FINAL AUDIO D8000 Pro headphones
Solid construction with a lightness of touch.
Solid construction with a lightness of touch.
Extraordinary headphones, once again, from Japan’s Final Audio. The last pair of their cans to cross our threshold were the giant golden Sonorous X design, which sold for $7399. These silvery (actually aluminium-magnesium alloy) D8000 Pro headphones are a mere $4999.
But before you get hung up on their price, consider how much you could pay for a pair of speakers, or a high-end power amplifier. We do believe, very much, that there is no upper limit on hi-fi, nor on how it should be priced, provided there are sonic gains still to be wrung from the additional cost, and that the price reflects that cost, rather than being plucked from thin air as an enormous geffen mark-up sustained by exclusivity or desirability.
Final is not, after all, one of the many companies that have appeared in recent years offering super-high-end designs. It has been around since the 1970s, when it started making cartridges, and coalesced into its present form around 2014-2015, when it relocated from Shinagawa in Tokyo over to Kawasaki, midway between Tokyo and Yokohama. There it handcrafts these giants of the headphone world in its own Japanese factory.
While that golden Sonorous X used a 50mm dynamic driver, the D8000 and these Pro versions of them use a planar magnetic driver, although a circular one. In planar magnetics the usual cone is replaced by a large flat surface excited into motion by the electromagnetic force created by conductors woven across its surface, in this case an aluminium voice coil which is cunningly etched into a thin diaphragm coating (rather than the usual adhesive mounting method for the coils) in a spiral towards the centre of the circular surface. This distributed coil then moves as the electrical signal varies within a fixed magnetic field generated by magnets on each side, driving the membrane across its entire surface — as opposed to the pistonic motion of a conventional dynamic headphone.
Nor is the diaphragm here itself entirely flat, but rather corrugated, though still extremely light, so that its response can be lightning fast, allowing delivery of details potentially beyond cone-based headphones or speaker tweeters. The question marks with planar magnetics are generally around tonal balance and bass delivery in particular — in the loudspeaker world even giant planar magnetic speaker designs are generally supported by conventional cones to shift sufficient air to deliver satisfying bass frequencies. In a headphone the bass is often supported by the headphones being closed rather than open... but that is rather to deny the maximum benefit of the airy spaciousness of planar magnetic sound.
Final’s answer to this is AFDS, Air Film Damping, a concept borrowed from high-end studio microphones, where thin perforated screens provide a little braking mechanism around the diaphragm movement without impeding the flow of sound. This allows a tilt towards lower frequencies without the diaphragm getting out of control. And that in turn allows an open design to be used, rather than a closed one.
All of that is hidden within, of course. When you unbox the Final D8000 Pro, it is the giant chunks of aluminium-magnesium alloy headshell that most impress, followed by a degree of shock at their weight. Even the cable weighs a lot, the long quarter-inchterminated silver-coated twisted cable in particular, which hangs down heavily and trails away like some megastrand of Christmas tinsel snaking away to your headphone output of choice. Once in position the headphones themselves sat beautifully balanced, but their presence was always significant; you will never forget you are wearing them.
Yet we were not discouraged from long listening sessions. Their sound made sure of that, along with the comfort of their large allencompassing breathable foam earpads. Their open nature keeps you in contact with your environment as well, of course, in addition to sharing your tunes with those nearby.
We’re not sure if the D8000 Pro came to us run in or entirely fresh from the box, but they were certainly on form from their earliest tunes, and continued to generate moments both magical and instructive throughout their month in residence.
One example of this was Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay (Take 2) from the recent ‘Travellin’ Thru’ box-set. We were interrupted during this track by someone banging on the door to our right, but when we removed the headphones, the banging stopped. It turned out to be a rather loose and bizarrely timed contribution on the track from a kick drum in the right channel, but so truly presented with both timing and fullness of impact that it persuaded the brain this event was happening right here, right now. Which is exactly what you want hi-fi to do: make the moment real.
They continued to do so, whether delivering a tight and punchy kick drum under the guitar and synthscape of The Triffids’ Wide Open Road, or highlighting the curiously lo-fi elements opening Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know. While testing Naim Audio’s Uniti Atom HE (see previous issue) the combo of Atom HE and Finals delivered a mind-meltingly zingy portrayal of The Go-Betweens’ Streets of Your Town, currently resurrected for nostalgic advertising purposes by Ampol, but here crisply separated to the point where our attention was constantly darting around the soundstage to small sonic elements like block hits in the left, or the cunning combination of panned rhythm guitars, each element easily individually selectable by the mind’s ear, yet held together in a finely musical whole.
And even though Final notes that this version of the D8000 is tuned to perform better with compressed pop and rock than the standard D8000, fans of acoustic music — classical, jazz, folk — will nevertheless swoon for the realism delivered by such nimble microdynamics and resolving power. The combination of raised choir and blast-furnace brass in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s release of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem should be enough to simultaneously put a smile on their face and a tear in their eye. Similarly it was fascinating to hear the extended ringing resonance of Boris Giltburg’s piano following his crashing blows during Rachmaninov’s piano Preludes, but the D8000 Pro’s ability to focus simultaneously on the minutiae of his delicate fingering was still more riveting. The quality here encouraged our longest evening of purely classical listening in a long time.
What became increasingly apparent during our time with this fine headphone is that it was not a show-stopper — it did not make us gasp at its revelations, nor prevent us going to bed because we had to hear just one more track. Rather it delivered everything about as perfectly as one could reasonably demand — solid and tight, airy and revealing — without thrusting its own brilliance in your face, so that what we enjoyed was the wonder of the music, whatever the genre, whenever we chose to put them on. A little heavy on the head they may be, but they have a lightness of touch that keeps the music playing.