[SHAMuuu]

I can handle love/hate tunings a lot of times, though it depends on the tuning. I'll consider them if I find a really good deal on them, but I did already order the Azurys and I'm more likely to get an open Focal if I get another Focal. My favorite headphone is the uniquely tuned T1 Gen 3 so not unfamiliar with unique sound signatures. A big reason I went for the Azurys is the new lighter form factor. I had some issues with weight and headband comfort on the bigger Focals which is a big reason I never got a Focal in the past.



I don't recall having problems with the vocals on the Elear or the Utopia OG, but I never spent a lot of time with either so long-term use may or may not bother me. In terms of what other brands of headphones I'm used to, it's mostly Beyers, Senns, and Audio-Technica and while I like all of those my preference lies more towards Beyers, especially those with more relaxed upper regions compared to their norm. I haven't really gotten into planars as they never really sounded quite right to me, but I haven't listened to any of the newer releases.

I am curious to see impressions of the Azurys compared to the Bathys.

The funny thing with love/hate tuning headphones is that one will walk down the path of pad rolling.

In other words, the will to burn a few extra Dollars to tilt the scale XD

 

[mainguy]

I can handle love/hate tunings a lot of times, though it depends on the tuning. I'll consider them if I find a really good deal on them, but I did already order the Azurys and I'm more likely to get an open Focal if I get another Focal. My favorite headphone is the uniquely tuned T1 Gen 3 so not unfamiliar with unique sound signatures. A big reason I went for the Azurys is the new lighter form factor. I had some issues with weight and headband comfort on the bigger Focals which is a big reason I never got a Focal in the past.

Honestly I wouldn't rule out Bathys either. I was comparing them for a bit of fun today with Elegia (by no means an extensive or serious comparison, more of a gut feeling one).
The Bathys (wired) actually holds up very well. It loses some staging and imaging, no doubt about it. But the tonality, I have a feeling, will be much better for most people. Timbre of the mid range, so vocals and guitars, especially female vocals, are a lot better on Bathys. Elegia has a radio esque effect with female vocals, they just don't sound right.

Bathys reminds me a lot of my old Stellia, they're like a baby Stellia. A warmer Focal but still retaining that awesome clarity and detail. It's possible the Mimi EQ has done something but I'm finding vocals on Bathys a lot better than I used to.

Elegia were great for their time, but I do truly think Bathys has surpassed them as an overall headphone. Which is pretty impressive given the $700 to $900 price gap and all the added features. That said, for the £200 Elegia goes for on ebay, or even 300ish new, it is a steal.

 

[kman1211]

The funny thing with love/hate tuning headphones is that one will walk down the path of pad rolling.

In other words, the will to burn a few extra Dollars to tilt the scale XD

True for a lot of cases, but I haven't really touched my T1 Gen 3, love it stock. But for my first Focal going for the more neutrally tuned Azurys so likely will not tinker with them; but if I really like the Azurys in terms of both fit and sound, I'm considering grabbing the Hadenys. Been a little let down with the recent Senns I tried, ended up only really liking the HD 650 and HD 600 in the end. New ones just don't jive with me long term even though I liked them short term. Basically testing out Focal to see how I like their driver and sound characteristics in the long term.

Going for the Azurys because I love how they look, closed-back Focals are unexplored territory for me, I prefer cloth/velour pads to pleather (leather can be okay though depending on the pads), and I wanted them for their portability.

Honestly I wouldn't rule out Bathys either. I was comparing them for a bit of fun today with Elegia (by no means an extensive or serious comparison, more of a gut feeling one).
The Bathys (wired) actually holds up very well. It loses some staging and imaging, no doubt about it. But the tonality, I have a feeling, will be much better for most people. Timbre of the mid range, so vocals and guitars, especially female vocals, are a lot better on Bathys. Elegia has a radio esque effect with female vocals, they just don't sound right.

Bathys reminds me a lot of my old Stellia, they're like a baby Stellia. A warmer Focal but still retaining that awesome clarity and detail. It's possible the Mimi EQ has done something but I'm finding vocals on Bathys a lot better than I used to.

Elegia were great for their time, but I do truly think Bathys has surpassed them as an overall headphone. Which is pretty impressive given the $700 to $900 price gap and all the added features. That said, for the £200 Elegia goes for on ebay, or even 300ish new, it is a steal.

I have heard the Bathys is really nice, curious what your thoughts on them compared to the Azurys are. Though honestly I have my eyes on the Hadenys depending how how the Azurys turns out for me.

Are the pads on the Bathys leather?

 

[mainguy]

I have heard the Bathys is really nice, curious what your thoughts on them compared to the Azurys are. Though honestly I have my eyes on the Hadenys depending how how the Azurys turns out for me.

Are the pads on the Bathys leather?

I'm fairly sure it's synthetic leather.

The Azurys should be on their way, I ordered them from Yorkshire AV in the UK on Wednesday, it said they were in stock, but no dispatch email nor have they responded to my emails. Pretty poor so thought I'd mention it in case anyone else sees them on there with the nice 5% off new customers code.

 

[kman1211]

I'm fairly sure it's synthetic leather.

The Azurys should be on their way, I ordered them from Yorkshire AV in the UK on Wednesday, it said they were in stock, but no dispatch email nor have they responded to my emails. Pretty poor so thought I'd mention it in case anyone else sees them on there with the nice 5% off new customers code.

