Herb Reichert’s lust for power leads to sonic Euforia
My current romance with audiophile-quality headphones began in earnest with the appearance, about 10 years ago, of Audeze’s LCD-2 planar-magnetic headphones—these predated the company’s patented Fazor elements, said to guide the sound around the transducers’ magnet structures—and Schiit Audio’s original Asgard headphone amplifier. Together, these groundbreaking products rekindled my interest by making headphone listening into something new and exciting—something less distorted, more dynamic, denser, and more intensely lifelike than what I was getting from my speakers on the floor. Best of all, I could listen while lying in bed with my eyes closed.
My first headphone romance was back in the 1990s, when I realized that headphone drivers were high-sensitivity, high-impedance devices. That’s when I started cutting off phone plugs and connecting Grado headphones to my 300B amps.
My brain hit the next level of engagement about five years ago, when I encountered JPS Labs’ Abyss AB-1266 headphones ($4495, now discontinued). These radical, off-the-head transducers gave me my first glimpse of what I now consider the leading edge of audio reproduction. Their ability to reproduce recordings as supernaturally clear apparitions remains unmatched in my experience.
The planar-magnetic Abyss ’phones had low-to-moderate sensitivity and presented amplifiers with a purely resistive, frequency-independent load of 48 ohms. They required only 0.320V/2.14mW to achieve a 90dB SPL. But they sounded most transparent and compelling when driven by exotic tube amplifiers, such as the $5899 Woo Audio WA5 amplifier I reviewed in 2016.1
My WA5 review sample came equipped with Takatsuki Denki 300B power tubes ($1995/pair) and a $1250 premium parts upgrade. The WA5 was not only an outstanding speaker amp, it was also an ideal headphone amp, offering user-selectable levels of power, output impedance, and gain. It made more than enough voltage and current (10W into 8 ohms/500mW into 32 ohms) to drive any tough-to-drive headphone
