Dan Clark Audio AEON RT Review (closed headphone)

[DJBonoBobo]

My intuition tells me it's the high clamping pressure more than anything else, as I had a similar problem (which I was able to solve) with my Hifiman HE4XX (like I posted earlier). But if you've got a narrow head then I would think this would be less of a problem. You could also explore planar headphones that have headphone bands that you can "work in the opposite direction" to loosen the headband (like my HE4XX). It seems like the Dan Clark is not readily adjustable for clamping force.

BTW I have no problem at all with the clamping force. It is perfect as it is.

Agreed, what he's claiming literally can't be true. And then to further extrapolate from that it somehow causes tinnitus?? Right..

Ok.
My understanding of the discussion now is: There are people who find closed planars uncomfortable or unpleasant or even painful. Some who have tinnitus report that it causes them worse symptoms (temporary).
But there seems to be no reason to assume that closed planars are causative of hearing damage (more so than other headphones), because there is no theory that would support that? Is that the consensus here?

 

[Robbo99999]

Wait stop until you don't know for sure. That makes some materials fragile and stiffer. Those flexible metals are something i would not heat up.

Btw we are in a forum with science in it's name whilst also discussing a hypothesis that could be easily measured and proven, but there is nothing supporting that claim aside from some other spitballing in forums. I known confirmation bias plus gut feels and repetition is enough these days to get people moving, but at least try to be better than that. just a little bit.

Yeah, that's right, I never said people should try it, it was a semi joke idea based on what I skim read on the wikipedia page for Nitinol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium), linked by another member here. If it were my headphone then I would research it more heavily before trying such things.

 

[deepblue]

Agreed, what he's claiming literally can't be true. And then to further extrapolate from that it somehow causes tinnitus?? Right..

No need to get snarky - I was only sharing my experience and the experience of others that I've read online. As I said earlier, there hasn't been extensive reserach done into it, so all we have is our reported experiences.

As for the cause, it seems like it might be what's known as the 'Ortho Wall'. Extremely long ringing in particular frequencies, usually very narrow bands of high frequencies. The tightened membrane of a planar driver has resonant frequencies that'll cause it to ring out, which could mean increased risk of ear fatigue from ringing high frequencies for some people.

It's not an unreasonable logical leap to make that if Planars cause pain in certain people's ears - as has been reported - that it could cause tinnitus. When I first developed my symptoms the only cause I could put it down to was my newly acquired and extensively listened to LCD-2 (which seems particularly notorious for causing this issue).

 

[tsanguine]

I have tried the AEONs and Ethers (also Nitinol) and to me the clamping force was excellent, one of the few headphones I did not feel the need to adjust clamping force.

I agree with solderdude. These are far from the tightest clamp I've experienced. They are quite comfortable. The leather headband might be more responsible for the force and if anything I've found the rubber block that holds the leather headstrap to the Nitrol band can slide a little to easily after awhile. This just means it can more easily get loose and require tightening more frequently.

 

[Racheski]

I agree with solderdude. These are far from the tightest clamp I've experienced. They are quite comfortable. The leather headband might be more responsible for the force and if anything I've found the rubber block that holds the leather headstrap to the Nitrol band can slide a little to easily after awhile. This just means it can more easily get loose and require tightening more frequently.

Just be careful tightening it - if you overdue it the screw will dig into the block and they will eventually crack. Luckily Dan will replace them for free and they are easy to install.

 

[tsanguine]

Just be careful tightening it - if you overdue it the screw will dig into the block and they will eventually crack. Luckily Dan will replace them for free and they are easy to install.

I haven't tried to tighten mine. It seems like it might just need to be cleaned. I already have to send mine in because they were part of an original bad batch that had the paint flaking on the base part of the headband. The problem is, I use them so much that every time I've boxed them up to send them into Dan, I keep opening them back up to listen for just one more night. I have plenty of other headphones but these are the only closed ones I like. I wear them right before I fall to sleep and I can listen to these without bothering my wife or either of my toddlers that crawl into bed with me throughout the night.

 

[Maes Hughes]

Is there a scientific explanation for this? The eardrum is moved/deflected by the fluctuating air pressure inside the ear canal, and that's how we sense sound. So how can planar headphones exert more pressure than dynamic without the ear sensing a higher sound volume? It doesn't make physical sense to me.


Closed back headphones should be safer than open. The main reason for using closed back is to insulate from external noise. If you are using open back headphones in a noisy environment, the tendency is to crank up the volume to drown out the noise, which is more damaging to your ears.

