• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Abyss AB-1266 Phi TC Review (Headphone)

_thelaughingman

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 1, 2020
Messages
1,324
Likes
1,943
Fortunately, 'many fish in the Ocean'..Me? Happy with my new HE400se and Qudelix with bass shelf and 2k boost.. $8k will buy a new Laguna bandsaw and Sawstop with $ left over..:)

Shoot that bandsaw will be better investment than anything else.
 
Joined
Nov 30, 2020
Messages
39
Likes
49
manufacturer says quite literally that the headphone is not complete without 3000$ cable that is almost impossible to use. poor voicing and engineering. requirement to fundamentally change the construction of the headphone to listen to different music genres. impossible to figure out how to wear them, and recommendation to wear differently depending on music. incredibly hard to drive. manufacturer cannot take criticism and keeps taking potshots at amir and ASR.

should i go on?


Cannot follow most of this:
- manufacturer says quite literally that the headphone is not complete without 3000$ cable that is almost impossible to use
Yepp, over the top marketing and too expensive. The cable is flexible and nice to handle, imo.

- poor voicing and engineering
Poor voicing??? Engineering - yes, weird construct

- requirement to fundamentally change the construction of the headphone to listen to different music genres
- impossible to figure out how to wear them, and recommendation to wear differently depending on music
There is no requirement to do so whatsoever, sounds ok once you found your position. If you chose to change to accentuate bass or anything, takes a second

- incredibly hard to drive.
Well, it works very well with an ifi iCan Pro ... it is hard to drive but I would not call this incredible hard. It's not a Sus

- manufacturer cannot take criticism and keeps taking potshots at amir and ASR
Yes, very lame indeed. Poor handling which could be done 1000x better.

M2C.
 

BlackTalon

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Forum Donor
Joined
Apr 14, 2021
Messages
586
Likes
898
Location
DC
I'm happy (and sad) to learn I can buy respect for my hearing abilities. I doubt my 'big rig' would cost more than $15k to replicate, which definitely doesn't seem to put me at that level. Maybe if I buy a pair of $30k monoblocks?

I'm pretty subjective when it comes to audio, so joining up on ASR was getting a little out of my comfort zone. But all made possible by seeing how the price of hi-fi gear is going up and up and up and yet seeing plenty of people getting really good sound for a small fraction of the price. I'm an engineer, but in an unrelated field (a subset of civil) where it is a bit of a mix between objective and subjective. Material properties are very important, but do not tell the whole story. Some products that have a lot of really good properties have other reasons why they can be a poor choice over time, yet the manufacturer's sales reps will always tell you their products are vastly superior to all the others. What's funny though is many of the reps are actually independent companies that are under contractor to the manufacturers, and when one of them losses the contract the next time around you will start hearing from them all the negative things about the products that they never talked about before. In general no one knows how good/ mediocre/ bad a product is better than the manufacturer, and they are the last ones who will admit their products are not all the best in their class.
 

Tachyon88

Active Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2020
Messages
233
Likes
259
Oh for goodness sake :facepalm:.
What makes one respectable is their sound reasoning and reputable demeanor, not some paper receipts. At this point we may as well conclude anyone who owns a Porsche is a world-class auto engineer.

With all the car analogies that get made, they just might be ! /s :p
 

nerdoldnerdith

Senior Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2020
Messages
495
Likes
690
Location
Chicago
@nerdoldnerdith Firstly thanks for sharing those pictures, if those really are your speakers I have to say you probably have one of the best collection of equipment on this forum. Congrats on such a killer set of gear. I understand your frustration with some of the membership of these forums. There's a lot of bandwagoning, and dogpiling on things when they get a bad review. It's immature. In the case of Abyss they don't do themselves any favours with their $3000 cables. It's extremely disappointing and annoying when people peddle that nonsense. I myself have personal experience with dealers trying to swindle thousands out of me and contrary to what a lot of people are saying not everyone who may be in the market for these headphones are millionaires with loads of cash to spare. Some of them just really enjoy this hobby and do spend much of their disposable income. If they are new to the hobby they are in danger of being misled. I think a lot of pushback you see in these threads are people reacting to that.

Not everyone on this forum is a boot licking sycophant. I am genuinely glad you enjoy your headphones and I think the fact you own so many great measuring speakers means people ought to take your thoughts a little more seriously and treat you with respect.
Thank you. Anyone who wants to come by and take a listen is welcome. I live in Chicago.

