Fork me. Tuning fork aka Camerton that is. We expect high style and jewelry finish from big houses like Focal and what Meze have grown into. That a very small Berlin boutique would compete on their turf and manufacture everything in-house from the raw driver to its flawless CNC'd housing and frame to the pads and cabling by having invested in the necessary machinery and know-how is a bit shocking. To Oleh outsourcing seems a dirty word. Where Dan Clark types began by modifying Fostex cans then spent countless years clawing their way up into the big leagues, Camerton pitched their tent above the treeline from the word 'go' before aiming for the permafrost zone. One obvious price such dogged determination and self-reliance extracted is a relative lack of marketing moxy. Just how many caps can one man wear? As a result the brand remains far more obscure than it deserves. No dedicated stand at Munich HighEnd 2024, just a chance-upon presence in ferrum's exhibit. Very few reviews. On that score it's still early days. Meanwhile the actual product has fully arrived. So it's up to the discerning shopper to bridge the gap. Perhaps my review might bolster visibility and confidence?
Oleh Lizohub at Munich HighEnd 2023.
The only headphone I expect to compete directly with the Binom-ER without having reviewed it is the Abyss Diana also happily mobile. Of the planarmagnetics I did review—Audeze to Oppo, Kennerton to Meze, Final to HifiMan—the year 2024 Edition of the Camerton sits on top. With three pad and four cable choices, it's also the most comprehensively accessorized. Then Oleh's understated classic cosmetics sidestep the hyper styling of an Empyrean or Utopia to be more of a landed gentry than nouveau-riche proposition. From a tuning perspective, Oleh has pursued linearity so none of the currently popular 'fun' profiles which interpret our music for a certain designer-curated effect. Arguably most surprising is that he achieves this peak performance within loading parameters that operate far closer to sealed than open-backed. We get the gain of very limited leakage without the typical ear-muff pain of sonic woolliness and compression. We do forego the usual swivels which angle pads fore/aft and up/down. We must live with how ER's fixed arrangement happens to land on our head. I had zero issues and only extreme comfort but obviously can't speak to endless possible skull shapes and their needs.
Fashionistas have black anodized and pure aluminium plus a few pad colours to contemplate. Deep listeners bag light wear which will last them into extended power sessions. Multi-taskers and less-be-more lovers will delight in hitting cruising altitude with basic pocket rockets of smartphones and DAP. Here the USB-C cable with a DAC/driver on a chip built in becomes the cat's meow. Whilst pricing and finish finesse spell 'exclusive', the actual usage scenarios write out 'every(wo)man'. For just one example of Oleh's obsessive perfectionism: "I read your comment about my ear-pad replacement scheme. Since my headphones are a product of sex as you wrote, I consider it my duty to protect my creation. But seriously, I prepared the answer to this aspect a long time ago. I approach my products using the analogy I developed from building model airplanes when I was a child. As you know, nothing comes from or disappears into nowhere. If you add something in one place, something will definitely be lost elsewhere. The modern airplane is the most striking example. There is nothing superfluous about it. Its design and appearance are the result of decades of evolution. It would seem that you could add many things but after thinking carefully you realize that it is not so simple. Back to headphones. Before constructing an intricate system for replacing pads and after weighing all pros and cons, I use the simplest system when all others, especially magnetized ones, incur a significant weight increase in the most painful places of cups and pads. A weight increase entails the need to increase down-force. This demands an increase in headband rigidity to add mass. Everything interconnects and we sacrifice comfort. The magnetic fastening system is heaviest. Whether it's neodymium magnets or simple steel inserts attracted to driver magnets, it adds a significant amount of weight to the ear pads. My calculations said at least 40g. So what's more important, easy pad swaps which may not happen more than once; or wear comfort all day long? I could obviously indulge a funny marketing stunt and have our specs list headphone weight without pads – but that wouldn't be my style." Indeed. Oleh is no heyoka or trickster. Quite the contrary!
Which gets me to the chequered flags of an assignment that turned into a real peach. It's long been my contention that UltraFi is synonymous with premium headfi. It eliminates the room to pay proper respect to the 'fidelity' concept of hifi. It rolls out bass reach and linearity which in speakers takes rather serious artillery plus active or passive intervention i.e. acoustic treatments and/or DSP. There's no resolution loss from distance or ambient noise. Even better, we circumvent all civil 'what', 'when' and 'how loud' concerns of domestic playback when no speakers are involved. Rather than wait to build the dream of a dedicated fully isolated listening room which never materializes, we get to live our musical Jones now without antagonizing others in our crib. Camerton's Year 2024 Binom-ER over-ear planarmagnetic is such an UltraFi proposition. If it were a speaker, I'd probably call it a big Harbeth with a shot of Zu if set up in a perfect room. It's my best effort at pigeon-holing its sonic profile into one sentence. Poor pigeon.
White Binom-ER at Munich HighEnd 2024. Photo credit Mono & Stereo. Olive-grey version in overlay.
Because I've not heard everything, I added a question mark to the award byline. It should appease the omniscient. My phrasing also stipulates type not the entire headphone class. Dynamics, e-stats and ribbons do things differently. They open up alternate realities. A headfi extremist could well want an example in each category. It's why Simone on staff owns Raal 1995 Immanis for ribbons, Spirit Torino Valkyria for dynamics. In my world Camerton's Binom-ER would fill the isodynamic post. Job. Taken. Position. Closed. Susvara. Retired.
Camerton respond: Dear Srajan, first of all I want to express my gratitude for your understanding, respect and of course, great patience. As you noted, after sending the product I did not condition you in any way and completely trusted your professionalism. As you probably noticed, the path to creating this product was not easy and I hope that to a large extent I let you experience it with me. My approach is absolute. This probably means that customers need to get used to my products. Not everyone understands them right away. I had a lot of different headphone tunings to choose from, among them those more similar to conventional headphones on the market today, with a sound more familiar to modern listeners. The stakes were extremely high. I only needed one win and understood that by sending you one the risk would probably be less but every time I compared these tunings, I asked myself: is this the sound I want to hear? Is this the sound I want to convey to my listeners? Is this what music really sounds like? The conclusion was clear. You will get exactly my version of the sound of music, the one I strove for. In the end this is what I consider correct and I am ready to subscribe to literally every semitone. I am ready to defend it to the last. Before sending out your sample, I understood that this was the only correct decision. More precisely, I wouldn't regret it if I failed. When after the first comments your review didn't update for a decent amount of time, I got pretty worried but also understood that I was not mistaken and right now the process of actually getting to know the product was taking place. So you did a great job. Chic approach and analytics of sound. Readiness to open new frontiers. The modern audio world is very inertial. Rarely anyone is capable of this. And special thanks for your award! Sincerely, Oleh
