, but I think it would be cool to see more planars have their layout like the Yamaha nonetheless.
I'm curious to see if well implemented crossfeed would help with depth staging on my MRs.
P.S. I checked out your squig link and couldn't see any Abyss graphs to compare things with?
It's actually just that I need to convert all my old measurements to a different format to add to the Squig site so it's taking time. 🙂
I agree about the distant, angled driver approach. I think the YH5000s suggest some potential for that to yield excellent staging characteristics.
@@PassionforSound I see, all in good time 🫡
I can only imagine that an easy to drive/high end/well tuned/angled driver planer paired with a DAVE would be sound stage heaven. Then for it to be Vegan friendly so that I could buy it and all would be good in the world! (One can dream 😂)
I hear you! (No pun intended)
Honestly, I listened briefly to these when they first came out. Granted, it was under show conditions ( almost straight out of the box) but my reaction was fairly similar to yours. My initial thoughts were loved the way they looked but they didn’t feel or sound like a $5k headphone. I’ve since heard that they do require some burn-in so I will revisit them in the future.
I just want an excuse to have one bc the design is just brilliant to me. I’m glad you’re covering these
I loved the design too. Really wanted to love them.
Hi Lachlan!! Thanks for this fascinating review. I've long been a fan of Yamaha products (I have a Yamaha soprano sax). I won't be buying this headphone however. I still have a Meze Elite, but listen almost exclusively to my Focal Bathys, due to its unique Sound Personalization feature, which customizes its EQ to match my high frequency hearing loss. I still enjoy my Burson and Chord electronics that you have reviewed in the past, thanks! -Bobby
I tightened my sliders and have had no problems since. Very easy to adjust if you so choose.
And yes they're incredibly picky IME, I don't recommend to someone not willing to invest in these. But when you get it right they are far superior than something like a final or focal regardless of preference (imo at least).
They're also very picky in the cable department. I did not like it with the stock cable at all. I didn't even like it with the danacable lazuli ref I have. Goes to show how important synergy is.
Initially I chuckled at their marketing in their website, but now that I have them dialed in what they say is quite accurate.
Such a strange sounding pair of cans.
I tried them in Akihabara along with a bunch of other heapdhones.
Yamaha makes some of the best instruments in the world.
What happened lol
Yes, it's a bit of a head scratcher... 🤣
Hey, why didn't you graph the differences between DAC/Amps with this headphone? You showed two different graphs for the different pads, why not the signal chain? If it's a significant, audible difference, we must be able to see a change in the FR.
What is your reasoning for this inference? - I see how it could maybe be so, but there is more to sound quality than frequency/amplitude respons curves - in fact you could argue that only reveals sound quantity relative to frequency. The balance there amounts to tonal quality, but there are other qualities to consider.
@@arrowzen7433 Yes, a frequency response graph describes volume relative to frequency. What are the other qualities to consider, exactly? What can you hear that a measurement microphone can't detect? How do you demonstrate and/or quantify that?
Do you have the D8000 or the D8000 Pro?
I had the D8000 on loan recently. The review is coming soon...
Not really a "FAIR" comparison considering the huge price difference, Yamahas are in the nice used car price range!
In what field are Yamaha competing st Sennheiser's game? Thats like asking if Goodyear can compete at Ford's game
Hi Lachlan, just wanted to say that thing you are describing about not really hearing it as music, but being able to focus on specifics of microphone distance and things, well I quite like the sound of that, if I could afford these, that’s probably the kind of different experience I would be looking for I reckon. Such a cool looking headphone, hope they adopt that design in more affordable stuff. And that matching amp looks cool. Good review!
Yeah, it's got a lot of potential.
There are other headphones that will give you the same kind of insight as these if you want it. My point with the Yammys was that they kind of give it to you even if you don't want it. 🤣
The HEDDphone 2 is probably the best option I've tried for maximum insight without going to flagship levels.
Guys, come on... It's only $5000! Chump change, amirite???
The mid is peaking then dipping. Lmao
if they were $500, those signature flaws/peculiarities would be passable. For $5K, that is inexcusable
I think youtube is deleting my comments 🤔
It does that sometimes and on completely harmless comments... 🤷
@PassionforSound I'll try again with some edits and see if it let's it through this time 😂
Mine too, on another video yesterday, someone alerted me to it and kindly reposted the comment that I left, on a different channel. What an insulting joke eh? Some algorithm.
I think you’re right
last year I tried it in the shop and after just 30 sec... i found the tuning seriously wonky..... instrumental and vocal sounded kinda weird... nothing i can call it natural at all....
Yep. It definitely takes some time to adjust to
@@PassionforSound i understand summit fi HPs have their own characters but not to the extent it's unnatural or i need to EQ the shxt out of it to be listenable then it is not quite worth the asking price....
The other end of the scale imo is the Drop x Grell OAE1..... another wonky tuned HP... anything above human voice frequency is recessed.... some say it's their best HP ever... i think they believe electric guitar can sound natural lol....
These sound like such a mess, but the bass seems very agile and punchy so with proper EQ they might be great. Needs a lot of filters though😅
I put it on avg. volume and with song like Astrix - Adhana, drivers started to fart, i immediately put down the headphones at the store xD for me they would sell like hot cakes for around $500 but there's an extra zero there which is unfortunate, also Meze Elite for me much better headphones, but still when something like he1000se exist for %50 off at 1699, they are overpriced.
I think they might need a revision to their tuning to properly compete.
Terrible value and sounds more like $1k headphones. Heard these at e-earphones in Japan.
Out of my budget
$5000 pass
Pricing on TOTL headphones has become insane unfortunately.
Thanks for this, I heard it a few times with both pads on a few rigs. There are just better headphones out there for less, better luck next time Yamaha.
Enough mugging for the camera. It's starting to become annoying. I know you do it as a form of satire, but it is undermining your credibility.
Besides the very wonky FR, it has also high distortion measured by ASR, especially for a flagship planar. It is a scam product, way inferior to a 200usd FT1 Pro.
"High distortion" measured by one person doesn't make it a scam product
More snake oil when talking about ear pads!
What? You can see the different FRs in the graph?
Ear pads make a significant difference, more than modern cables, amp, or dacs...they're just not as profitable or sexy