Open invitation
Portable if not commutable planar magnetics.
The LCD-1 is a slightly curious product. Technically these headphones offer the planar-magnetic performance for which Audeze has found success with reviewers and listeners around the world. And price-wise they do so at a more affordable level than the company’s previous ‘statement’ planar-magnetics have done.
And perhaps in keeping with the lower price and so wider use Audeze has added convenience features, making the LCD-1 “a compact and travel-friendly package” — the headphones fold up, they come with a sturdy carry-case, they are relatively light and certainly comfortable. Their impedance and sensitivity are a nominal 16 ohms and a quoted 99dB/1mW respectively, which are mobile-friendly specifications.
But these are open-backed headphones, and Audeze’s own website says “the LCD-1 is engineered for fatigue-free listening sessions both at home and in the studio”. They’re not wireless, there’s no noise-cancelling, not even any controls — no buttons on the headphones, no lozenge-style in-line controller on the cables. Such lack of facilities point more to a home headphone rather than a road warrior.
So which is it — home and studio, or travelfriendly? Well let’s settle that straight off the bat.
They may be good to travel, in that you can take them easily from one place to another. But they’re definitely not for sitting beside someone on a plane, train or bus. They spill sound outward quite generously, and your neighbours will not like them, nor you. So portable, yes. Commuting cans, no.
That dichotomy unravelled, we bring almost nothing but good news. Despite the LCD-1 being the most affordable pair of headphones Audeze has yet delivered, they achieve many of the planar magnetic joys we’ve previously rated highly in its reference designs at twice the price and above.
Flat surface, not flat sound
Planar magnetics are entirely different from the usual cone speaker design, instead using a large flat surface (see right) excited into motion by the electromagnetic force created by conductors woven across its surface. The diaphragm is extremely light, so response can be lightning fast, allowing delivery of details potentially beyond cone-based headphones or speaker tweeters. The question marks are generally around tonal balance, and bass delivery in particular — with full-size planar-magnetic loudspeakers even the largest designs are generally supported by conventional cones to shift sufficient air to deliver satisfying bass frequencies.
But that equation is altered when sound is fired straight into your ears, without all the air of a room to require excitation. The LCD-1 headphones don’t woof their heads off like some ‘street’ designs which overly accentuate the low-end, and the midrange up is certainly their strength, but they sound balanced, and when called on to deliver, say, the wide phat bass of Tyler, The Creator’s EARFQUAKE, they can do so, though with this extreme example there
was a notable effect on the quality of treble from the transducers when asked to shake themselves at such depth and intensity.
Construction is solid outside and in. Each LCD-1 driver is precision-crafted by hand and the complete LCD-1 is fully assembled in Audeze’s Orange County factory in California. They have lambskin leathercovered memory-foam earpads and headband padding, together with high-quality plastics, and as noted there’s 180 degrees of articulation in the earcups, so that they fold flat and then pivot inwards to fit neatly into their sizeable travel case. They balance well on the head, with a clear crown position, and they have a long range of extension to fit heads even bigger than our own. Their lightness on the head makes possible the long listening sessions that their sound quality encourages.
The detachable cable is thick and braided, splitting at the yoke to connect with both ear-cups. These connectors lack any left/ right indicators so we had to take a slightly cross punt on which was which… we used a channel test to see if we’d guessed correctly, which we had, yet noticed later the literature notes that “the specially designed cable has reversible connectors, so the LCD-1 will always deliver the correct left and right channel information”. Eh? We flipped the cables and sure enough, left was still left, right still right. This is the most mindboggling piece of tech this issue; we have no idea how this has been achieved...
The driver materials and arrangement are, of course, a step down from Audeze’s reference designs. The diaphragm is smaller at 90mm, and is an ‘ultra-thin’ Uniforce type rather than the ‘nano-scale’ Uniforce used on the top designs. A single-sided Fluxor magnet array is used rather than the doubled-up dual Fluxors that sit either side of the diaphragms in the LCD-4, and that presumably means conventional horizontal magnetisation rather than the clever (unique, to our knowledge) diagonal magnetisation used in the LCD-4.
All this should reduce the driving ability of the headphones from a given level of current — yet the sensitivity of the LCD-1 is higher and their impedance lower, so that even portable devices can be used with the “travel-friendly” new design.
So the performance proof will be in the pudding. And they shine. Indeed, they’re one of those headphones which we used for several weeks without making notes, because they so rarely did anything wrong worth writing down, while their high points were so enjoyable that the last thing we wanted to do was spoil the musical moment by making notes. We did record, however, a widely differing performance depending on the headphone amplifier we were using. Direct from iPhone, and via our usual Musical Fidelity headphone amp, everything was clean and lively, with usually impressive definition in the midrange, and the treble delivering oodles of atmosphere and precise soundstaging. There was genuine depth in that they reproduced the 30s of hertz in Neil Young’s Walk With Me, though not quite to the same level as the midrange and treble, so that we were loving the clarity but wishing for a trifle more low-end support in order to deliver the full intensity of this growling performance. This was notable on spoken voice also, with lower male spoken voices a little thinned of richness and occasionally left boxy in the process.
Hence we’ve heard bolder deliveries of Lou Reed’s Walk On the Wild Side, but not, we think, a more accurate portrayal at this price. We could hear the reverb around Reed’s vocal decaying slowly into the soundstage, his voice crisp, the twin panned guitars jangling gently, while the shuffling snare, though low in the mix, was never masked by other content.
Moving to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Live in London’ recording of Tower of Song, we could again ask for a little more support to fill out the bass in his voice: all the higher sonic cues were impeccable, and the ‘golden voice’ crowd cheer expansive, yet that voice sounded a little smaller than usual, lacking the lowest of his multi-octave frequency content.
And it flunked our torture test of Dion’s
I Read It (In the Rolling Stone), rendering hideously peaky vocals without the underlying punch which does lie in the recording to compensate. But this is a torture test.
Modern material with higher bass levels did well under this balance, and Chris Martin’s vocal rose crisp and clear over the thick undercarpet of the title track on ‘Everyday Life’; even here, though, a little more of the low stuff would have filled the presentation to perfection.
A complete change came when we switched to using a portable DAC unit of supposed acclaim. This totally changed what we were hearing — a big thickened bass now dominated, the treble details were curtailed to an extraordinary extent, so that the Coldplay track became a swampy mess. This DAC had not had such an extreme effect when we’d used some other dynamic headphones; for example it delivered the Coldplay to perfection through a resident pair of open AKGs.
Conclusion
So we’d recommend an audition to check their performance with your system of choice. Because at their best, these foldable openbacked planar magnetic headphones were excellent for the price, with detail, speed and lightness of touch that provided thrilling and longterm listening highlights.