Fc-Construct OP t1_ixwaxnv wrote on November 26, 2022 at 9:49 PM

For all you Canadians out there, it turns out that there's a little thing called the Toronto Audio Fest. While not exactly CanJam as it primarily features speakers and their associated paraphernalia, a few high-end headphones do make an appearance here. I had the chance to recently go and thought I'd share my experiences with everyone.

There were quite a few brands in attendance:

Focal - I heard the Utopia 2022 and Stellia. Utopia 2022 was largely similar to its OG version but with some minor tuning differences. The Stellia was rather aggressive and I prefered the Focal Radiance I reviewed a while back.
HiFiMan - They had their standard headphone line-up as well as the the strange closed back HE-R9 and HE-10D there. They weren't worth the time listening to. The HE1000se made an appearance and I quite liked it. Felt like a more treble focused Arya, in a good way. Probably not the best for modern music but it would excel in anything classical or orchestral.
Audeze - The CRBN, MM-500, and LCD-5 were the ones I got to try. LCD-5 and MM-500 were surprisingly similar with a large 3 kHz pinna gain. The CRBN didn't sound like an estat at all but the soundstage was surprisingly small? I wasn't blown away by it (nor anything I heard at the show to be fair) so that estat allure wasn't really there for me afterwards.
Grado - They brought their entire line-up, I tried a few before moving on. I found the rumors of Grado being death by treble to be rather exaggerated. Some of them even had a respectable amount of warmth. Still not a headphone I'd ever consider owning though. The fit and comfort is just highly suspect.
FiiO - They had a few of their IEMs on display as well as their DAPs and desktop sources.
HEDDPhone - Funny enough, the HEDDPhone was at the FiiO booth hooked up to one of their high end sources. I quite liked the HEDDPhone, it has a fairly unique sound presentation with a very distinct treble. It's clean and snappy sounding with plenty of definition. The weight didn't bother me too much either, though I only had it on for a short time. While it's heavier than the vast majority of headphones, the way it was distributed really helped alleviate the pressure.
Meze - While the Liric and Emyprean were on display, I focused on the 109 Pro. Honestly, I wasn't a big fan. It sounded strangely thin to me and its technical performance wasn't anything to write home about.
Stax - To my great surprise and delight, Stax made an appearance. And not just any Stax but their flagship X9000. Unfortunately, the listening environment of a noisy exhibition made it hard to really tell how good the X9000 sounded but in my eyes, it was like a perfected version of the Audeze CRBN. Probably my favorite headphone I heard at the show. The Stax L700 and L300 were also at the booth but when they were besides the X9000, well I didn't spend too much time on them.

Here's a link to the article with full impressions on everything I tried: https://headphones.com/blogs/features/toronto-audio-fest-part-1-a-sample-of-headphones. One thing to note is that at live exhibitions like this, there are a lot of limitations so please take everything with a few grains of salt. I have an entire section in that article describing some of the challenges and caveats when reading these impressions. Obvious ones include the noisy environment and the lack of familiar test tracks.

PS: Lest anyone says that people in Toronto think the world revolves around them, there's also a Montreal version of this exhibition. Hopefully something like this happens for you West Coast gang.

(I'll also have a follow-up article to this that's speaker specific so if you're interested in that, check out the headphones.com review page in a few days or lurk around /r/audiophile where I'll likely post a few things there)