The sweet siren song of high-end earphones

After a tough summer working three jobs, I finally had an evening off. My plans were to get a good 10 hours of sleep, preceded by a stress-relieving hour or two of blasting alien fleets in Homeworld 2. However, my gaming computer was tied up recording a TV show for a few more minutes, so I turned to the Internet computer to conduct a brief Google search.

Bad move. Suddenly 6:30 p.m. was 1:30 a.m. I didn’t get to play Homeworld 2, and I didn’t get a good night’s sleep before having to get up for work the next morning. Even worse, I had generated a long list of bookmarks that ate up the next evening. And, in turn, the day after that was largely consumed by revisiting most of those sites, making sure I hadn’t missed anything, and trying to decide how I was going to act on what I’d learned. All that from one simple Google search.

So what was so damn important? Well, all I wanted to know was if anyone had posted opinions or reviews of the new e500PTH earphones from Shure. As an owner of the e4c model from the same company, I wondered what people thought of the long-awaited upgrade to the top-of-the-line e5c series. All I knew was that the latest model contained three tiny speakers for each ear and cost US$500.

Did I find any comments? Yeah, sure. Apparently the earphones are just fine. No one who’s bought a pair has any regrets. The problem was that I found those opinions on discussion sites devoted to the audiophile community (http://www.head-fi.org/, http://www.avsforum.com/, and http://www.6moons.com/ ).

All right, to be honest, the location wasn’t the problem. All that did was add credibility to the reviews. The problem was that I learned there is a large community, obsessed with good sound, iPods, and at-home music served off hard drives. People like I want to be. Bad people with naughty ideas, ideas that I had been quite happy to remain ignorant of. Suddenly I felt a strange movement under my right buttock. It was my wallet, trying to run away.

Like many Internet communities, this new social realm proved to be an intricate web of relationships: newbies meeting long-time enthusiasts, engineers and aesthetes debating the existence of differences between silver and copper wires, manufacturers describing the features of something new in production. However, unlike most such on-line communities, this one seemed refreshingly free of invective, insult, and derision. Generally, it was just a bunch of nice people sharing knowledge and opinions. “Join us,” they seemed to say. “We’re your new friends.”

I haven’t quite joined them exactly, not yet, but I sure did a lot of reading. First of all, it turns out my Shure e4c in-ear-monitor earphones were well-regarded. Not the best when compared to some of the products from Ultimate Ears, Grado, beyerdynamic, Etymotic Research, and Sennheiser, but perfectly respectable. And my fourth-generation iPod? Those units have what’s considered the best digital-audio conversion chip Apple has ever used. And I had already forsaken the MP3 format in favour of lossless compression. “Join us, Dave. You know you belong here.”

Where was I falling short? Well, it turns out the real keeners use their iPods (or other audio sources, portable or otherwise) only to hold and serve music. They bypass the built-in amplifiers in favour of high-quality outboard amps, using the line-out capability of the Apple dock connector or a computer’s USB port to provide the signal. Some folks add external digital-to-analogue converters (DACs) and preamps, or buy tiny tube-based amplifiers. There was even somebody who would rewire your iPod (for US$200) to permanently bypass all the internal circuitry and provide a direct line-out from the headphone jack (fourth-generation models only). Not that I’d send him my iPod. No, I’d buy another off of eBay and send him that instead. I mean, if I joined these guys and all.

The good news? Well, the headphone audiophile world has a much lower cost of entry than its speaker-based equivalent. Excellent headphones run between $100 and $1,000 (about the price of a single decent speaker). A high-quality wire to mate iPod to amplifier can be had for between $50 and $400. Amplifiers with Class A specs start at US$350 (with quite a few decent models as low as $100). Even if you choose a matched outboard DAC and amp, that’s only US$600 or so. (How can I afford not to join these people?)

If intend to remain portable, the best solution seems to be a single pocket-sized amplifier running on battery power. At US$350, HeadAmp Audio Electronics ( http://www.headamp.com/ ) offers the AE-1, while Ray Samuels Audio (http://www.raysamuelsaudio.com) has the Hornet. Each is the size of a credit card in length and width, although it’s naturally much thicker than the plastic you’ll buy it with (by a couple of centimetres). Of course, there are many other amps to choose from—these are just the ones I settled on (hypothetically, of course). In addition to the community discussion groups mentioned above, check out the on-line retailer HeadRoom (www.headphone.com/). HeadRoom makes its own amplifiers, so you won’t get much impartial advice there, but the selection guides for headphones are very worthwhile. Either that or avoid these people like the plague. It’s too late for me, but maybe you can still be saved.