S2 Ep12: How Does Audeze Make Such GREAT Heaphones?!

In this episode we listen to a fascinating discussion between host Ken Candelas and guest Chris Berens on the magic of Audeze's headphones and their latest product, the LCD-S20. From how Chris got started with Audeze to the future of their technology, you'll learn quite a lot about what is important in the manufacturing of such high quality professional products.

Episode Transcript

(00:14):
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Metal
Mastermind. I'm your host, Ken Candelas, and
today I have a dear friend with me.
His name is Chris Barons, a mastermind on headphone
technology with the company Odyssey.
Got to give it up for you, man, this is awesome.
Odyssey has been such a game changer in the music industry

(00:36):
and the audio recording industryguys.
I mean, you see me rocking with these all the time.
I can't get enough of the Odyssey's.
And I even ordered their new headphone, their new clothes
back the S 20s. I'm really excited about those.
So I'd love to talk a little bitabout that kind of stuff today
with you, Chris, and just your general journey when it came to

(00:59):
audio equipment and what was that like for you.
So why don't we just start off with just a little introduction,
Chris. Tell us who you are and what you
do and what you like to do on your free time.
Yeah, thanks, Ken. It's good to be here.
We're excited about the S 20, ofcourse.
We just started shipping them, Ithink yesterday, believe it or
not. Anyway, I started with Odyssey

(01:19):
about 10 years ago now. I, I have been involved in, I
mean, I've been a music lover mywhole life, been involved in
music production and kind of as a hobbyist for a long time.
And I wanted to get out of the kind of retail scenario that I
was in and get into something those little more music oriented
a little bit, a little bit less.You have to be here during these

(01:40):
hours because the store is open sort of thing.
So I, I just found Odyssey and they were not far down the road.
Actually, how I found Odyssey isan interesting story.
I, I was working on a record, I was doing some mixes with some
friends of mine and my mixes were not translating and I was
mostly mixing on headphones. I won't name the brand, but it's

(02:01):
a pretty common one. A lot of, a lot of people have
them and I was just not really happy.
So I started looking into what other headphones I could get
that would, you know, help me make the mixes turn out better.
And I, I had heard of Odyssey before and this was what,
20/20/16, early 2016. So it was a while ago.

(02:22):
And so I looked them up and lo and behold, they're like 15
miles away from my house. And not only did they have cool
looking headphones, but they hada job posting on the website at
the time. So I applied and I got the job.
And so that's kind of how that got started.
That's amazing. What luck, right?
Yeah. And I mean the convenience

(02:42):
factor, you can't beat it. But but I mean, like Odyssey, I
mean, they've been doing, you know, headphones for quite a
while and they've gotten from the medical industry, I know for
a big proponent of their technology was expanding into
that world. I've noticed that audio and
medical or space exploration or any of these sorts of things,

(03:05):
they kind of tend to be around the same circles of technology.
And I'm just wondering why wouldthat be?
What? What do you what do you think is
the commonality between these sorts of fields and how they
affect us? Well, probably the number one
thing since you mentioned that is the need for excellence or

(03:26):
the quest for excellence, right?We want, you know, NASA
obviously has to have stuff perform as it's supposed to all
the time. Medical industry very, very much
the same thing. Like they need their stuff to
work right and and they need it to be accurate.
And that's what we're always looking for in transducers as
well. And actually the film that we
use for the drivers came from a NASA application.

(03:50):
It it's made by this company forus.
They custom make it to our spec,but they do a variant of the
same film that's made to use what's called solar sails, which
are these things that are like the size of a football field
that when they launch certain satellites and spacecraft out
into the into orbit because there's no atmosphere, they

(04:11):
don't and they don't want to have to refuel.
They don't use Jet Propulsion. They actually use the power of
the sunlight and the heat that'screated by that to propel in the
direction that they need to do it.
So they they create these thingscalled solar sails, which is a
variation of the same film that we use for our diaphragms to
make these giant things that collect the sunlight and propel

(04:35):
the spacecraft. Wow.
So this totally went space age and that's amazing because it's
just, it's incredible that same or very similar type of material
you said. So what is it about the material
that makes it so special in thatcase?
Well, the, the lightweight, how thin it is for their

