Article: Audeze LCD-4z Review

[audiobomber]

2 hours ago, wgscott said:

 

In other words, you have no idea what you are talking about.  (CU gave Tesla the highest possible ratings for a few years.  Until their cars started catching fire.)

 

But while you are playing catch-up, read the Bose vs. Consumer Reports wiki article I posted.  It is right up your ally.

An audio system built around CR reviews will be very inexpensive and appallingly mediocre. 

[audiobomber]

4 hours ago, Sonis said:

Thank you Chris, you’ve hit the nail on the head. On the other hand, everyone here has the right to take me to task for any breach of etiquette or wrong-doing whether real or imagined!

Oh, it's real. You misled us regarding your (non-existent) interactions with the manufacturer. Take this thread as a lesson learned and have the grace to bow out now, as Audeze did.

 

[wgscott]

11 minutes ago, audiobomber said:

An audio system built around CR reviews will be very inexpensive and appallingly mediocre. 

 

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.

[albert]

I own a pair of audeze lcd-x but have not heard the 4z. I think sonis is reporting what he heard. Why would he do otherwise? He has nothing to gain by giving a bad review. On the other hand , it is hard to believe that audeze would make such a bad headphone at this price point. Sonis alread said he no problems with the lcd-2 and 3. This leads me to believe that there is something wrong with his friends pair of 4z. Did audeze even listen to the pair that was returned to them before or after the repair? They exchanged the driver but maybe that was not the only problem with the headphones. This speculation but hopefully sonis can listen to the pair sent to Chris.

[audiobomber]

7 minutes ago, 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've heard the good stuff. You can't get there with a HT receiver.

 

Are you a Marxist? Fine if you are, I'm just curious.

[AudezeLLC]

We accept that Sonis had no ill intent, as he had stated in the last post and are ready to move on. We do not want to waste anymore ether, cloud space and contribute to melting ice. We do not want to waste any more of AS readers time either.

 

We are a relatively small company and not a multi million dollar corporation. The core engineering team has been with Audeze since its inception. We are a passionate bunch and the products we create represent lives work for some of us. We put forth our honest grievance as we saw it and @The Computer Audiophile  published it. As I have repeatedly stated, we had no intent to discredit the subjective opinion of the reviewer. If I had appeared emotional at any point, it was out of passion and not out of ill will and I apologize  to the readers if it came out that way.

 

As requested by quite a few, I will try to address the core complaint, i.e sound.

 

A person's perception of sound signature is true to that person and is subjective. It is shaped by the person's preferences, experience,  the type of music, age, ear geometry (to a lesser extent but applicable to headphones), the shape of the head and whether or not one wears glasses (as it affects the seal). It does not universally translate from one person to another but the hope is that it would appeal to the majority. I know I am preaching to the choir here, but want to state that any way.

In the following discussion,  when I say bass it is the frequencies 250Hz and lower, mids is the frequency range between 250Hz and 3kHz and treble is 3kHz and over. I want to avoid any ambiguity in terminology (mids, treble etc can mean different things to different people). 

 

I will outline our design philosophy to educate readers on what to expect from our headphones.

 

Our Design Philosophy

We design headphones to sound as natural and as close to the original performance as possible. We always strive to accurately reproduce instruments and vocals, each in their own space. Our goal is to make them sound like a good pair of speakers in a well treated room. 

 

This is easier said than done especially when the headphone drivers are on axis, an inch away from the ear vs speakers that are several feet away at at an angle. It is possible to partially accomplish this by making the headphone response imitate  HRTF measurements made with speakers placed 30, 45 or 60 degree angle to the listener. This typically results in an elevated treble response beyond 3kHz. The headphone would provide a wide sound-stage but not sound natural and may sound sibilant. Without room reflections and cross-feed, our brain is not easily fooled. Instead we use angled ear pads to direct the sound from the drivers at an angle that our brain perceives in a more natural fashion. We also use earpads that are deep to put some distance between the outer ear drum and the driver.

