![]() ![]() Paul McCartney’s new album, McCartney III (24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Capitol/Qobuz), had just come out when I started this review, so it’s inherently unfamiliar to me, but it also doesn’t sound like any album he’s done before he apparently recorded the whole thing at home with a combination of various instruments, some actually played, some programmed. Natural Causes isn’t your typical super-reverberant ECM recording, and the intimate ambience of “Padre-Yaga” made me keep clicking the track skip button on my phone to play it again. The guitars didn’t boom or resonate unnaturally, nor did the headphones add any harsh edge or twang to the strings. a singing bowl? I imagine that a big set of open-back planar-magnetic headphones might have brought out some details that would let me unpack this dense recording more easily, but the Calyx Hs seemed to get the tonal balance of all the instruments just right. “Padre-Yaga” combines what sounds like three 12-string guitar tracks, tablas, maybe a piano, and. His work consists mostly of overdubbed and looped acoustic guitars, and in the last 20 years he’s been adding more percussion and instruments from around the world. ![]() I’ve been listening to Tibbetts-described as the “Zen guitarist of Minnesota”-since his first ECM sides in the 1980s. Having just done a quick evaluation of the Apple AirPods Max headphones, in which I had no choice but to rely on classic test tunes such as Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” ( Tracy Chapman, 320kbps Ogg Vorbis, Epic/Spotify), I decided to give my brain a break and start my test of the Calyx Hs with some less-familiar material.Ĭruising through the Organic Experimental playlist on Spotify, I stumbled upon Steve Tibbetts’s Natural Causes album (320kbps Ogg Vorbis, ECM/Spotify). The one downside is that they don’t include a decent zippered carrying case. They also play plenty loud enough from a smartphone. To my relief, the Hs are quite comfortable I wore them for a couple of hours while waiting for my car to get serviced, and it didn’t dawn on me until I took them off that I was supposed to be paying attention to the comfort. The package includes the headphones, a carrying sack, a 1/8″-to-1/4″ (3.5mm to 6.3mm) adapter, and a 4.6′ (1.4m) cable with 1/8″ plugs on both ends. Sensitivity is unspecified, but I can’t recall ever encountering headphones with 40mm dynamic drivers that were too much for a smartphone to drive. ![]() Other than wood side panels with “Calyx H” etched into them, there’s nothing outwardly interesting about the design. And they typically don’t offer as reliable a seal over the ear, so it’s challenging to get powerful bass from them.Ĭalyx seeks to solve this problem by using buttery-soft artificial leather earpads that seat securely on the ears, as well as by using 40mm dynamic drivers-a fairly large size for an on-ear model. They’re compact, but many of them have a tendency to mash the earlobes uncomfortably. By my count, we’ve reviewed five of them since 2015, versus 93 over-ear headphones. Outside of models made for kids, on-ear headphones are relatively rare. Seeing that the product was targeted at audio enthusiasts rather than bottom-feeding Amazon shoppers, I immediately agreed to a review, having not the vaguest idea of what I was about to hear. But when I got an e-mail from Calyx-a brand I’d never dealt with, known primarily for portable music players, amps, and DACs-I was delighted to find they were pushing the Calyx H, a set of on-ear, passive headphones for $250 (all prices in USD). A lot of them pitch me headphones to review, but most of those are cheap, true wireless models or $50-ish, plasticky over-ears with lame noise canceling. It seems like a new-or at least unfamiliar to me-headphone brand pops up daily in my Facebook feed. Measurements can be found by clicking this link. ![]()
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