(04:59):
application, it's that and the transparency of the actual film
itself, because a lot of films that are created for that kind
of use, like flexible circuit boards is technically what it
is. A lot of those kinds of films
are they're made a little thicker, they're a little bit
heavier, which when you can imagine something that large
that you're trying to move with sunlight, you need it to be as

(05:21):
light as possible, but it also has to be strong.
And the transparency factor is if you run sunlight through
something that's tinted green ortinted orange, which or whatever
it is, which many of these kindsof films are, you change the
quality of the light. And in our case, since we etched
with lasers, it actually changesthe way the lasers behave.

(05:41):
So the transparency is actually really important for us as well.
And then you have the the purityof the metal that's laminated on
top, which is the conductive aspect of it in both cases.
So in in the solar sails application, it conducts the
sunlight and in our application actually conducts the
electricity that makes the diaphragm interact with the
magnetic field and move. Holy crap, that is some amazing

(06:06):
stuff. It's really taking a, a, a leap
in brunt of, you know, technology here.
I've never seen anything like it, never heard anything like
it. This is one of those types of
things that once you've heard it, you kind of can't unhear it.
And I got to say, yeah, it it, it's doing fabulous work on, on

(06:27):
all of these mixes. And I'm very, very confident for
other producers who are, who have been getting on board with
this kind of stuff and they are starting to really care,
especially independent artists who, you know, many of us, we
don't have a place to really work in an optimal environment.
And I always talk to my studentsabout, you know, grab a really

(06:50):
good pair of headphones, something you can trust.
I use Odyssey and those kinds ofthings make a difference for
people. We just had Tom Vaughn from
Cordy Electronics on our show. The other.
Day, Tom. And we, we.
We. I know.
You guys are are very good friends and we were talking
about, you know, just the portability factor of technology

(07:12):
in audio today and how things are getting a lot smaller, but
they're retaining a lot of the quality while doing so and
allowing things to be a lot moremobile.
So let's talk about your new headphone, the S 20.
I'm, I'm really excited about getting my hands on this.
You know a good friend of ours, also Mark Urselli, who was also
just on this show. Has also a good friend of mine.

(07:34):
Yeah, rating reviews about the S20 and I understand him.
It uses a very similar technology as you have been
implementing in your electrostatic headphones, which
is called the slam tech. So I'd love for you to explain
for our audience what's SLAM andwhy does it make things sound

(07:56):
just more intense, more just big?
It's it's really impressive. Yeah, it's, it's curious, one of
the, I would say the main thing that it does, it acts like very
much like a subwoofer. So if you've ever had a room
with speakers and you add a subwoofer to it, you know that
it brings, not only does it bring all that low end that it's

(08:16):
supposed to bring, but it also brings something above the realm
and that that it's working in frequency wise.
So it helps out with imaging, ithelps even out frequency
response. It makes the drivers work less
hard because they don't have to move as much air because this in
in the subwoofers case, the subwoofer is moving more air for
them so they have an easier timedriving.

(08:36):
In the case of the SLAM system, actually what it is, is a
Helmholtz resonator. It's a channel or kind of a horn
in a way, variation on that ideawhere we're expanding the size
of the chamber that is moving the air.
So we're essentially tuning thatChannel and it's a channel that

(08:58):
runs around. I wish I had a pair here, but I
don't. But it's a channel that runs
around the edge of the driver. So the diaphragm is here and
then you have out here, you havethe ear pad.
So it's under the ear pad between the ear pad and the
stator plate, but it's around the diaphragm and it's ported on
both sides. So what it's doing and the
reason we created it actually are the, the sort of main

(09:19):
impetus for it in the, in the case of the carbon electrostatic
was to eliminate this sort of sticky diaphragm situation that
you have with electrostatic headphones.
Sometimes because an electrostatic headphone works by
it has two stator plates which are charged with an
electrostatic field and the diaphragm is in between them and
there's very little clearance there.

