Headphones and Personal Audio at CES 2011, Part 2

Posted by: Chris Martens at 9:09 am, January 8th, 2011

This is part 2 of Chris Martens' 4-part CES personal audio coverage.
Click here to read part 1.
Click here to read part 3.
Click here to read part 4.

Etymotic Research

Etymotic is now shipping its MC5 in-ear headphone ($79), which uses a moving coil-type driver rather than the balanced armature-type drivers used in Etymotic’s flagship ER4-series earphones or in mid-line hf-Series ‘phones. Be this as it may, the little MC5 does a downright amazing job of channeling the clear, open sound that has made its upscale siblings famous.

Focal

The French speaker maker debuted a new self-powered, high-performance computer speaker called the XS Book ($399/pair), with each speaker sporting a ¾” tweeter plus a 4” woofer in a beautifully-made ducted port enclosure. The XS Books are powered built-in 2 x 20 Wpc amplifiers, and are set up with two stereo analog audio inputs: via a 3.5mm mini-jack and a pair of RCA jacks. The XS Book offers traditionally high levels of Focal fit and finish with simple but exquisite styling, and should appeal to listeners who find the firm’s 2.1-channel XS computer speaker system too complicated and/or too expensive.

Next, Focal showed CES attendees a product family that had debuted (in the U.S.) at CEDIA 2010; namely, the impressive Bird system. Bird is an affordable, prepackaged high-end audio system that is designed to sound good while minimizing complexity and clutter. To this end, the heart of the Bird system is what at first appears to be an electronics component, called the PowerBird, which in fact combines the functions of an amp, a DAC, a wireless iPod dock (available with either a Kleer, USB, or Airport Express-compatible dongle), and—take note—a subwoofer! To complete the system, one adds only satellite speakers, of which Focal offers three: the Little Bird, the Bird, and the SuperBird (no, it doesn’t resemble legendary NASCAR driver Richard Petty’s famous winged Plymouth Superbird in the slightest). The system sounds terrific, and is very well priced: $899 for the complete Little Bird system, $999 for the Bird version, and $1199 for the SuperBird package. Wireless dongles add an extra $100 to the system price.

HiFiMAN/Head-Direct

Hot on the heels of its top-tier HE-6 planar magnetic headphone, HiFiMAN has created a very impressive and somewhat less costly new model called the HE-6p ($900), which is essentially a much higher efficiency version of the HE-6 that can—check this out—be driven by portable headphone amps (something that would never be possible with the low-sensitivity HE-6). I listened briefly to the HE-6p and would say it offered the best sound I heard at CES on Day 1—a sound that preserves all of the richness and much (though not quite all) of the transparency of the top-tier HE-6. For many listeners, though, I suspect the HE-6p will become the model of choice, partly because it is a hair more “forgiving” than the über-revealing HE-6 and partly because it is so much easier to drive.