 

When measured using a dummy head, our open back LCD series of headphones (including LCD-4/4z) stay flat in their frequency response  starting at 10Hz -20Hz upto about 300Hz (let us set a rference at 0dB). From here, the frequency response gradually raises till it hits 10dB at 2.7-3kHz, this can be seen in measurements. Our headphone response follows tha Harman preferred headphone response  closely starting from the bass all the way through the mids and are easily verifiable through measurements.   Our experience has been that beyond 3kHz, measurements become unreliable and we rely more on listening tests and sine sweeps to judge the perceived response. Beyond 3kHz, we find that the Harman curve does not sound natural as we find the treble to be more elevated than we like. So our target response gradually slopes down from 3kHz (at 10dB) hitting  0dB at around 9kHz and continues to slope downwards till it hits about -6dB around 20kHz. We find this target response more natural sounding for a headphone and mimic speakers in a well treated room providing a perceived response that is flat through the mids and then gradually slopes down from there.

 

No headphone is perfect, laws of physics will simply not allow a design to perfectly follow the target response or a HRTF based on speakers in a room unless DSP is used. We make sure our designs stay very close to our preferred target response.

 

Our Design Choices

Our headphones use planar magnetic drivers. For those who may not be familiar with what planar magnetic headphones are, we have written an in depth article about the technology and its advantages here. 

 

Great bass requires a large flexible diaphragm  and a good seal. Our Our large ultra-thin and flexible diaphragms are tensioned just the right way to keep the resonant frequency very low and allow a controlled and tight bass down to 10Hz. 

 

The mids is all about exerting fine control over the diaphragm and moving air. In a planar magnetic design, the driving force is provided by an array of magnets and the force they exert on the current carrying traces (voice coil) present on the diaphragm. However just having the voice coil and the magnets does not guarantee a uniform force on the diaphragm. It is important that the whole diaphragm moves in unison. If the force is not uniform, some parts of the diaphragm would accelerate differently and would lead to breakup modes and distortion. Through magnetic simulation and evolutionary optimization algorithms, we design voice coils with varying trace width to uniformly distribute the force acting on the diaphragm. Ont top of this, LCD-4 and LCD-4z use fluxor magnets to achieve the highest efficiency in the industry. 

 

The treble is all about inertia and how fast the diaphragm can accelerate to follow the music and maintain the timing resolution. The nano-scale diaphragm and the ultra thin voice coils makes for one of the lightest diaphragms available in a planar magnetic design and orders of magnitude lighter than the lightest dynamic driver.  The low inertia of our diaphragms ensure a treble extension upt to beyond 20Khz. Our fast drivers also allow transparent reproduction of music while preserving depth and layering. We use Fazor elements that reduce diffraction to improve clarity and imaging focus.

 

When measuring drivers just by themselves in an IEC baffle,  both LCD-4 and LCD-4Z provide a textbook/theoretical response. This forms the basic foundation. We shape this response to our desired target response through the design of the housing and earpads. After the transducers, the earpads have the largest influence on the sound signature.

 

LCD-4 vs LCD-4Z

 

On 9/7/2019 at 1:32 PM, Sonis said:

I want to make one thing perfectly clear.  I have heard a number of Audeze’s products. I found their LCD-2s and LCD-3s to be among the best magnetic phones of their day. I briefly heard the LCD-4 (without the z) at a hi-fi show a while back, and even though no one would characterize a show as the ideal place to seriously audition anything, I heard nothing that I would characterize  as being untoward in that short listening session. 

I am not at war with Audeze, and I certainly do not wish to make an enemy of them. I applaud their build quality and the fact that they are an American company. I wish them well, and I look forward to continue hearing great things from them in the future. Unfortunately, the LCD-4zs that I auditioned do not, in my estimation, live up to Audeze’s well deserved reputation.

 

Both LCD-4 and LCD-4z use the same  magnetic structure and use the same earpads and use the same fazor elements. The only difference is the number of traces used. LCD-4z uses lesser number of traces to decrease the impedance and to increase voltage sensitivity. This should have no significant impact on sound signature and and our measurements show the same. This is because the sound waves from the diaphragm travel through the same magnetic array and ear pads in both cases. The reason I bring this up is because the reviewer mentioned in his post that he has listened to LCD-4 and found them satisfactory and so were the LCD-2 and LCD-3 he has heard. There is nothing special about the LCD-4Z he received. They went through the same QC process. We measure all headphones before we ship them. We measure the drivers in an IEC baffle to make sure they are within spec. We have specialized algorithms to match left and right drivers. We put all drivers through a burn-in process because some of us like to burn-in and also because we want to detect failures. Our technicians  measures them to confirm if they are within spec before shipping them out. 