(09:40):
And in order to get good bass out of an electrostatic, which
is, by the way, something that'salmost unheard of until we came
along and made carbon, in order to get decent bass, you have to
have a certain amount of flex inthe in the diaphragm.
It has to have excursion, right,to be able to move those low
frequencies. So there's always this balancing
act between having enough excursion and getting too close
to the stator plate and having it stick and then when it peels

(10:02):
off goes. And so you can get this kind of
thing that happens with a lot ofelectrostatic.
So we were looking for a way to reduce that or in what we ended
up with was pretty much getting rid of it entirely.
And so the SLAM channels were originally intended to do that.
And what we also realized duringthe research, and by the way, it

(10:25):
took them about two years to fully implement all this stuff,
they realized that it actually is acting like a horn.
It's increasing the bass response and it's tunable.
So the size and dimensions of that Channel are tuned
specifically to the headphone that they're made for.
And, and now we have 2 headphones that have it.
First was the Carbon 2 which increase the base response a lot

(10:50):
in electrostatic, which now we have an electrostatic that
actually has like usable information down below 40 Hertz,
which pretty much unheard of. And then we ported that over now
into the LCDS 20, which is one of our most affordable
headphones. So what we have been trying to
do for the past three or four years is make a close back that
was kind of produced for musicians tracking in a studio.

(11:14):
We wanted to get away from this sort of pointy sound signature
that's really fatiguing. And we wanted to bring in
something that had more low end and a more full round, but still
still neutral sort of sound signature.
And when you put close, close back cups on a dipole diaphragm

(11:35):
like we use because our diaphragm dipole means it
radiates equally forward and back, sort of like a Figure 8
microphone, but in reverse, right?
So part of the way our headphones work is the the
frequency or the I should say, the vibrating air moves in both
directions equally. So you're vibrating out away
from your ears as well as in. So when you close the back of a

(11:56):
headphone, you create sort of a pressure wave on the inside
where it limits the excursion ofthe diaphragm.
And you also get reflections offthe cup that changes the
frequency response. And usually there's kind of like
a, you know, 200 Hertz bump and then there's a bump around like
kind of a wide one depending on the shape and everything around

(12:17):
5K say. So what you end up with is extra
upper mid range and a little bitof bump around like bass guitar
realm. But so we were looking for
something that would help even out that bottom end and bring
back the sub frequencies that sort of get lost when you close
the back. And so that's why we thought,

(12:38):
OK, this is a great candidate for SLAM because we can now have
a closed back headphone that brings in all the low
frequencies that you sort of miss with our other closed back
headphones in an analog situation.
That's, that's incredible. I mean, the idea of essentially
turning a corded speaker into a headphone, but in a way that has

(13:01):
a sort of a grace to it with thetechnology that you're using is,
I'm sure, no doubt a very, very tricky thing.
And that's why I'm pretty sure it took two years for that
research to come through. A lot of testing had to be done.
And I'm sure things like in those internal reflections of
the, the material that the cup is made of, how big the cup is.

(13:23):
And like you were mentioning, with the amount of pressure that
gets literally backlogged insidethat chamber, How does that get
released? Right?
Because we're dealing with physics here.
It's you can't deny that. So these kinds of, and what I've
actually wanted to say as well is that one of the things that I
actually really appreciated about working with Odyssey is,

(13:45):
you know, this is not my only Odyssey pair, but you know, I'm
about to acquire my third pair. And it's really because I'm, I,
I, I found a part of my journey in headphones that I never had
before, which is this purpose built item that I could really

(14:05):
use it for many different thingsbecause it is that good.
But it's also really like good at telling me certain kinds of
information between the different models.
So I'm having like so much fun just exploring this stuff,
comparing and going back and forth.
And I can't wait to get my handson this closed pair because

(14:26):
these open pairs are great at mixing in that fidelity.
And all that pressure is gone because of the open back.
But I was always really curious how this was going to be used in
something more closed back, which you already have.
I believe it's the XC if I. Yeah, we actually have.
Technically, we have 4 closed backs now.
We have the LCDXC that you mentioned, which is like our

