Headphone Reviews

Measurements

Raw frequency response plots show that the Ether C Flow matches the Harman Target Response quite well, and in listening I found this a remarkably neutral headphone. The sharp inflection in the raw response is an artifact of pad bounce—the natural resonance of the pad system elasticity—and is generally not heard in as stark a way as measurements might indicate. I heard the bass of the Ether C Flow as quite good, but not as dramatically impactive as the Audeze headphones.

While the curve closely matches an appropriate response, I also note that it's quite noisy. Definitely more so than the previous Ether C, which I heard as having a somewhat more refined sound.

There is also a distinct peak at 6-7kHz that becomes even more distinct in the compensated plots. As an independant look, I'll point to ultrabike's post here. His measurements show a clear tendance for distortion and ringing between 5-6kHz. The 1000Hz shift in our measurements could easily be accounted for by the differing ear shapes of the measurement systems. When listening to the Ether C Flow for long periods, this feature became apparent.

30Hz square wave shows an odd shape due to pad bounce, otherwise it isn't swaybacked, which might indicate phase change, and remains well above zero over its entire coarse. The bass response I heard was quite good.

Initial transient of the 300Hz square wave is a little to high for my liking, and its shape and that of the second significant peak is quite sharp. In my experience this can be troublesome, though I'd say this is a mild example. The 300Hz square wave of the Ether C by comparison, is more symmetrically shaped, and the following waveform is cleaner. Similar comparisons can be made of the impulse response on close inspection. I did hear the Ether C as better resolving and cleaner sounding.

90dB THD+noise plot is somewhat higher than I would like to see, but still under the 1% that most consider the limit of audibility. If I did hear distortion it would have probably just added to the lack of refinement I mention. I didn't hear these as "hard" sounding. 100dBspl plot being significantly lower than the 90dBspl plot indicates good power handling over most of the spectrum; below 60Hz we start to see some excursion limiting.

Impedance plot shows a nominally 24 Ohm headphone with a flat impedance as expected with a planar magnetic headphone. Interestingly, if you blow-up the .pdf to very high magnification and look at the impedance curve between 6-7kHz you will see a small bump that coincides with the features at the same frequency in the raw response plots.

Broadband isolation of -20dB and the plots show that this headphone is fairly good at keeping outside noise at bay.

With an efficiency of 230mVrms needed to achieve 90dBspl at the ear, this is not a headphone that will be driven well from portable devices.