 

Thanks for listening.

-Karthick

[The Computer Audiophile]

4 hours ago, audiobomber said:

Is that a fact??? Or simply the preference of this particular reviewer? You seem to believe that the review is negative, therefore it's correct. Clearly everyone does not share the same opinion of these headphones. Sonis' opinion may well be honest, but is it fact? Given you are an objectivist, shouldn't you cite some distortion or FR failing to show how "wretched" the 4Z actually is? Maybe Sonis has been fooled by expectation bias, or has quirky hearing, or different preferences than some others.

 

I've always owned headphones but I've only been serious about headphone audio for the past couple of years. One thing that I find striking about head-fi is the wide variation in opinion over what is phenomenal, and what is trash. Price doesn't seem to enter into it. Partnering gear, hearing biology and personal preference do. 

 

A couple good points but I shy away from using the term correct with respect to a reviewer’s opinion. There’s no such thing. 

 

If someone is purely an objectivist this review would be meaningless without measurements. 

 

 

 

4 hours ago, audiobomber said:

An audio system built around CR reviews will be very inexpensive and appallingly mediocre. 

 

Not necessarily but I believe we are talking about the Consumer Reports style of reviewing. This is where the manufacturer isn’t involved in the process etc...

[kumakuma]

6 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Not necessarily but I believe we are talking about the Consumer Reports style of reviewing. This is where the manufacturer isn’t involved in the process etc...

 

Exactly. That was the only reason why I used Consumer Reports as an example. 

 

Another example, perhaps more palatable to this audience, would be Michelin Guide Inspectors.

 

Quote

Although our inspectors are employees of Michelin, they’re above all customers first - just like you. Testing restaurants in complete anonymity in order to ensure that they do not receive any special treatment is essential to the creditability of the MICHELIN Guide.

 

 

[wgscott]

10 hours ago, AudezeLLC said:

When measuring drivers just by themselves in an IEC baffle,  both LCD-4 and LCD-4Z provide a textbook/theoretical response. This forms the basic foundation. We shape this response to our desired target response through the design of the housing and earpads. After the transducers, the earpads have the largest influence on the sound signature.

 

Is there any chance you could post images of those measurements here?  This would be the most definitive way to refute the criticism.  

[audiobomber]

14 minutes ago, wgscott said:

 

Is there any chance you could post images of those measurements here?   

FR graph available here, along with a much more nuanced review:

https://diyaudioheaven.wordpress.com/headphones/measurements/audeze/lcd-4z/

[mitchco]

@audiobomber thanks for that. Hmmm, something does not seem right. There is a good 13 to 14 dB drop between 1 kHz to 3 kHz and covers across 3 kHz to 7 kHz.

 

 

Relatively speaking, a 10 dB increase or drop means that frequency range is perceived as twice as loud or twice as quiet compared to the frequency range next to it. That's a lot.

 

On Audiophile Style, I measured the NAD Viso HP50:

 

 

Much flatter response. My results were consistent with Tyll's and the Harman target curve they were modelled after.

Link to my full review:  

 

 

I am wondering if there was an issue with the measurement rig over at DIY Audio Heaven...? I get excellent results with my setup using SoundProfessional's top of the line in-ear binaural mics.

 

@The Computer Audiophile and @AudezeLLC without stepping on anyone's toes, and if you feel it is worthwhile, I would be happy to measure a pair.

 

Kind regards,

Mitch

 

[pkane2001]

1 minute ago, mitchco said:

@audiobomber thanks for that. Hmmm, something does not seem right. There is a good 13 to 14 dB drop between 1 kHz to 3 kHz and covers across 3 kHz to 7 kHz.

 

 

Relatively speaking, a 10 dB increase or drop means that frequency range is perceived as twice as loud or twice as quiet compared to the frequency range next to it. That's a lot.

 

On Audiophile Style, I measured the NAD Viso HP50:

 

 

Much flatter response. My results were consistent with Tyll's and the Harman target curve they were modelled after.