Of course, owning expensive audio equipment doesn't make me an expert in anything. This is the gear I have and regularly use, so I am acclimated to sound that is ruthlessly neutral. My ears are used to how things are supposed to sound, so that's worth something. I wouldn't say that the AB-1266 is quite as neutral, but it still sounds awesome for other reasons.

I will also just throw in that I own other expensive pairs of headphones, and my preferences for them aren't based on their MSRP or how much I paid. I paid $2400 for a pair of Audeze LCD-4's that cost $4000 new, and those things sound wonky as hell. The Focal Clear and Sennheiser HD800S are way better headphones, as are many cheaper headphones I am sure. The AB-1266 are the best sounding headphones I own and have heard, and they happen to be the most expensive as well.

By the way, I am selling a pair of Audeze LCD-4's for anyone interested. $2400+shipping.
 

WickedInsignia

Active Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2021
Messages
184
Likes
408
Location
Australia
Maybe I'm biased and my brain is trying to justify the $4000 I spent on them
This is all we need, thanks.
Case closed. Let's move on.

Most agree Abyss should be skipped anyway on ethical consideration of their $3000 cables.

There is still more fondling to be had.
This thread was worth this quote alone.
 
Last edited:

nerdoldnerdith

Senior Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2020
Messages
495
Likes
690
Location
Chicago
This is very scientific lol
When you say that you know the science and that the science doesn't say as much as one thinks it says, you don't have couch your answer in scientific language with graphs and statistics. I was just saying something. I'll explain in a bit.
 

WickedInsignia

Active Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2021
Messages
184
Likes
408
Location
Australia
That maybe was there for a reason.
There's no "maybe" in biased. If your entire case is subjective you're acting on bias, and your entire case is subjective.

EDIT:
I don't mean for anything here to sound rude, sorry if it comes across that way.
Please understand why Abyss receives so much shade here: They are a company selling some very questionable goods, with historically bad temper and headphones that don't measure up to the price tag.
For $8000 I would want flawless channel matching, zero audible distortion and a sound tuned to some sort of meaningful metric. Especially if that thing is so damn heavy. The only case people are making here is that there are better purchases (which there are) that are better before and after EQ (again true). I'm sorry you're getting dogpiled a bit here but you're challenging some of the most trusted voices on this forum.

Anyway, I'm starting to spam so that's it from me in here.
 
Last edited:

mkawa

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Messages
788
Likes
695
i'm pretty ok with someone with your amount of disposable income making some potentially irrational buying decisions, so this seems something that's fine to let lie, unless you really feel the need to defend the product (because you did spend like a used car worth of money on it).

like i've said before, i'm worried about the your subjective opinion encouraging others, likely without the same amount of disposable income, doing the same thing you did. ASR, objective measurement, and so on, are here to help people make better choices on what to do with their scarce resources. eg, don't buy expensive cables, don't buy power conditioners, don't buy multi-thousand dollar DACs and headphone amps. DO eq your headphones, use room correction tools with your speakers, etc.

i didn't know this stuff (ok i knew about silly cables) before i started really reading and experimenting for myself with the (not all well spent!) gear that i had, and much of my teenage years were spent stuck in a room building audio circuits! i know there are some key choices i made that i now regret where i got out of my depth and didn't have a reliable guide.

so yes, the case is closed. you have lots of disposable income. you bought a very expensive set of headphones of very dubious value from cable peddlers among other things. however, you like your purchase on subjective merit, so good for you. now we're moving on to what the measurements say and what that means for other people.
 

ReaderZ

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Apr 14, 2020
Messages
618
Likes
414
These are not just some "graphs" on the Internet. You were given proper measurements together with controlled listening tests that verified what the measurements demonstrated. The measurements show that these headphones are not equalized flat. I outgun you on multiple fronts based on criteria you have above. Should I just then listen to a headphone and pass on judgement and tell you to pound sound if you don't agree?

We measure because even experienced listeners can get these things wrong. They give us an anchor for the listening tests to follow. That in an ad-hoc situation you liked them is neither here, nor there.


