Article: Audeze LCD-4z Review

[gmgraves]

On 9/8/2019 at 9:14 PM, wgscott said:

 

Is that a fact??? Or simply your snobbery? You seem to believe that CU is too pedestrian to appreciate sound quality. Perhaps your expectation bias is set by the price tag.

 

Lenin had a term for this.

I think Audiobomber is right. I remember a CR report on speakers one time where the criterion for quality was the number of times the frequency response graph of the speaker being tested wandered either above or below an arbitrary pair of lines (set, as I recall at +/- 5 dB). The winner was a pair of fairly cheap Marantz mid-Fi speakers. They beat-out A pair of Rogers LS3/5, a pair of fairly large Infinity bookshelf speakers (don’t remember the model), a pair of Proac Tablette speakers and several more that I don’t recall at all.

What I do recall, was that the “winning”  Marantz speaker model in question was surely the poorest sounding of the lot and the pair with the best ACTUAL sound, the Rogers, (a pair of which I owned, at the time), were given the lowest ranking.

These are also the people who disqualified the original Koss electrostatic headphones as being unsafe, because they had a decorative aluminum ring circling each plastic ear-cup. CR’s reasoning was that there was around 600 volts inside the closed-back cup in the driver enclosure. The fact that there was no way for the 600 volts INSIDE  the totally closed headphones to touch the cosmetic aluminum band OUTSIDE the cup even if the phones were ostensibly immersed in salt water never seemed to enter this decision in any way shape or form!

These and a few questionable camera and automotive reviews, completely undermined my confidence in the competence of CR’s ability to properly review anything that I knew anything about. If they couldn’t get HiFi right, cameras right, or sports cars right (all things that I figured that I knew at least as much about as they did) then, how could I trust them about things I didn’t know about like toaster ovens, electric mixers and vacuum cleaners?

Haven’t looked at a CR since. Maybe they’ve changed, but I wouldn’t trust them until they proved themselves over a long haul. Not about to spend the dough to give them that trial.

[gmgraves]

19 hours ago, kennyb123 said:

 

It was brought to my attention that there was another write-up where Audeze LCD-4 headphones were said to sound “wretched”.  Weird how closely George’s narrative tracks with what Sonis conveyed in his review.  

 

 

Easy peasy, nothing sinister going on here. At the time I posted this, I was evaluating a bunch of headphones at once. The Audeze LCD-4z had been returned to Audeze to be “repaired” and I had listened to two different headphones at that time for which I did not care. The other were a pair of AR  model AR-H1 planar magnetic headphones which I had recently returned to AR’s PR firm. When I posted that opinion in mid-June, I merely confused the sonic signatures of two phones that I found wanting. I couldn’t check to confirm which was which because I had neither in my possession at the time (and I had been “evaluating” 4 or 5 other phones along with the AR and the Audeze LCD-4z).

BTW, I post here under my own name but I review under a nom de plume for a reason that has nothing to do with Audiophile Style, per se.

[gmgraves]

39 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Do you still have the AR-H1 headphones?

Like I said, Chris:

“The other were a pair of AR model AR-H1 planar magnetic headphones which I had recently returned toAR’s PR firm.”

So, no. Haven’t had them since early June.