During the review period, I was blessed with having the $10,000 Apex Pinnacle headphone amp also in for review. Along with the amp, Pinnacle creator Todd Green -- aka Todd Vinyl Junkie -- sent me some of his personal stash of headphones to use with the amp. Thus I had a cornucopia of high-end headphones, including Grado GS-1000i's ($995), Sennheiser HD 800s ($1399), and Beyerdynamic Tesla T1s ($1295) to go along with my AKG K-701s ($499) -- and the Audez'e LCD-2s, of course.
While I definitely heard a few broad similarities among all of the headphones -- chief among them the ability to resolve copious amounts of musical detail -- each pair had its own unique take on the music. I was surprised to find that the Grados offered a sound that I could very easily live with -- I've never been a Grado fan -- sounding clean, relatively neutral and evenhanded. The Beyerdynamic 'phones were a tad darker and a bit more closed in than the Grados. Even for an open-backed headphone, they didnt leak a lot of sound into the room. The Sennheisers were my least favorite. They were just too dark, rich, and heavy in the bass for my tastes.
As for my reference AKG K701s, the LCD-2s take everything I like about them and add deeper, tighter bass, cleaner highs, and a more sophisticated and tonally accurate midrange. In fact, none of the top-fight headphones I had on hand came close to equaling the manner in which the Audeze LCD-2s reproduced music. They took the tonal balance of the Grados and went a step further. They sounded far more open and airy than the Beyerdynamic 'phones, and they seemed to offer just as much bass as the Sennheisers, but with a more even low-frequency balance. And they displayed the overall neutrality of the AKGs, adding a sense of ease that only they achieved, even among this rarefied group of peers.