The issue is unlike Speaker's FR, where there is very little disagreement, Harman curve(which itself has many versions) is not universally agreed to be the best target, and IMO FR is the single most important part of headphones. Plus there are still things we can't measure, such as sound stage, HD800s has amazing sound stage, most people agree, but we still don't have a way to quantify and measure it.
 

tomtrp

Member
Joined
Jan 14, 2021
Messages
73
Likes
51
I'm not Amir, obviously, but I'd like to chime in on the 'exaggerated spatial effects' thing. The HD800 drivers are a little in front of the ears and pointed back at an angle. Supposedly this improves 'soundstage'. If they intended to 'exaggerate' soundstage, they didn't do a very good job IME, because I didn't hear much difference in either the 800, or the 555's I owned (which had a similar angled-driver arrangement) compared to other headphones I've heard. Not familiar with these other than they seem aimed at the "The price is the product" crowd.
The spatial effects are also very content dependent. You can try Dvorak No.9 conducted by Reiner with HD800 to feel the incredible "width" of HD800. And yes, with most of pop/rock/Jazz music, the soundsatge of HD800 is not that pronounced or expansive, but still quite satisfying. With some of specific recordings, the "soundstage" of HD800 can be very wide. I tried the same recording on 8351Bs, though speakers have way better soundstage of course, HD800 still has that weired expansive "soundstage" and width in particular (in headphone scale) seems exaggerated compared to speakers. I read something about IACC and ASW in Toole's book, which can be a good tool to understand such effects.
 

nerdoldnerdith

Senior Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2020
Messages
495
Likes
690
Location
Chicago
i'm pretty ok with someone with your amount of disposable income making some potentially irrational buying decisions, so this seems something that's fine to let lie, unless you really feel the need to defend the product (because you did spend like a used car worth of money on it).

like i've said before, i'm worried about the your subjective opinion encouraging others, likely without the same amount of disposable income, doing the same thing you did. ASR, objective measurement, and so on, are here to help people make better choices on what to do with their scarce resources. eg, don't buy expensive cables, don't buy power conditioners, don't buy multi-thousand dollar DACs and headphone amps. DO eq your headphones, use room correction tools with your speakers, etc.

i didn't know this stuff (ok i knew about silly cables) before i started really reading and experimenting for myself with the (not all well spent!) gear that i had, and much of my teenage years were spent stuck in a room building audio circuits! i know there are some key choices i made that i now regret where i got out of my depth and didn't have a reliable guide.

so yes, the case is closed. you have lots of disposable income. you bought a very expensive set of headphones of very dubious value from cable peddlers among other things. however, you like your purchase on subjective merit, so good for you. now we're moving on to what the measurements say and what that means for other people.

I wouldn't in a million years tell anyone on a budget to go spend thousands of dollars on a pair of headphones. For the love of God, buy a pair of Sennheiser HD600's and be done with it.

However, if someone with $5000 burning a hole in his pocket tells me that he wants to buy the best pair of headphones he can afford, I know what I will recommend to him.

And I should make it very clear, I am defending the product because I own it and it sounds great, not because I am looking to justify my purchase. I don't want to defend the product, and I am only defending the product against people trashing it who have no idea what they're talking about. I don't like how Abyss sells snake oil and tube amps and makes outlandish claims about their products. I hated the look of these headphones from the moment I first saw them and swore never to buy them, but curiosity eventually got me. They are uncomfortable and I nearly sold them when I got them because they wouldn't fit right on my head. I could have gotten every penny pack.

I really wanted to hate them. But they sound so, so good, and when I put them on I can't stop listening to them. I close my eyes and lose myself in the music.

In order not to spam this thread with any more of my posts, I will make my point here:

I have read the Harman research and Sean Olive's studies. I know what it says and doesn't say.

Firstly, they wanted to understand how to built excellent loudspeakers, so they used scientific methods involving blind testing to determine what objective measurements correlated the most with listener preference. In the end they found these measurements and created loudspeakers that are very hard to beat. Among these measurements was frequency response.

With loudspeakers out of the way, they turned their attention to headphones and in-ear monitors. They were faced with a problem, however. Blind testing allowed them to conclusively determine everything that went into engineering great loudspeakers, but they were unable to conduct blind tests on headphones with the same amount of rigor. This forced them to settle for solving a slightly different but related problem, namely figuring out what frequency response on a headphone correlated the most with listener preference. Eventually they found that frequency response, and it is what we know as the Harman target.

They compared IEM's with the simulated version of those IEM's and found a 1:1 correspondence when conducting preference tests, so they concluded that frequency response could be used to predict in most cases what IEM's listeners would prefer.