Link to my full review:  

 

 

I am wondering if there was an issue with the measurement rig over at DIY Audio Heaven...? I get excellent results with my setup using SoundProfessional's top of the line in-ear binaural mics.

 

@The Computer Audiophile and @AudezeLLC without stepping on anyone's toes, and if you feel it is worthwhile, I would be happy to measure a pair.

 

Kind regards,

Mitch

 

 

Hi Mitch,

 

DIY Audio Heaven is maintained by Frans, who is @solderdude at ASR. I'm sure he can chime in on his own measurements, but I don't know if he also hangs out here, on AS. Frans is the most helpful person I know,  so I'm sure he'll be able to clarify. 

[AudezeLLC]

@mitchcoLooking up  the DIY Audio Heaven, they state that they use a 'flat bed' DIY rig with no pinna. So, the measurements are likely not going to match a HATS system. But my guess is you may  be able  to compare headphones measured on the same rig relative to each other (with some exceptions, especially with pinna interaction when different ear-pads and positioning are involved). To give some perspective, since you already have the measurement of the NAD VISO HP50, here is their measurement of the NAD VISIO HP50: (https://diyaudioheaven.wordpress.com/headphones/measurements/nad-viso-hp50/)

 

[mitchco]

Hi Paul, ah, thanks. Yes, Solderdude - good guy for sure. @AudezeLLC thanks for that.

 

I used a blocked in ear approach which is not HATS and using a set of binaural mic's in my own ears that are quite flat, hence the reason why I use this approach and seems to better represent what the actual response of the headphones would be up to about 10 kHz. After 10 kHz, all bets are off due to different shaped pinna's.

 

It is too bad that the headphone industry still does not have a defacto way of measuring headphones that can be related to or deviation from a flat response. In other words, using the approach at solderdude's site, what is flat and how does one compare? And then what is the deviation from flat?  Some sort of normalisation needs to be applied to the raw data or the approach taken if it is not the blocked in ear approach to help relate. Maybe solderdude has already done that, but I have no way of knowing what the deviation from flat is looking at his measurements in this thread.

 

It is figured out in the loudspeaker industry with the free download of ANSI/CEA-2034-A Standard Method of Measurement for In-Home Loudspeakers. It can even predict the in-room response in a typical living room with a high degree of accuracy. Something like that needs to be developed for the headphone industry.

 

Anyway, just a thought and the offer still stands.

[AudezeLLC]

@mitchco We  use in ear probes (Etymotic Research ER-7C Probe Mic System, series B) to get a sense of the frequency response at ear drum and it also turns out to be the best way to capture one's HRTF. We also use customized plugged ear probes. But as you have said, these are not standardized, yet it gives us some idea how our headphones measure relative to one another.

 

We also have access to and use 

1. Artificial head: GRAS KEMAR RA0045 Ear Simulator, KB0066 and KB0065 Pinnae in IEC 60318-4 (previously 60711) configuration.
2. Ear and Cheek Simulator: GRAS 43AG in IEC 60318-4 configuration.
3. Headphone test fixture: GRAS 45CA, KB0071 pinnae, IEC 60711 Ear Simulator. (This setup is similar to the one used in this paper on Listener Preferences for Different Headphone Target Response Curves by Sean Olive et al. 

It will be very difficult to force every manufacturer to use the same measurement rig but we do comparative measurements on multiple rigs and real ears with ear probes.

 

Establishing a defacto standard for headphone measurements would have to go beyond agreeing to a specific rig and compensation curve. When we measure two  headphones on a rig A, then measure the same headphones on rig B, the relative difference between the two headphones do not always  stay the same (especially beyond 3kHz). They are pretty close when the two headphones use the same ear pads but if different earpads are used, all bets are off.

 

We do not have any objections to your measuring the sample we send, it is up to @The Computer Audiophile

 

 

[wgscott]

I can see how the frequency response curve is consistent with the reported observations.  However, it also seems rather similar to the other headphones that are said to sound much better, so that has me puzzled.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, AudezeLLC said:

We do not have any objections to your measuring the sample we send

Working on this now. 

 

More information can only help all parties. 