(14:47):
Premium 1 is basically an LCDX with a closed back instead of an
open back. And then we have the LCD 2
classic or LCD two close back isthe official name.
So we have the LCD two close back, which is basically an LCD
2 classic with a cup. So that's a little more warm,
little more forgiving, but you know, still pretty bulky and and

(15:10):
a little bit harder to drive. So what we wanted to do was move
kind of from that and those are our two analog ones.
We wanted to move from that sortof heavier, bulkier thing down
to a little bit lighter weight thing, which is where we then
come with this Maxwell chassis, which Maxwell being our third
close back. But it's an active headset,

(15:31):
digital. You have a pair, you know how
they work. You can't just plug it into an
audio interface and track with it necessarily.
It's not really made for that. So we wanted to make something
that you could plug into an audio interface, have it be easy
to drive, get good volume out ofit, but have it not be fatiguing
and a little bit lighter weight and less bulky and also less

(15:52):
deer in the wallet, if you know what I mean, because it's more
affordable. So you can kind of feel like,
should I give this to the drummer?
Maybe not the drummer, Maybe youdon't give them to the drummer,
but you can give them to the guitarist, the bass player, the
singer for sure. You know, so so you don't have
to feel so precious about them as you would one of our upper
end close backs. 100% And that is such a really smart approach

(16:17):
for Odyssey as a company. I think you guys having such a
rich history in audiophile communities, having that
experience, knowing what it takes to create the best
headphones in the world and thenbringing it down to a market
where you can serve the rest of consumers who want to aspire.

(16:39):
But also don't have the funding to get to that point yet.
So it's a, it's a great middle ground for an introductory
headset for somebody looking to get into the professional realm.
It's also for the professional who's looking to have a more
affordable, maybe replaceable option for things like recording

(17:01):
drums, which of course I do. So I know exactly what you mean.
I've broken pairs before and I'mwilling to test these ones out
right. I hope they're built like tanks
so. Yeah, well, they're built very
much like the Maxwell, which you're already familiar with.
I mean, it's the same headband design, very similar cups, very
similar yolks. It just doesn't have the

(17:21):
electronic circuitry inside. And it has some, some more
refined kind of, you know, pro audio sort of features as
opposed to being made specifically for gaming, which
is where the Maxwell came from. Yes.
And yeah, the Maxwell I, I can definitely tell, you know, it's,
it's built very well. I, I take it on the go to work

(17:41):
all the time. I use it while I'm at the school
when I'm reviewing students projects.
It, it's a really, really powerful tool.
Despite the fact that you guys market it as a gaming headset,
it's actually a pro audio headset with gaming features.
Yeah, it's sort of, it's sort ofa wolf in sheep's clothing in
that way, you know. And and this actually, we didn't
really intend it as a pro headphone.

(18:03):
And this is how we originally got into the pro market.
By the way, we made the LCDX over 10 years ago now and we
released it and it was, you know, kind of like our easy to
drive audio file headset. But the way it turned out, a lot
of pro people actually discovered, wow, these are
pretty neutral, I can mix with this.
So they adopted it, we didn't point it at them, and now it's

(18:26):
more known as a pro headset, even though it wasn't made for
that market, but it definitely works well for that market.
Actually, I have a Maxwell righthere.
I can kind of show you like someof the stuff that's going on.
So this will be similar in the S20 as well, where that the
headband strap is, is easily replaceable, removable.
The ear pads also pop right off in the case of the S 20.

(18:49):
In the case of the S 20, they'reactually magnetic.
So this is our first, it'll be our first headphone with a
magnetic ear pad. So you just pull it off.
So when you're working in studios, that's a great tool
because if you're, you know, tracking with somebody new and
maybe your last guy was a littlesweaty.
So you just pop some new ear pads on there and you're good to
go. Same with the strap.
And also because there are much fewer moving parts, there's no

(19:11):
sliders and that kind of thing. It's just like basically a hinge
here and a, and a hinge here. Just twisting, pivoting, no
sliding, pulling, whatever thosebecause those are the parts that
always break first on a headphone is those kind of like
thin moving things that have to do a lot of stress where all our
stress parts here are robust andthere's very little plastic in