However, the inability for them to conduct a proper blind test with headphones prevented them from deriving a similar correspondence. What this means is that the Harman research does not allow us to say that frequency response alone can predict listener preference among different headphones. All things being equal, yes it can, but we are talking about comparing totally different headphones where all things aren't equal. If a headphone's frequency response deviates significantly from the Harman target, then it probably won't be preferred. The AB-1266 doesn't deviate significantly from the target, and there are only a few areas where it is more than 3dB off. I would not be surprised if the AB-1266 sounded even better if its natural frequency response tracked the Harman target more closely; I never made the claim that it is perfect.

The same research says the preferred frequency response of a pair of headphones also depends on the program material. If one is listening to music recorded with equipment calibrated to be flat and mastered on flat studio monitors, then the Harman curve will be perfect. For the majority of music that isn't produced in such a way, all of that goes out the window. This is also consistent with the research on loudspeakers; frequency response is one thing among many that correlates with listener preference for a loudspeaker, but it isn't necessarily the most important, and you can't judge a loudspeaker based solely on it. With the majority of music that is tonally off, you will be listening for other qualities.

There are reasons to believe that there are factors other than frequency response that figure into how much we enjoy a pair of headphones. They sit over our ears and not in them, so the sound we hear is acoustically modulated by our ears, and this is likely affected by the design of the headphone.

I should also add that in the Harman research, they were always looking for the measurements that correlated with listener preference and not the other way around. Listener preference was paramount. Subjective evaluation was always a part of it, so there is nothing wrong with me saying that I prefer one pair of headphones over the other. It isn't as reliable as blind-test data, but it's also not to be totally disregarded.

Here is the Harman research for anyone interested:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjABegQIJhAC&usg=AOvVaw3poq-QBHdmv1fEVquLCrzw

I've said my piece. Case closed.
 
OP
amirm

amirm

Founder/Admin
Staff Member
CFO (Chief Fun Officer)
Joined
Feb 13, 2016
Messages
44,368
Likes
234,394
Location
Seattle Area
The issue is unlike Speaker's FR, where there is very little disagreement, Harman curve(which itself has many versions) is not universally agreed to be the best target, and IMO FR is the single most important part of headphones.
That's because seemingly anyone who hangs around a headphone forum thinks they are an expert and they know better. Unlike speaker buyers, headphone buyers are far more exposed to measurements and Harman work. Yet this is done at casual level without really understanding what they are looking at, what the measurements really show and what the target is. In other words, awareness of both proper and improper knowledge is far more with headphones than speaker. This in turn creates these massive food fights and arguments.

My system is to modify the headphone response against the target. In vast majority of cases headphone performance sharply improves when done so. So there is no question in my mind that what I use is the correct target when interpreted correctly. Without it, I would be totally lost in evaluating a headphone.

In other words, I have a closed loop system to verify what the measurements say. Others just measure and people run with the measurements as if it is gospel down to 1 dB. Mistakes abound in that approach.

As long as you keep your expectations loose and proper, then the system works. Take it to where it doesn't belong and you could fall in a ditch.
 
OP
amirm

amirm

Founder/Admin
Staff Member
CFO (Chief Fun Officer)
Joined
Feb 13, 2016
Messages
44,368
Likes
234,394
Location
Seattle Area
However, if someone with $5000 burning a hole in his pocket tells me that he wants to buy the best pair of headphones he can afford, I know what I will recommend to him.
This is a seriously broken headphone without equalization. You are welcome to make such suggestions but it has no room in this forum because you lack proper evidence to back that. If you gave me one for free I would not use it as is.

There are thousands of devices that are liked and preferred by audiophiles. That doesn't make them properly so.

Now if the company showed studies that defended this type of response, that would be one thing. But there is not and I don't even know if they measure these headphones much. They need to analyze their products more objectively and find and fix these flaws. Saying they are great as is takes away the spotlight and motivation for them to do so.
 
OP
amirm

amirm

Founder/Admin
Staff Member
CFO (Chief Fun Officer)
Joined
Feb 13, 2016
Messages
44,368
Likes
234,394
Location
Seattle Area
However, the inability for them to conduct a proper blind test with headphones prevented them from doing the same.
They can do what I have done blind: correct the response curve with EQ and then do a blind test to see which is preferred. I expect the ultimate execution in a headphone at this price. This test would take just a day to do.
 

abdo123

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Nov 15, 2020
Messages
7,425
Likes
7,941
Location
Brussels, Belgium
And here is exactly the point - what the hell is SO bad with the ab-1266tc that it warrants this endless shitstorm?

why do you want to dictate to people how they should feel about a product?

is this the only way for you to maintain whatever positive opinion you have?
 
Top Bottom