Years ago, as a side gig with a friend, I started a small business importing and distributing high-end women’s garments from European makers: swimwear, hosiery, bodysuits, underwear. At the time, the consistent fit and finish, comfort, and manufacturing quality we appreciated was hard to find stateside.
I never thought I’d see these two interests—women’s undergarments and hi-fi—converge, until I started researching this review of the $4500 Audeze LCD-5 headphones, the company’s current flagship.
Sometime in the middle of the previous decade, Audeze was seeking a better way to make comfortable, high-performance ear cups. A well-connected packaging vendor learned about this project and took the Audeze design team to visit a small factory in “the OC”—Orange County, California—that uses thermoforming machines to mold foam into contoured forms for use in, among other products, push-up bras. Turns out, the requirements for these two product categories are not all that different. A curvy path then led to Audeze’s process for making better-fitting, contoured earpads for superior comfort, seal, and sound. The LCD-5 features the most recent version of this high-tech ear cup concept. The whole LCD-5 is manufactured close by, at Audeze’s facility in Santa Ana, also in the OC.
The LCD-5’s black leather earpads are the softest I recall ever nestling on my ear. But there’s more to these earpads than meets the skin—they were “sculpted to eliminate resonance and absorption as much as possible,” Audeze’s Chris Berens told me in an email. Audeze refers to Chris as their “artist-relations guru,” reflecting the fact that, in addition to the audiophile market, Audeze does a good bit of business in the pro-audio sector as well: recording and mastering engineers and musicians in the studio. Audeze’s top-range ’phones have a reputation for being sonically revealing yet nonfatiguing, snug-fitting yet comfortable, even for long listening sessions—characteristics that endear them to musicians,1 recording engineers, audiophiles …
… and doctors?), incorporate a microphone, and—most important—be transparent to the scanner and safe in a powerful magnetic field. Herb Reichert told this story in Gramophone Dreams #56, including his assessment of the civilian version of the resulting headphone, the Audeze CRBN. I heard it at CanJam, powered by one of the same headphone amplifiers I used in this review, the Linear Tube Audio (LTA) Z10e.
