After 1 month…
It has been a month since I received the KOSS ESP/95X headphones. It has been my go to headphones for the last month at home. I still have not had a chance to do an A/B comparison with my other headphones. I have actually packed them away apart from the KOSS. That should give you a good indicator of what I think of them.
These are also the most comfortable headphones I have in my collection, you can just wear them for hours and you just totally forget about them.
Issues
Now unfortunately it hasn’t been all smooth sailing with the headphones, there was a few small issues that crept up in the last month:
- right headphone ear piece was getting a high pitched squeal. This seems to be a common issue with these headphones from reading forums. It only happened once and after I powered the energiser off and on again it disappeared. Fingers crossed this doesn’t appear again.
- may not be an issue specific to the KOSS but probably for electrostats is that the headphones are ultra sensitive to outside interference, I find if the headphone leads cross path with another power cable it can pick up the interference from the power lead.
- the volume control on the energiser is just plain horrible, the more I use it the more I dislike it. I also found an issue where the left channel volume knob is not consistent with adjusting the volume where small mm increments can increase the volume quite dramatically and can throw off the balance of the right channel. I am not sure if this is an issue related to my energiser or the engineering of the knob, i don’t have a second set to compare with. To get around this issue I adjust it to a balanced sound volume I am happy with and adjust the volume of my dacs pre-outs. I don’t want to touch the energiser to adjust the volume at all now as it is so finicky.
Sound
This is one area where it just keeps getting better and better. Every time I put on the headphones and hear the sweet sweet music coming out of the headphones, I get the biggest smile across my face.
These headphones are so unforgiving to bad recordings, forget about listening to vinyl unless it is a super clean pressing.
When listening to Vinyl, every pop, hiss crackle comes through loud and clear. It actually made me avoid listening to any of my Vinyl since I got these headphones and I have been reaching for my hdtracks, dsd audio files every time I put these headphones on.
From other reviews I have read, people complained about the lack of bass, but to me the mid bass is as a abundant as the hifiman he-400, it just lacks sub-bass. The bass sounds incredibly clean, tight and fast. The bass on these headphones are the best I have heard either from speakers or headphones.
The most astonishing thing I have noticed about these headphones is the way it can make music sound so three dimensional and by that I don’t mean the wideness of the sound stage or that it sounds like a multi channel surround sound system. The three dimensional imaging I get is the individual layering of the instruments and vocals, they just sound so real and lively and you can just pick them out like you would do when you see a live performance.
Conclusion
To me these are end game, I won’t be buying another pair of headphones. I am also looking at consolidating my collection to just two or three headphones.
I don’t think I can just keep this set alone as it is far from portable but for home listening it definitely will me my go to pair and my reference for all future headphone comparison tests.
now to decide what headphones needs to go…
Reviews of things.. 