A mini survey of ear-bogglingly good headphones and headphone amplifiers

I'd like to let you in on a little secret: You can buy terrific headphones for next to nothing. That's not to say they all sound great, but a bigger budget definitely buys better build and sound quality.

For this roundup I've selected three contenders for the world's best headphone: the Denon AH-D5000, Grado Labs GS-1000, and the Ultrasone Edition 9, plus a pair of headphone amplifiers, Benchmark's DAC1 USB and Woo Audio's WA5-LE.

Rational Exuberance

John Curl is a superstar high-end electronics designer. In the early 1970s, he worked his magic on the Grateful Dead’s concert and recording sound systems and later kept the Jefferson Airplane aloft, just before tackling film sound in Hollywood. All of that led to collaborations with high-end pioneer Mark Levinson; together they raised the stakes, considerably, with their legendary solid-state preamplifier, the JC 2, in 1974.

Most audio manufacturers build their amps as if it's 1975. Surprisingly, most of their circuit topologies haven't changed much since then. Those circuits worked great three decades ago, when most amplifiers were stereo and sat in open-sided racks or on the floor. In 2007, though, home theater and custom installation have radically changed our expectations of an amplifier.

The very best audiophile gear is, like most of today's luxury products, substantially sized, glamorous, and breathtakingly expensive. Lucky me, I live with steady parade of the stuff, but maybe I need a breather, just as some restaurant critics enjoy the pleasures afforded by a simple meal prepared with just a few well-chosen ingredients. Enter Atoll Electronique. It is French, reasonably priced, and has definite audiophile street cred, so Atoll might be just the "palate cleanser" I am looking for.

We take it for granted that high-end audio products are simpler than mainstream gear, with less processing and fewer knobs. But when Mark Levinson introduced the JC-2 preamp back in 1974, the audio world was shocked by its omission of tone controls and other gewgaws. In this and many other ways, the Mark Levinson brand has been one of the important trendsetters in audio. Which is why its relative silence of late has been puzzling.

AMERICAN HI-FI REDUX
Based in Ogden, Utah, Zu Cable and Loudspeakers is reinvigorating high-end speaker design.

Superstar chef Mario Batali’s credo, "Wretched excess is just barely enough," could be applied to most luxury pursuits: cars, watches, boats and my favorite indulgence, high-end audio. Dan D’Agostino, Krell Industries’ co-founder and chief designer, has a bit of Mario in him—he is an accomplished cook and drives a silver Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder "for the fun of it."

Music systems are back. By "music system," I mean a simple, lifestyle-oriented audio setup—like the all-in-one 8-track/cassette/radio units we had back in the 1970s, but, one would hope, a whole lot better. Music systems don't give you every last feature technology makes possible; they give you only what you need to play your tunes. They can sound good or bad or somewhere in between, but their simplicity and good looks have made them welcome in many homes that have shunned traditional hi-fi systems.