Quick Hit: Cardas Ear Speakers and Being on the Road with High Rez ...

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This is a quick note to talk about how truly spectacular I am finding the Cardas EM5813 "earspeakers" are when I am on the road.

One of the things that struck me is that I keep reaching for them, despite that they are breaking a few "audiophile rules" in that they are not tonally as accurate as the Etymotic IEM's I had also packed for the trip.  There is something that is big, spacious, warm and lifelike with the way they handle the music they are given by my trusty PMP.

It is clear that the headphones capture the life and emotion of the performance, dynamics and transients are just about perfect.  Tonality?  It's on the warm/dark side of the spectrum, but unapologetically so - the subtractive loss is not large, and the benefits are so amazing, that these have become my "go to" headphone when I am not actually on a airplane (the Etymotic, while less captivating, win due to their superior sound isolation).

For acoustic instrument based music there will likely be no better headphones, but surprisingly with the diet of classic rock and pop I have been feeding it, the small details and big dynamics are captured so well that the minor accuracy (subtractive) errors aren't important.  And what's surprising as well is that instrument timber and pitch definition are intact, too.

For an experiment I used the digital EQ on the PMP to see if I could "fix" the tonality issues ... and it did make that better, but at the expense of some of what made the headphones truly special.  So I left it alone after that.

Highly recommended.

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