Clay Aiken – His Voice Soars!

An educated person: One who knows enough to understand just how much he or she does not know.

I have to admit I was initially not convinced.  That’s not quite accurate.  I was disappointed.  After all the in-house hype for NightHawk headphones, we received our initial order and they sounded like a dud.  That comes hard from me, so a little background to this tale is in order.

Since the day my industry friend Richard Colburn hand carried the first pair of Diamond interconnects from California to Illinois and into my life in the late ‘80’s, I have been a huge fan of virtually everything that has sprung from the mind of Bill Low and his band of merry pranksters at AudioQuest.  I well remember after dinner Richard handing me the cables to listen to that night as long as I returned them prior to his leaving the next day.  I got home around 10:30 and immediately replaced the cables connecting my CD player to my preamp with the Diamonds, well aware that this pair of cables, for crying out loud, cost nearly twice what my player did.

We already carried the largest selling brand of audio cables in the marketplace, and my feelings about the one brand of silver cables we also carried were not good, but here comes a cable that promises to fulfill the promise of silver absent the downside.  That night, which ended by sheer obligation to sleep at least a little before work the next day, lasted until near 4:00 AM, and was my watershed observation that everything in an audio system matters, often wildly out of proportion to what preconception and bias might suggest, and cables were not mere accessories or afterthoughts.

Imagine me, nearly thirty years on and all this time ensconced happily in the AudioQuest family, encountering a letdown for the first time.  I have to say it shook me.  We had let the NightHawks break in, both on and off our heads, for the better part of a month.  Surely that must be enough time?  But they didn’t seem to be coming around.

We would put them on and listen to music we knew well, and it just seemed to lie there, uninspired and uninspiring.  We would compare them to other ‘phones, well known and respected, and, while they were all in their ways disappointing, they at least each, for the most part, did what I had expected headphones to do- provide me that closer than real life perspective on the recording so that I could hear things I can’t hear even on my best home speaker system, so that the new knowledge could in turn inform my speaker-based listening.

I told some of my friends at AudioQuest that, aside from phenomenal build quality, state of the art comfort, beautiful profile, and spot on pricing, we were, to a person, not loving the NightHawks.  As we are all one big, heretofore happy, family we were concerned.  Hands were wrung, supporting documentation was provided, advice was given and a summit phone conversation was suggested.

And then something happened.  I’m not sure what, exactly, but, though a small part of it may have had to do with an even longer break-in period than we initially thought, I think mostly I changed.  You see, I’m not a headphone guy.  I use a nice pair of in-ear ‘phones for casual listening on my iPod Classic and my Pono (I will not listen to MP3s by choice ever and I own none), but that is pretty much just yard work and airplane travel mode in my world.  Those batteries probably discharge more often from non-use than while playing music.  The last time I used full-on headphones for any significant listening, they were Koss Pro 4AAs and they were a new idea, not a retro fad.

I decided to approach the NightHawks again from a fresh perspective- as though they were a speaker system that happened to be attached to my head.  I went in with the same expectations of enjoying music I have when I listen to speaker-based systems; in other words, I left evaluation mode behind.  True that I had read the AudioQuest treatise on all the technology involved, how the design brief departs from all that has come before, and how the measurements support NightHawks as a breakthrough.  And true also that the ‘phones had more play time on them than last time I donned them, but, again, I think the big change was in my thinking about what a headphone is.

Suddenly, I was lingering long on my favorite tracks with the NightHawks playing, and yearning to go back to them while trying esteemed competitors.  I’ve been evaluating vintage vacuum tubes to sell to customers with Peachtree gear, and my playlist for that “task” served double duty listening to headphones.

David Bromberg’s “Dehlia” live from a million years ago has a moment when (the great) Will Scarlet enters from WAY off stage left with his harmonica.  On a great speaker system this is a transcendent moment.  Seemingly starting in some other world, the harp moves slowly closer to the microphone until it’s finally as close as it’s going to get.  The growing drama of this moment, which never rises above the subtle, relies on a combination of spatial coherence, true detail retrieval and tonal gravitas that headphones just don’t seem to have.  Until NightHawk.

NightHawk presents all of this information, granted from inside my head, not coming to me as a concert performance does, but there is actual three-dimensionality, both to individual instruments (plucked acoustic guitar, voice and harmonica) as well as to the space they share.  This means I can locate everything in a 3D sound field in my head and that the instruments are fleshed out, pumped full of shape and color.  It makes it very easy to experience the emotional impact of this performance, with which it drips, although subtly.

All the esteemed competitors, which include two open back designs and one closed, and range in price from a little more than the NightHawks to more than twice as much, fall apart on this track.  Some do an okay job of getting the tonal balance (the closed pair coming closest), but still do not approach NightHawk.  More important, though, none gets the totality of the performance, and they all grossly miss the spine tingling entrance of Will Scarlet.  NightHawk nails it, and having done so, establishes a benchmark that has me taking off each of the others as this point comes and ending my note taking.

