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In Reply to: RE: Auditioning Headphones posted by DavidLD on September 07, 2014 at 04:02:53
The Panasonic RPHJE120K In-Ear Headphones arrived today.
I put my favorite "Contemporary Jazz Masters CD" in the Laptop. I decided a good initial test might be up against my Dollar Tree earbuds (yes, $1 the pair). Given the rave reviews of the Panasonics I expected to be blown away. Not quite. Ok, maybe they sounded a little bit better, but I have a new appreciation for the quality of the Dollar Tree item. It's really quite good. The Panasonics fit in the ear like an ear plug and are a bit trickier to get positioned right.
The same thing happened to me a few years ago, 1972 to be exact. I had these Utah loudspeakers I had gotten at Team Electronics, Pd $100 for the pair. I had been reading all the favorable reviews on the Large Advents. I figured the low bass would blow the Utahs out of the water. So I saved my nickels and dimes till I got a pair. Turns out the Advents did not blow the Utahs out of the water on the low end. Try as I might, the pedal tones on my pipe organ vinyl sounded all but identical. The Advents did have stronger and better dispersed highs. The 3 1/2 inch cone tweeter in the Utahs was not very strong.
Eventually, I swapped out the cones in the Utahs for much stronger round horns. That was a great swap as the highs improved as did the overall balance top to bottom. The tweaked Utahs are still sitting in my living room and I can still AB them with the Advents. The Utahs are dryer and probably flatter. Julian Hirsch would no doubt have prefered the Advents to the Utahs. I'm still stumped. No hi fi magazine ever gave any Utah loudspeaker the time of day.
I got to thinking about that as I stuck the highly-rated Panasonic buds in my ears. Maybe I haven't mastered putting them in my ears yet. Some reviewers say that could affect the bass a lot. But we have 12,000 rave reviews on Amazon. 12,000 people can't all be wrong.
However, if you have a dollar to spare..., and can't afford $7.88
David
Follow Ups:
My first speakers were Utah HS-1s that I bought from Allied. They served me well for many years. The price was right and I paired them with a SCA-35 Dynakit that I built over Christmas break at our kitchen table and an Allied Radio badged-Dual 1209 with the angled base. The cartridge was a Shure M44e. Good sound at low cost was a key element in my choices at the time.
Sim
...PA speaker builder. Just a thought.
Later Gator,
Dave
Utah speakers were everywhere! But maybe the majority of them were branded Knight or Allied, and were ordered in various states of completion from Allied Radio cataloges through about 1970. They were frequently paired with a kit-built Knight (KG prefix) amplifier or factory built (KN prefix) amplifier or receiver. MOST if not all of the 2-and 3-way drivers Allied sold were probably of Utah manufacurer as well.
The odd thing I always thought is that magazines such as Stereo Review and High Fidelity never acknowledged that this aspect of the hobby even existed let alone run comparison tests with speakers from the "hoity-toity" east-coast companies such as Acoustic Research. They seemed to act as if they were above all the Knight kit builders running Utah-made speakers. Of course, Allied would happily sell you any AR speaker as well, and even sold some in unfinished pine.
My 1970 Allied catalog has all sorts of Utah-branded speakers and tons of Allied branded speakers that are Utahs in only slight disguise.
The Hi fi magazines such as High Fidelity ignored all of this.
The basic Utah design in later years that had the big 12 inch woofer and huge 8-inch mid-range was really underappreciated by the larger hi fi community. That combination was very musical.
David
I had a pair of Ultralinear speakers in the early 70's. After they finally died I opened them up to find a Utah label on the inside of the crossover board.
I think Utah was the "working mans" speaker. Good quality sound and affordable, for the time.
charles
Utah had contracts to do the innards and maybe the cabinets for any number of different brands. They guilt low cost and good quality drivers. The remains of Utah are Pyle. I suspect they made the drivers for a lot of brown goods console stereos in the 60s and 70s as well.
I had bought some 12 inch Utah full range drivers in very high quality, home made cabinets. They sounded remarkably similar to my Dynaco A-25 speakers, but were much more efferent. IMO they are real sleepers. You won't get rich flipping them, but good sound can be had for cheap!
Dave
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