The issue, in the majority of cases, doesn't have anything to do with the sound being produced by the driver. Different pressure than you are thinking, sealing pressure(not sure if this is the proper term) not SPL. For people that are sensitive to this, they will notice this without anything playing at all. It isn't that planars are inherently worse for your hearing than dynamics. Instead, the issue is with the type of sealing pressure applied to the ear. In most dynamic driver designs a "hard" seal (that creates an air pocket that can exert pressure) isn't necessary and the seal only means that the ear is encompassed by the pad without air leakage. Think of the seal of a HD600 vs something like a DCA or Audeze for a difference in seal type.

Normally your ear can self regulate this pressure and all is well. In people that feel pain with this, there is potentially some type of condition that interferes with this natural process. In these cases, there is a slight possibility of hearing damage if the condition you have is worsened by this pressure and hearing damage is a possible symptom of the condition. You should consult your medical professional to see if this is the case for you.

It is more common in planar designs that there is a front volume seal that can generate a type of pressure that can aggravate the ear of someone with a condition subject to these issues. Any headphone that does create a hard seal could be problematic not just planar. If you don't feel this pain, enjoy the great headphones that some of us have to miss out on.

I'll stop further discussion of this to not clutter the thread.

 

[Shazb0t]

Different pressure than you are thinking, sealing pressure not SPL. For people that are sensitive to this, they will notice this without anything playing at all. Instead, the issue is with the type of sealing pressure applied to the ear.

Please prove that this "sealing pressure", specifically as it relates to planar headphones vs any other type of headphones, exists. Then we can determine if it could potentially cause tinnitus. Otherwise, it sounds like a bunch of pseudoscience to attempt to correlate someone getting tinnitus with their purchase of a new pair of headphones.

I believe the new Audeze LCD headphones gave you or anyone else tinnitus as much as I believe that the MMR vaccine causes autism. My point is that correlation does not equal causation. The physics/science matter when considering these types of claims.

 

[lawk]

Does anyone have an idea how much of an upgrade the Aeon 2/noire would be over the RT closed?

 

[Rayman30]

These would be great for work, I am guessing an iPad Pro would not do these justice.

 

[Mauro]

Crossovers add their own complexities, particularly in the time domain. In theory a single full bandwidth driver with good time-domain performance and the ability to span the full spectrum will be superior to multiple drivers with crossovers, IF the driver truly gracefully handles the full spectrum. In loudspeakers multi-driver designs are essential because it's pretty much impossible to make a bass driver that can handle high frequencies without breakup, and tweeters simply can't move enough air to produce bass. In IEMs it's because balanced armature drivers, in particular, are generally not designed for full-spectrum response, so you pretty much have to work with a crossover.

Because our drivers are full-bandwidth, and as the THD measurements show can easily handle the whole spectrum without breaking up, we would not want to degrade system performance by introducing phase issues (and other secondary crossover-related problems). Our planar technology allows us to take a "simpler" path, though tuning the system without the benefit of a crossover is quite tricky, as the range of measured results from Amir's other planar headphone tests show.

In short, my POV is it's harder to tune a single-driver system but if you can the results are, at least to my ear, better because it's phase coherent...

Interesting!! What are in your opinion the problems with phase issues? Group delays?
I had a discussion with sean olive and he pointed out that group delays are not a relevant issue by providing aes papers as argument...

by the way 1more triple driver doesn’t seem to have many issues despite being multidriver..
https://www.stereophile.com/content/1more-triple-driver-over-ear-headphones

 

[solderdude]

The 1more triple driver actually is just 1 full range driver with a ceramic tweeter.
AFAIK there is no crossover and both the tweeter and dynamic driver both get the full bandwidth.
This appears to differ from the M&J that have an electret driver which does have capacitor for high-pass.
Then there is the passive radiator behind the driver but this cannot be seen as a driver.
Also there are issues with (so it seems) phase cancelling at around 7kHz.

 

[Dan Clark]

Interesting!! What are in your opinion the problems with phase issues? Group delays?
I had a discussion with sean olive and he pointed out that group delays are not a relevant issue by providing aes papers as argument...

by the way 1more triple driver doesn’t seem to have many issues despite being multidriver..
https://www.stereophile.com/content/1more-triple-driver-over-ear-headphones

I never comment on other manufacturer's products, that's kind of bad-form unless it's to offer a positive comment, so no comment on 1More's design.

Generally the better the group delay the crisper and cleaner the bass will generally be, in our experience, but there are thresholds below which group delay is inaudible. That said, errors in group delay can indicate other problems that could affect frequency domain performance, so it's something you pay attention to both in absolute and indirect/reference contexts.

Phase problems are often heard in the midrange and it just makes things sound less coherent and focused, kind of smeared. When you hear the absence of phase problems and then switch to something with complex phase behavior you'll hear it.