On the final movement of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony, Neemi Jarvi conducting the Gothenburg SO on Bis, again only the NightHawk really even lets me enjoy the piece.  As I said, I’m not a headphone guy so I still miss hearing this wonderful performance and recording presented to my seat in the concert hall of my main system, but it does tell me some things about the performance I don’t get from that seat and without the accompanying aggravation the competitors burn or bore my ears with.

NightHawk makes wonderfully visible sections of the orchestra, including sweet strings, wherein I can hear both ensemble and individual playing simultaneously, and it does so through the hard work of coherent resolution and a neutral tonal balance rather than resorting to the typical headphone trick of an upwardly tilted tonal balance and just enough high frequency distortion to make you think you are hearing detail.  French horns soar darkly above the rest of the orchestra, no mean feat because they have so little higher harmonic content, which is usually the way height is faked, but the ‘Hawks do it because they are actually reproducing the delicate phase information that places everything properly in the spatial environment of the recording.  So they preserve the horns’ tonal darkness and locate them properly.  And the tympani rolls!  Loaded with body and muscle, but staying rooted, properly somewhat vaguely outlined, in space no matter how played.

NightHawk revealed dynamics and rubato with an easy precision that made me, again, not want to take them off, especially to hear what the esteemed competitors did with this piece.  The short description is NightHawk soared while the others, to one degree or another, seared.

My notes have quotes like, “French horns or car horns?”, “tympani die immediately,” “no bass foundation,” “decent 3D to sections, but little overall depth and NO height,” “generic woodwind section with no ability to tell which ones are playing at any given time,” “can’t tell how bowed strings ‘work’; could be a synthesizer.”  The most expensive pair actually shifted the physical location of the tympani dependent on pitch and dynamics, while also making them appear too distinctly located on stage, thereby ruining the brilliant job of the Bis recording team to present an orchestra as an instrumentally egalitarian whole.  Yes, sometimes the device that “images” better is worse.

The Sibelius, by dint of its complexity and dynamic sweep, was the piece that most separated NightHawk from the pack.  Each competitor had me scribbling notes, hoping to go back to the NightHawk sound as soon as I could.  Each time I did, I listened all the way through, just waiting for the glorious finale.  I was wasting evaluation time, but I couldn’t help it.  I was having too much fun.

Then there is the riot on tape that is Van Morrison’s “Madame George.”  Not the contemplative mesmerizer from Astral Weeks (with my mother’s pal Richard Davis on bass) but the even earlier explosion I discovered not nearly as many years ago on The Bang Masters.  I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m damn glad the recorder was running.  It opens sounding like a kindergarten class thirty seconds after the opening bell has futilely rung, and it doesn’t straighten up a whole lot from there.

Under the influence of the NightHawks, it’s startlingly 3D and I can hear the superimposition of the individual mikes over what seems to be a stereo mike picking up all the classroom shenanigans as the teacher, not in any way Van, tries to corral the room into some semblance of order.  Thankfully, the kids win all the way to the end, but I am now gathering oodles of real information I can infuse into my speaker listening of this beloved track.

All the other headphones are a letdown.  One merits, “no foundation or dimension,” and “painfully high frequency tilted,” while another gets, “no depth, again okay fleshing out of instruments, but nothing like NH,” and “ lateral spread does not extend beyond earcups,” followed with “everything is either in left ear, middle of head, or right ear,” and “cannot sense the room,” and finally, the third is, “feel as though I am in Lilliput,” and “perhaps lowest distortion of non-NH, but brings nothing else to the party,” and “unlivable bass content and character.”

I ended with the wind-down palate cleanser that is “Watkins Ale” played ethereally on the lute by Ronn McFarlane.  Replete with lyrics, it’s clearly an Elizabethan pornographic campfire song which, although sung from the woman’s viewpoint, makes me think the composer, from the large and famous Anonymous family, had to be one of the sons.  Ronn, not a singer nor wishing to offend any Elizabethans still in the room, dispenses with the words and gorgeously plucks the tune out on his lute, making it sound far easier than the actual act.

Only NightHawk does this lovely little ditty justice.  The difference between the meatier, softer, thumbed down plucks on the lower pitched strings is easily differentiated from the much clickier, calloused fingered lifts of the more complex melody string passages.  Lots of dark hall ambience fills its rich and rightful role supporting the tiny gem that is a lute in a large room.  So simple, but so difficult to pull off.

So far behind, the esteemed competitors garner such praise as, “2D! Ambience splays out to sides, never peels back into depth,” “transient envelope gone, as if notes start before strings are plucked,” “tiny, tinny sound,” “had to turn it UP in attempt to find what NH delivers but still couldn’t,” “ambiance falls off digitally, as though a series of discrete events,” and “feels as though I am in a miniature world without any power.”

So what changed?  I’m fairly sure I did.  Even if the price for what I’m hearing is $599 and 45 days of break-in, it’s a screaming bargain.  But now, you’ll have to excuse me.  That Sibelius has come back around on my living room speaker system and I’m going back under the NightHawks.  Maybe I’m a headphone guy after all.