[Ralf11]

The strength of the language used in the review is not consistent with the cost of the headphones, nor with individual variation in sound preferences

[AudezeLLC]

22 minutes ago, wgscott said:

I can see how the frequency response curve is consistent with the reported observations.  However, it also seems rather similar to the other headphones that are said to sound much better, so that has me puzzled.

I will try to keep this simple.

 

Unlike speaker measurements, headphones do not measure flat as you cannot point a microphone at the ear cups to make a measurement. So either DIY rigs or standardized rigs are used. However when measurements are made using these rigs, the response will not be flat. So compensation curves are used to make the measured response flat if the 'ideal headphone'  is  measured on the rig. however choosing this compensation curve is a subject of heated debate and on going research and is also subjective.

 

Here is a light-hearted attempt to explain this: https://www.audeze.com/blogs/technology-and-innovation/the-problem-with-frequency-graphs-and-eq-compensation

[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.

[Sonis]

On 9/9/2019 at 1:10 PM, The Computer Audiophile said:

Working on this now. 

 

More information can only help all parties. 

NSX, the owner of the Audeze LCD-4z review pair will be sending that pair, along with his Sennheiser HD-800’s toChris for his unbiased evaluation and comparison to the pair being sent to him by Audeze. Unless Audeze decides to send Chris a “lab queen” pair (which I trust that they won’t), that ought to put this debate right to bed.

[Sonis]

On 9/8/2019 at 8:58 PM, audiobomber said:

Is that a fact??? Or simply the preference of this particular reviewer? You seem to believe that the review is negative, therefore it's correct. Clearly everyone does not share the same opinion of these headphones. Sonis' opinion may well be honest, but is it fact? Given you are an objectivist, shouldn't you cite some distortion or FR failing to show how "wretched" the 4Z actually is? Maybe Sonis has been fooled by expectation bias, or has quirky hearing, or different preferences than some others.

 

I've always owned headphones but I've only been serious about headphone audio for the past couple of years. One thing that I find striking about head-fi is the wide variation in opinion over what is phenomenal, and what is trash. Price doesn't seem to enter into it. Partnering gear, hearing biology and personal preference do. 

Oh, yeah. I have quirky hearing, all right. I have 8 pairs of high-end headphones in my possession or at my disposal, all of which have decent bass, excellent midrange and clean highs. Some are isoplanar like the Audeze LCD-4z, some are electrostatic, and the Sennheiser HD-800 and the Koss Pro4AA are classic, apex driven designs. None of them sound as unacceptably bad as  the Audeze LCD-4z. Not even the Koss (which are nothing to write home about, but come-in handy when I’m recording due to their closed-back, gel-filled ear pad design which is highly isolatory.). I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. When eight high-end headphones all sound decent using the same sources and the same ancillary equipment and one sounds badly designed or defective, or is it logical to assume that the one “odd man out” is likely the poorly designed or defective phone here? Is it likely that the listener’s hearing is bad, or quirky, so that he selectively hears eight other phones as being decent, and this one phone from Audeze as being very poor sounding?

The phone’s owner and myself both assumed that any headphone costing $4000 and sounding as bad as these did simply must be defective. We both agreed that the owner should send them back to Audeze to get them checked out and repaired. Imagine our collective chagrin, when the repaired headphones were returned to the owner and they still sounded EXACTLY like they did before they were sent back to the  manufacturer!

Yeah, I have quirky hearing.

[audiobomber]

2 hours ago, Sonis said:

Yeah, I have quirky hearing.

I don't know anything about your hearing, or preferences. I know that headphone preferences are highly individual. I love my Grado GH4 and Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro headphones. Some people cannot tolerate them.

 

I find the revered HD 650 boring, coloured and threadbare. I owned a pair of Koss Pro 4AA, and consider them simply horrible; coarse details, lacking in transparency and air. It is very difficult for me to imagine that the 4Z slots below the Pro 4AA, which IIRC you said somewhere.

 

I will be watching the next chapter of this story with interest.

[The Computer Audiophile]

I think we should all just take a step back and wait for the follow ups. @mitchco will receive a new pair of 4z from @AudezeLLC for measurements and I will receive the exact headphones reviewed by @Sonis .

 

After this we can all come together to see where we’re at. 

[rando]

@The Computer Audiophile this plan appears to avoid both headphones being in one location for testing to settle the disputed claims.  

 

What if anything am I missing?