Sean Olive was once asked (on ASR I think) what he thought the most important factor in a headphone was and I believe he said frequency response, and to a point I agree in that if you don't like the tone not much else matters. That said, we also place a lot of emphasis on THD and time domain issues because we find that after tone these have a major effect on sound.

For example, we actually tend to increase our bass/upper bass a little relative to the Harmon curve because our THD is very low and with bass people often are more sensitive to the harmonics than the fundamental, especially at lower volumes (see Fletcher-Munson). As a result if you have two headphones with similar amplitude response but one has 10% THD in the bass and the other has 0.5% the low THD unit will be perceived as having less bass even when SPL are matched for the fundamentals.

So it ends up being a balancing act as you weigh tone, distortion, group, and phase delay, time domain, etc to create the final sound and there are obviously many different trade offs that can be made, it's not like there's one exact answer for all products...

 

[lawk]

Not to derail the thread, but these are some two very different dudes. The Aeon is much more textured in the bass, more controlled and faster.

But the 1More is a great little can. I kept it around. Despite being a thumpy warmer set, it has a nice snappy effortless treble to it. It has a special timbre to it I have not heard before. The only downside is the weak stage.

 

[SimpleTheater]

I wear them right before I fall to sleep and I can listen to these without bothering my wife or either of my toddlers that crawl into bed with me throughout the night.

A cheap pair of IEM’s should hold you over for a couple of weeks.

 

[tret]

Just registered here to drop a thank you and huge props to @Dan Clark. I've been looking for a closed headphone to compliment my Empyreans, needing something that would provide better isolation while working with my kids doing their (noisy) thing in the other room. I didn't want to spend TOTL dollars for something like a ZMF Verite or Focal Stellia and happened upon this thread a few weeks ago. I decided to give them a go, I've previously owned a couple of headphones from the Ether line and from those experiences knew that Dan makes some of the most comfortable headphones with top notch build quality.

At $500 I knew I could expect a nice pair of headphones but prepared myself for a potentially underwhelming experience around sound quality. I should have known better, and I must apologize for my lack of faith. In any event, I love the sound quality, the energy, the comfort, the build quality. Aeon RT is just an amazing value. Thank you, again!

 

[Mauro]

I never comment on other manufacturer's products, that's kind of bad-form unless it's to offer a positive comment, so no comment on 1More's design.

Generally the better the group delay the crisper and cleaner the bass will generally be, in our experience, but there are thresholds below which group delay is inaudible. That said, errors in group delay can indicate other problems that could affect frequency domain performance, so it's something you pay attention to both in absolute and indirect/reference contexts.

Phase problems are often heard in the midrange and it just makes things sound less coherent and focused, kind of smeared. When you hear the absence of phase problems and then switch to something with complex phase behavior you'll hear it.

Sean Olive was once asked (on ASR I think) what he thought the most important factor in a headphone was and I believe he said frequency response, and to a point I agree in that if you don't like the tone not much else matters. That said, we also place a lot of emphasis on THD and time domain issues because we find that after tone these have a major effect on sound.

For example, we actually tend to increase our bass/upper bass a little relative to the Harmon curve because our THD is very low and with bass people often are more sensitive to the harmonics than the fundamental, especially at lower volumes (see Fletcher-Munson). As a result if you have two headphones with similar amplitude response but one has 10% THD in the bass and the other has 0.5% the low THD unit will be perceived as having less bass even when SPL are matched for the fundamentals.

So it ends up being a balancing act as you weigh tone, distortion, group, and phase delay, time domain, etc to create the final sound and there are obviously many different trade offs that can be made, it's not like there's one exact answer for all products...

Such contribution from manufacturers is both fascinating and informative.
Thanks so much for taking the time to answer...
I would have so many questions but I feel guilty not having among my planar headphones a DCA’s.
In this regard, I never quite understood how do you sell in Europe (I haven’t seen a dealer page on your website but I do see Thomann has your HPs). Could please give me a hint?

 

[Jimbob54]

Such contribution from manufacturers is both fascinating and informative.
Thanks so much for taking the time to answer...
I would have so many questions but I feel guilty not having among my planar headphones a DCA’s.
In this regard, I never quite understood how do you sell in Europe (I haven’t seen a dealer page on your website but I do see Thomann has your HP). Could please give me a hint?

You can buy many (and the Aeon RT exclusively I think) direct from his site. Shipping isnt too bad but the customs and related taxes and handling are what they are. It was worth it for my Aeon RT.

