Hello, I just joined, primarily for the audiophile products. Looking at purchasing the NHT C3 speakers for our new living room. Space is about 15 feet wide by 33 long and they will fire long ways. Space is just for general listening, music room with all equipment is downstairs, so hoping they will fill it with sound nicely. Cheers.
Mar 18, 2024
These are lovely to listen to with the right music. I've listened to jazz of various sorts, a bit of rock and roll, and some classical. There's the usual added spaciousness that's characteristic of open back headphones. I know it sounds odd, but there's some vertical imaging besides. Not sure if that's an artifact of how planar drivers produce sounds, but it's pretty cool. More noticeable with thin instrumentation (think ECM artists). Ralph Towner's 12 string was pretty big. Afro-Cuban jazz - with the huge array of percussion instruments - was really satisfying. The whole presentation seemed big, the percussion was heard and almost felt. Huge, actually, for headphones. Classical was nice and wide open, no congestion, even on some of the LSO Live recordings, which aren't always satisfying through headphones. What was REALLY fun was listening to Max Richter's Sleep album. There's some really low bass notes that were tangible - it was like you could feel the air moving inside the cups. It was a little startling at first, then fun, and it set me off looking for other things with that kind of prominent bass.
These are my first and only planars so I can't tell you how much is because of the technology vs other open backs. (I'm pretty much a CIEM guy.) But - they're different from my open backs (Senns, AKGs, Grado) in a really fun way. I don't keep headphones that I don't like to listen to, or keep more than one set that sound exactly the same. These are keepers. They have a unique presence - not a sound signature in a DSP sense, but a size and shape presence very different from my other headphones.
A couple listening notes. Straight from my laptop, meh. That's true for me with most headphones other than my cheaper ones, which don't benefit much from upgrading the rest of the signal chain. Through either my Explorer 2 or iFi iDSD Black, really good. With the iFi, REALLY good. I am using the Xbass there mostly, but even without, the bass is tangible. I just like a lot of bass. The 3D processing on the iFi actually made them less fun to listen to, which isn't usual. And, they were amazing from my exasound dac. Enough so that I'm thinking about a headphone extension cord to listen that way.
Here's what I meant by "with the right music." They're not good with compressed files, or poor production. iTunes type files were almost sibilant and edgy - there were sharp high frequency like things going on that make me crazy with my CIEMs or my other really good headphones. A couple albums that are victims of the loudness wars, I didn't finish a song on. They make great sound great, make bad sound awful.
They're really comfortable. Seriously comfortable for a guy with (sigh) big ears. Really like them. I think they're punching way above their MassDrop price. I suspect I'll reach for them for certain types of music or certain moods. BTW: they come in a plain box, simple. All the money went into the headphones. As it should. And as always, YMMV.