Ah okay so just the headband has some leather on it but the pads are synthetic leather, was hoping they were leather. That's good, hope my pair gets ships this week sometime. Though I think they are officially released in June, so they may not ship till then. Only people that seem to be getting them early live in France which does make sense.

 

[mobbaddict]

I will look at just about anything that has the potential to be a new over-ear studio reference. But my budget is still pretty limited. And the HD620S would probably be a stretch for me. I'd rather save most of my bucks for some neutral speakers and a good open headphone at this point.

You can find some good studio closed-backs with a flat bass. The HD620 doesn't seem to go that road based on the measurements. A Sony CD900ST or used Audeze Sine could work for instance. There are probably other valid options I haven't tested (maybe Beyer DT250, Nad HP50 or Rode NTH100).

 

[SolarCetacean]

I made a post in its own thread, but I heard the Dan Clark E3 recently and I thought it was quite good. More dynamics than the previous generation of DCA headphones and nothing disagreeable in the "intangible" sound attributes like dynamics, soundstage, openness, etc. Now, I only listened for a few minutes, and DCA headphones have the uncanny ability to sound worse to me the longer I listen to them, but I wasn't put off by lack of dynamics here. There was a problem with the upper mids though. There seemed to be some sort of emphasis there which made vocals sound slightly nasally, like pulling up the back of your tongue towards the back roof of your mouth and then trying to speak/sing like that. It added a slightly congested tone to things that I noticed immediately and couldn't unhear. It should be relatively simple to EQ out though as it's just a tonality issue. There was also a slight treble sizzle that likely contributed to that upper mids emphasis via the harmonics.

It's one of those cases where having one FR deviation is worse than having two, because the rest of the frequency spectrum was so neutral that there was nothing to hide or reinterpret that coloration on the E3 so it just sticks out.

 

[ADUHF]

Just to throw out there a budget pick, a very well tuned studio cb headphone with clean elevated bass Shure 840a(update of 840) 170 -usd, rocked it all winter,3m cable only,light. Coincidentally Conan O'brien needs a friend use it ,its fun for me to look at. at...(fwiw,openback sidenote I'm hovering over ananda nano looks the best for 600!)

You can find some good studio closed-backs with a flat bass. The HD620 doesn't seem to go that road based on the measurements. A Sony CD900ST or used Audeze Sine could work for instance. There are probably other valid options I haven't tested (maybe Beyer DT250, Nad HP50 or Rode NTH100).

Thanks for the replies, Waddiewadkins and mobbaddict. I have looked at graphs of most of the above, with the exception of the Sony, and think you both have some good takes. I think Crin has plots of the Sony CD900ST, which are also in Jaako's AutoEQ database. And wonder if that's one of the HP's that DMS also likes with some different pads. (??)

My comment re the bass on the Senn HD620S is probably premature btw. When I first looked at Sennheiser's FR plots of the HD620S, I assumed they were probably done on a HBK 5128 HATS. But they were actually done on a GRAS system, which tends to measure a bit higher in the bass than the HBK 5128.

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/unveiled-meet-the-hd-620s.972764/

I'm not really looking for a closed headphone with a "flat" bass response though. If I get another closed back, it would have to be pretty close to the in-ear response of some well-extended neutral speakers in a typical semi-reflective room across the full range of frequencies, from the sub-bass to the higher frequencies.

There are a number of closed headphones that get pretty close to this type of response, but none which have really nailed it yet imo... At least not in my price range anyway. I am looking at many of the above though which seem to be at least close contenders.

 

[ADUHF]

This is a diffuse field compensated plot of the new Focal Azurys, based on Jude's recent raw HBK 5128 plot of same.

The grid is in 5 dB steps. And it was compensated with the inverse of HBK's original 1/3 octave 5128 diffuse field HRTF measurement, which is different than the "high-rez" 5128 DF curve used by Headphones.com (derived from free field measurements). I continue to use the lower rez HBK 5128 DF curve though because I think it still delivers better results, at least up to about 16 kHz. Above that, HBK's DF curve is simply too low in resolution to be accurate and useful imo, which is why that range is represented by a dashed line.

I also had to reduce Jude's raw Azurys plot to the same 1/3 octave resoluton in order to perform the DF compensation, which destroys alot of the finer "high Q" details in the upper frequencies. You can get an idea of the details lost in this translation from the graph below, which simply compares Jude's higher resolution raw plot of the Azurys to my lower rez 1/3 octave plot of same. Grid is also 5 dB here...

After compensation with HBK's DF curve though, the Azurys has approximately the same downward slope or trajectory from the bass to the treble as a good loudspeaker's sound power curve, which is generally in the -1 to -1.5 dB per octave range. This is the sort of thing I look for as a general indicator of a headphone's neutrality. The Azurys appears to be on the steeper side of that sound power range though, closer overall to a -1.5 dB/octave slope than to -1.0 dB/octave.

 

[ADUHF]

For the first DF graph above, I let Equalizer APO do the translation of Jude's raw Azurys plot to a 1/3 octave raw plot, by simply switching the FR curve from a Variable GEQ to a 31-band GEQ curve. EAPO usually does a pretty good job of this. However, I wanted to see if I could improve the precision of the 1/3 octave raw plot a bit more through some manual editing, to (hopefully) distribute some the errors in the higher frequencies a bit better.

I'm still making some tweaks to the 1/3 octave curve along these lines, and will post a revised DF plot of the Azurys when done. This is what the error curve on the revised 1/3 octave raw plot currently looks like though, fwiw...