 

[Dan Clark]

Just registered here to drop a thank you and huge props to @Dan Clark. I've been looking for a closed headphone to compliment my Empyreans, needing something that would provide better isolation while working with my kids doing their (noisy) thing in the other room. I didn't want to spend TOTL dollars for something like a ZMF Verite or Focal Stellia and happened upon this thread a few weeks ago. I decided to give them a go, I've previously owned a couple of headphones from the Ether line and from those experiences knew that Dan makes some of the most comfortable headphones with top notch build quality.

At $500 I knew I could expect a nice pair of headphones but prepared myself for a potentially underwhelming experience around sound quality. I should have known better, and I must apologize for my lack of faith. In any event, I love the sound quality, the energy, the comfort, the build quality. Aeon RT is just an amazing value. Thank you, again!

When we redid the website late last year our store locator module had to be migrated, which didn't work. Mea culpa, we've been so busy this year that totally slipped my mind.

If you are interested in the RT that is only available on our store, for other models we have lots of retailers and distribution in the EU, just drop a note to [email protected] and ask for your local distributor. In a few countries like France our coverage is minimal so it's easier to shop direct on our site or an authorized EU online reseller.

 

[SonicallyDeaF]

Sounds like a sweet set-up, really! Be sure to compare LS vs THX single-ended too, the balanced might simply sound much louder (for better or worse..)

I will unbox the LS stack soon as I have put them away for now and try the cans there and maybe I will get same results or something different.

Aeon RT (open) arrived Tuesday evening here in Chicago and the cans have been rolling on THX 789 since that evening around 7pm (only rested for a couple of hours) and still running now 04/01/2021, 6:47 P.M. CST
As I am writing this first impression, not so much of a detailed review the cans are currently plugged in to my Bellari HA540 MK2 hybrid class A tube amp (single ended) and comparison between the 789 balanced down below.
First, I want to address the ear pressure that one of the members have experienced with the closed back, there is non here on my copy (probably only present on the closed back as everything is sealed in tightly when a user puts on the headphones.)
Second, this is coming from a consumer perspective (me), take it how you want as my ears are not yours and vice versa.
Third, I only used one DAC for testing and this is the GRACE SDAC BALANCED, connected are the BELLARI HA540 MK2 and THX 789. The BELLARI is running RCA (no balanced in or out) THX 789 is running balanced cables. PC is powering the DAC and Spotify very high bit is used to listen to music.

PC - DAC - THX 789 - AEON balanced everything = musical, clean, no grain, hitting the target? plausible.
with this setup, I find everything to be fairly neutral, nothing overly extended, no shouty vocals, lows are clearly present, mids are there, highs are good and balanced, nothing overly done. The cans do get loud at about 10 to 11 on the dial, but increasing the volume will not do my ears any good.

PC - DAC - BELLARI - AEON single ended = resolving, louder but clearer, vocal tonality and range have a more presence in range and frequency (AEON RT open literally opened up to maybe it's full potential on this hybrid class A tube amp).
with this setup, volume pot is at 8 on the dot and it's loud enough adding more will not benefit my musical intake. Everything tightens up with the Bellari, bass, mids, highs, vocal presence is outstandingly clear and not mediocre or dull as when listening on the 789. Reverb are present on certain tracks and decay is faster. Instruments, every pluck on an acoustic guitar registers the string vibrations with clarity and precision (HELL TO THE YEAH)!!! Brass horns are brassy and not metallic sounding, high hat splash reverberates and leaves a good amount of sparkle.

Test songs

-Chris Isaak, Wicked Games
-Eric Clapton, Tears in Heaven (acoustic performance)
-Within Temptation, What Have You Done (acoustic performance)
-Gangstagrass, Barnburning
-Hans Zimmer, Discombobulate
-Edmon Colomer, Concierto De Aranjuez Adagio
-Bela Fleck and the Fleckstones, The Sinister Mister
-Notorious B.I.G. & Bonethugs-N-Harmony, Notorious Thugs
-Marvin Gaye, I Heard It Through The Grapevine
-John Coltrane, Naima
-Barry White, You're The First, The Last, My Everything
-Bob Marley and The Wailers, Coming In From The Cold

In conclusion, I will put these cans between the laid back Senn 650 and energetic Bdynamic 990.
Soundstage is not as wide as the Hifiman HE 400i 2020, bigger than the 650, same level as the 990 (990 being a hair wider) with pin point imaging accuracy as the ELEX? These cans have good timbre accuracy as some cans that cost more $$$. I believe that if the Aeon RT have the organic vocal presence of the Senn 6X0 line, these cans will be the $500 king and below to beat. This is merely my opinion and how I like/listen to my music, I understand there will be conflicting arguments said above hence take this with a grain of salt.