Hello all, time for me to share my impressions of the LCD-24’s!
I’d like to give a shout-out to this forum for being a place that I can feel comfortable trying to express my non-professional opinions in a long winded manner, and @M0N in particular for inviting me here!
I very much enjoy lurking and reading, garnering and gleaning all the great knowledge being shared by you fine folks!
Let’s begin.
What follows is a review and detailed measurements–just fucking kidding!
A little about me: I’m a critical listener, as in, I’m hyper critical of each new piece of gear that I buy, sort of an anti- “I know I’m going to love this,” because instead I’ve got it in my gullible mind to listen for every flaw I’ve read anywhere on the internet. So it takes me a few weeks to settle down, shut my brain up, and forget to look for everything that I won’t like, and that’s when the magic happens…
This is my first foray into higher end cans.
I’m an Audeze fan. My first expensive cans (heh, how times change) were the LCD2 Classics, and while I enjoyed them immensely, I found them, or at least the pair that I had, to be extremely glaring in the upper mids, being particularly shouty and unpleasant with the wrong music. And they had some rumble down low, but not near enough to satisfy my tendencies as a bass head.
After that it was the LCD-X, which for me is still much beloved. I’m indeed lucky in that I’ve got a pair that rumble and punch more than they should, proved later when I bought a pair of pre-fazor LCD2.2’s, and the X’s kept up quite well in the bass department, reaching down almost as low…but I wanted more, more of everything that both did well, with the one thing the X’s were missing in comparison, width. After reading what others here have written, I started looking again at the 24’s, which I’d lusted for from their introduction.
I also own a pair of OG Focal Clear’s and Elegia’s.
The 24’s that I received were basically brand new, and after one pass with leather care, smelled the part!
Then I settled in for my usual process of picking out every flaw and swapping cables and swapping amps and swapping them all back around again for hours upon hours, thinking and wondering whether or not there’s a channel imbalance, why did that guy sell them if they’re so great? And, am I, in fact, a dumb-ass? Do I even like the music I’m listening to? And all that sort of fun, generally crotchity and unpleasant crap I do till I’ve exhausted myself enough to simmer down and forget to be a pain in my own ass for a second, and just let the magic come.
I agree with what @Hazi59, @Delta9K, @bmn1251 and others have said. My pair doesn’t have have too much in the way of unseemly shoutiness or sharpness, but did glare a bit with some music initially…it depended heavily on the cables and the amp. Overall the 24’s do sound like a super LCD-2PF, to me, and at least this pair.
I listen to pretty much anything and everything.
Hip-Hop, EDM, Classic Rock, Metal, Classical, Rousing Film Scores, plenty of crappily recorded Pop, Synth-Wave, etc, and these do all of that very, very well for me.
I’ve never heard Metallica’s “One,” sound more bad ass, the kick drum punch is perfect, while all around are those guys doing their craziness with their guitars, and these cans did it with a dynamism that damned near approached the OG Clear’s, which I was not expecting, all while being somehow surprisingly mellow.
Amps used:
Sigh. I own three, yes, I own three Monolith Liquid Platinums. Let’s just say I got a bit carried away there, and being gullible, and OCD, as I’ve mentioned, simply had to have three of them. Why? Well because I’d bought some very expensive 12AU7’s to roll, and I wasn’t about to pull Amperex 7316’s in and out or do likewise to a pair of Mullard 57 Long Plate Square Getters, was I? So I naturally needed a third amp to roll 6922’s and other 12AU7’s in. You see, all perfectly logical, and totally not OCD.
Other amps: Neve RNHP (astounding with the LCD-24’s, fucking astounding, and as an aside; I HATE that the premium Audeze cable sounds so good, because now there’s another purchase I need to make for XLR), and a Matrix HPA-3B. The HPA-3B definitely brings out some shrillness and glare on some songs, but oddly enough, is never bright with the Focal Clear OG’s, go figure.
Signal Chains are strange, mysterious things.
The rest of the Chain: PC as my Roon core going out to a powered USB hub via an AQ Carbon cable, and out with a Shiit Snake oil USB to my Gustard U18 DDC, SPDIF out from there with an AQ Forest to my Bifrost 2 (OG card).
I’ve swapped all this stuff in and out, and even with the DDC, without that silly Sabrant USB hub in the path, music is noticeably less full.
And then there were the headphone cables; Audeze’s balanced black XLR, a Satin Audio Chimera II, and Cardas Clear-Light I bought from Drop. The latter two I was still in the process of burning in.
On the single-ended side of things: the basic black Audeze cables and their premium one that came with the 24’s.
Needless to say, all of this took quite some time to adjust to.
If you have read this far, by the way, my hat’s off to you, I’ve got lots more rambling to do!
The Mullard tubes are particularly slow to reach their best sound, taking about an hour to get there, but when they do, they are breathtaking, and trade blows with the 7316’s, which are amazing in their own right.
Depending on my mood, the Mullard midrange can lend a tad, just a tad, of shout here and there on some tracks, the Amperex’s less often, and the RNHP never.
This sensitivity seems purely mood dependent on my end, I simply don’t notice any shout whatsoever when I’m happy and grooving.
When I’m happy and my tubes are adequately warmed up, oh holy shit are these cans intoxicating… they are perfect for me, being both a blend of the things that I love in my X’s, ie, more detail, but with a mellowness that just let’s me be enveloped in the emotional majesty of music. The bass is sumptuous. Everything sounds analogue, natural, detailed without being fatiguing (but the chain is uber important), and these things take the 3 dimensional aspect that I adore in my other Audeze’s and the Focal Clear OG’s and then drive it up a notch.
They rumble and punch and slam more on the side of the 2PF’s, with more details being present, like the X’s, but wider and more well layered, with a stage that is excellent in depth and placement. Back up singers can clearly be heard, even though the bass warbles my Adam’s apple.
On Halsey’s, “Clementine,” I can hear her breathe in while tilting away and in my mind slightly to the left of the microphone before singing into it again, something I’d never noticed before. It’s present in the X’s now that I know that it’s there, but less perceptible.
It took a good couple of weeks for me to stop being wary of these cans and learn to fall in love with them, but after that, eargasms.
I had a friend from work who’s gotten into audio come over for a listening session last night, and we both did the manly thing of looking the hell away from each other and then laughing at the fact we’d both been crying at the beauty of the music. Blackmill’s “Let it be,” Queensryche’s “Silent Lucidity,” and Skynyrd’s, “Simple Man,” were just some of the things we’d listened to that welled up those emotions.
And that’s what it’s all about.
Thank you, sincerely, all of you, and thank you for reading my ramblings!
Now to figure out which horrendously expensive cable I’m going to buy. I’m looking at the Arctic Cables Gladius. Fuck me, I need it.
Hilarious