Quad ERA-1 Headphones: Intimate Beauties ! $800
Headphones are among the most personal of transducers. How they fit and how they sound,
is all in the head of the beholder.
Quad has had electrostatic speakers of great fame since the 1950s. Quad hasn’t made headphones- until now!
ERA-1 is a Planar Magnetic phone of prodigious performance. I’ll let TAS tell you.
TAS:
“First, the headphone exhibited powerful yet also extremely articulate bass, with an excellent combination of impact and pitch definition. Listen to the deep snarl of the bass and the thwack of the kick drum on ‘Prodigal Son’ from Billy Idol. Some might feel the bass is elevated in level, but it is presented in such a tasteful, musically uplifting manner that I think many will embrace it over a strictly neutral sound.
Second the ERA-1 has wonderfully well defined, nuanced, and revealing mids and highs, especially relative to the norms for its price. Many models in this class are either bright sounding or else dark sounding- and slightly softly focused, but the ERA-1 instead hews toward a more satisfying and accurate middle path.
To appreciate how this plays out in musical terms, listen to the hauntingly beautiful ‘Nublado’ from Sera Una Noche. It features delicate, shimmering percussion and the solo voices of guitar, cello and wind instruments. In every case, the ERA-1 deftly captures the defining tonal colors and textures essential to each instrument’s sonic character, not to mention the reverberant acoustics of the recording venue.
In short, ERA-1 now stands as one of the finest sub $800 headphones that money can buy.”
- Open back
- Planar Magnetic
- SPL 94dB
- 420 grams
- 20 ohms
- 10-40kHz
