Hello Srajan: I've been following your unfolding Raal headphone review with great interest. As of this morning, I counted four pages already. Given your lengthy intro, do you expect these to be the new king of the headphone jungle? It's hard to imagine they wouldn't be. I really can't wait to read your conclusions and was hoping for some bread crumbs. Brad Hyram
I expect that king making shall depend on recording/mastering quality to an unusually acute extent. With good stuff, I'd expect to hear even more goodness than before. With bad stuff, I'd expect to hear more badness. How could it really be different if we apply the same high degree of magnification? I've heard open-baffle bass in my room to know how it differs from ported/sealed versions. Removing that distortion and overlay onto the midrange alone opens things up. Few of us have the opportunity to know, by contrast, just how used or brainwashed we are to cabinet colorations to consider them right and normal. When you first remove them, certain things fall away, others come to the fore. How one reacts to such a shift depends. And obviously home listening is (ought to be) for pleasure whereas monitoring/mastering is about finding faults and correcting them way deep in a mix. How will a rigorous truth teller apply itself to pleasure across a wide swath of recording quality? That remains to be seen. From the standpoint of dissecting complex mixes down to their individual strands, I do expect that these could set new strandards. So we'll see how it all pans out. Raal Requisite are still back-ordered on their Pelican cases so my shipment is held up until those get in. Until then, all I have are assumptions so no bread crumbs, sorry. Srajan
