OK, so they aren’t so comfortable that you could sleep in them, but they are comfortable enough that you can easily doze off with them on. I wore these headphones for an entire evening’s Radio Three listening and never felt the need to even reposition them. Oddly, there isn’t a lot of padding around the headband, but this works in the Pioneer’s favour, as it lightens the load considerably. But this, coupled with very soft, very padded, yet very breathable ear pads and a very lightweight, but well-built frame and headband, means they really can be worn all evening with no real stress on the listener. This is actually the secret to their comfort, as they are very much ‘over ear’ designs: if you are small of head, ‘over ear’ means ‘covering everything from temple to jawline’. They were also designed from the outset to be comfortable enough to be worn at home for extremely long periods, despite their 480g weight. The SE-Monitor 5 actually pulls a lot of the technology developed by Pioneer in the SE-Master 1, and production engineers it so that it’s more regularly available and attainable. Fortunately, Pioneer made a £1,000 closed back SE-Monitor 5 version for the rest of us, and very good it is too. There’s a waiting list, and we’re not exactly at the front of the line. Open-backed, hand-crafted, built to order, made of unobtanium-wrapped fantasticium, with ear-cups made of unicorn eyelids… that sort of thing. Some of the below quotes have been edited for brevity and clarity.Pioneer launched an ultimate flagship headphone called the SE-Master 1 a couple of years ago. The answers, in all his own quotes, are below. To get a little more insight, we asked Garry to share the most popular receivers and amplifiers that people come to his shop for. For vintage restoration, Garry says that they work primarily on the 1960s vacuum tube gear and 1970s solid-state. “Unlike most audio equipment businesses out there, the most common equipment we sell is two-channel stereo,” he said. Garry’s shop, Hudson Valley HiFi, is located in Cornwall, New York, on the western shore of the Hudson River, and it specializes in both modern and vintage audio gear. For consumers, this means they are either finding non-working units and getting them restored, or likely paying a premium on restored units. A lot of these vital parts, also, aren’t being made anymore because they’re so old, so restoring them isn’t a quick fix for technicians at these vintage audio shop. Old gear naturally breaks down over time and needs new parts to perform at their best. “The early 1970s muscle car may not be as reliable or perform as well as a modern one, but there is just something cool and fun about the 50-year-old model.” Like with vintage cars, vintage audio depends a heck-of-a-lot on restoration. “I constantly use the analogy of vintage cars running parallels with vintage audio,” says Mike Garry, owner of Hudson Valley HiFi, which specializes in buying, restoring and selling vintage audio equipment. Vintage units just have that special something that modern equipment lacks. And part of it has to do with charm and character. Part of it has to do with fidelity, that the old stuff sounds better. Part of it has to do with rarity, the thrill of hunting down a Marantz stereo receiver from the 1970s, heritage speakers by Klipsch or JBL, or a vintage Thorens turntable. For audiophiles, there’s no doubting the appeal of vintage audio equipment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |