Dartblog

Jan Meier, the brilliant and bustling German audio engineer behind, in front of, and all around the company Meier-Audio, has built for me a beauteous headphone amplifier, pictured above. (And here are the insides, if you are curious to see.) It was awaiting my return from the horrors of the dentist like a doting little brown mutt. Except it was a doting little brown corrugated box, bearing the green affirmation sticker of German customs. Inside, the familiar protectant rag that enrobes a good piece of audio equipment. Unwrapped and plugged in, I fired the little darling up.

The amplifier is called the Headfive. Jan built five hundred of them to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the birth of Head-Fi, an exceedingly nerdy website where one might bicker for hours on end about the acoustic implications of nudging the headphones an eighth of an inch upwards. Or, in more profitable threads, a debate over which maker of in-ear-monitors—Ultimate Ears or Etymotic—produced the sets best suited to reproducing the sonic panorama summoned by Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony. And most debates tend toward the latter. The goal of any audiophile is to build for himself a system capable of faithfully reproducing the live experience. Audiophiles have no interest in loudness or crisp highs or booming bass unless those properties help him to achieve honesty in sound reproduction. And honesty is possible. One can simply throw money at the problem—purchase top-end Martinlogan electrostatics, a pair of McIntosh monoblocks and a Mac pre fed by an Esoteric CD deck—or one can enjoy the pleasures of tweaking.

Most folks don’t realize quite how good headphone audio can get. (And don’t you even mention Bose.) Partly, this is the iPod’s fault. Those ringy little saucers that come with the device cost a few cents to make and are hardly worth that. It is also a failure of marketing. The average music consumer could not divine where to go for high-end headphones. (Headphone.com is a wonderfully fair retailer.) But more than those, it is the simple fact that headphone listening is usually an afterthought for audio component manufacturers. It is a niggling little holdover. Engineers scramble to build the de rigeur headphone socket into their designs and end up using the cheapest amplification circuit available. As a result, when one plugs a pair of headphones into a CD player or into a speaker amplifier, one is close to understanding why the McLaren people elected not to power their cars with the engine from a Toro lawnmower.

Audiophiles, therefore, often decide to purchase dedicated headphone amplifiers, with circuitry which properly complements the headphones. Such is this little device I’ve acquired. It’s only job is to amplify an audio signal so that its amplitude is capable of most commandingly pulsing the little cones inside the headphone. The gray box’s lot is narrow and unglamorous, but it does its job excellently, in my opinion.

The jargon: Jan Meier’s Headfive amplifier has ten decibels of amplification measured at 1 kHz with a maximal output of twelve volts. The power supply is a toroidal transformer and Nichicon capacitors. Four LM6171 opamps and two BUF634 output buffers comprise the amplification section. The potentiometer is an ALPS. A bypassable custom-designed IC contains Meier’s wonderful crossfeed algorithm, which elegantly mixes the audio signals’ left and right channels so that the soundstage presented by the headphones is less discrete and more center-focused. Put another way, it apes the acoustical properties of a good pair of speakers.

I just gave the new amp a try using a pair of AKG 240m headphones. This is a hallowed headphone, found in every recording studio on the planet. In these headphones, the Austrian audio company achieved a nearly unparalleled naturalness. Wearing K240s, one senses that they try to reach neither heaven nor earth, instead reproducing audio smoothly, warmly, and neutrally from about five feet off the ground. Their open-air design allows atmosphere to pass in and out while one wears them; the sound breathes.

They also happen to be the only pair I did not leave up at Dartmouth. Well suited to classical music, I plugged the K240 cans into the amplifier and started playing Herbert von Karajan’s 1973 recording of La Bohème, Freni singing Mimi and Pavarotti Rodolfo. It is the benchmark Bohème, and it happens to have been one of Decca’s finest sonic moments. Even though the recording is analog and thirty years old, it has intense presence.

Bohème, lacking an overture, begins in medias res, Marcello and Rodolfo, a starving artist and poet, respectively, lusting after fuel for their old furnace that their Christmas Eve might have some warmth. Puccini’s score always seemed to me to have a glimmer of cartoonishness to it—a glance toward a future that would see Carl Stalling and his Looney Tunes scores punctuate visual action with brilliant, bold, and quick strokes. This opera begins with such a stroke. I listened to it twice, the first time using the headphone amplifier built into the compact disc player and the second time using Jan Meier’s box. There was no comparison. With the former, I was listening to a reproduction of the introduction, a cacophony of everchanging sforzandi. Properly amplified, it was, instead of a production, music, full-bodied and in sharp resolution. The opera’s first theme—an oscillating wave of a melody—occurs first in the winds. On the first listen, this was conveyed well enough. But it then sublimes to the violins, whose hue is captured only with the dedicated amplifier.

Marcello, sung by Rolando Panerai, has the first words of the opera. “Questo Mar Rosso - mi ammollisce e assidera … come se addosso - mi piovesse in stille,” he cries. Like a water drop torture, the Red Sea has been trying to paint freezes him; sets him numb. (Paris’ cold is doing its part, as well.) He’ll paint a drowning Pharaoh to avenge himself. Asks what Rodolfo, struggling apart, is doing. Anticipatory pizzicati trumble downwards, reinviting that first ocean-like melody in the strings even as Pavarotti takes it up himself. It is here that the opera begins. Again, the difference in sonic reproduction is night and day. Every single note of Puccini’s is audible through the amplifier bundled into the compact disc player. But who is singing them? It isn’t clear that it is Luciano Pavoratti. The framing around his notes, their beginnings and ends, and that peculiar acidic flagrancy: these only present themselves on the second listen.

Alas, words never do justice to these things. Go and reserve one of these December evenings for Bohème. It is a Christmas opera, after all. And do consider a headphone amplifier, if you are serious about hearing just how much is encoded on those silver discs you’ve been spending so much money on.