(19:32):
this headphone. It's almost all metal.
So it's it's built to last it. Clearly.
And I, I, like I said, I can't wait to get my hands on it.
And I'm, I'm actually, you know,I, I, here's a question that
actually, I think a lot of folksdo ask me, because when I, when
I show them brands like all, the, the moment they're like
eyes like sort of go big and they're like, wow, that's a big

(19:54):
price tag. I, I, I, I tell them, right, you
know, there's really nothing like investing in your
monitoring. But like, why would somebody be
better off, for example, buying a pair of Odyssey's rather than,
let's say, doing some calibration software for their
headphones that they currently have?
OK, well, calibration software is a whole big can of worms that

(20:17):
you know, we can get into it if you want to, but there's
problems with with a lot of it, the way it works.
But essentially all it does is change frequency response and
there's always a limit to what it can do.
It can't make the the transient response faster.
It can't reduce distortion, can't reduce distortion.
In fact, in many cases it increases distortion.

(20:39):
So what you end up with when youuse a lot of EQ, especially on a
dynamic headphone where it maybedoesn't take EQ as well, you end
up with a lot more distortion, you know, but you end up with
comb filtering and phase issues and stuff like that when you do
these wild crazy EQ moves that sometimes are required to

(20:59):
equalize a headphone to a more neutral state.
So we start out with headphones that are A, very neutral to
begin with in frequency response, B, very fast transient
response. That's one of the main
advantages of the lightweight diaphragms that we use, and C,
very low distortion. So what that means is they'll
take EQ really well. So you can apply pretty much

(21:22):
whatever curve you want to kind of customize and fine tune the
sound of it without destroying what it's doing on the benefit
side. Wow, and do you do you ever
explore calibration on Odyssey headphones too?
Yeah, we do. In fact we have a plug in called
Reveal Plus, which we made yearsago as sort of it originally was

(21:45):
only an EQ based thing and it was essentially to what we, what
we called level the playing field.
So that say you're working on your MMM 5 hundreds, you mix a
record, you send it off to a mastering engineer who's using
LCD Fives. Well, the frequency response
between MMM 500 and LCD 5 is similar, but it's not really the
same. So the idea originally behind

(22:06):
reveal was to equalize them so that they have a more similar
frequency response from the out of the gate.
So we're basically applying, youknow, a fairly mild EQ curve to
not correct but get them more into the same ballpark.
Interesting. So it's kind of a way to help
with translation I'm assuming inthat.

(22:27):
Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it was for.
Is 100% a translation tool so that when you do your mixes on
the five hundreds, you send it, maybe you send it to get remixed
by someone who's using LCD XS and LCD XS and M and five
hundreds have a fairly differentEQ curve in terms of their
frequency response. So if you apply something like
reveal, then you and that engineer are going to have a

(22:49):
much more similar experience in listening and you'll have fewer
revisions, fewer listening notes.
That that was the goal of this, you know, to begin with, as
opposed to a more corrective kind of approach, which, you
know, a lot of these companies that are doing like third party
things, they're doing these kindof things to try to make it

(23:10):
sound flat, which in a headphone, there's no such thing
as flat. In fact, flat, a flat like truly
flat frequency response on headphone would sound absolutely
awful and no one would ever buy it.
It would just be terrible because we don't hear that way.
Everyone hears headphones very differently.
And so when you apply EQ to sortof make a flat headphone or try

(23:32):
to make it more neutral, you're always going towards what you
think is neutral, which is not going to be the same as what I
think is neutral. So the better approach is
actually to use something like, you know, just a regular EQ plug
in maybe on your output bus and then applied gentle curves.
Obviously then you get into thisplace where you don't want to

(23:54):
boost a bunch, you'd rather cut.So you if you can do cuts around
areas where you feel like something's missing and just not
cut that missing area, then you end up with a much more
effective EQ and it's tuned to your hearing instead of being
tuned by someone else to what they think is neutral.
Right. And that's for I think a
phenomena called head related transfer function, right?

(24:16):
Yeah, HRTF for short. And that's actually a
combination of everything about your Physiology in terms of like
your shoulder dimensions, your head dimensions, the distance
around your head from one ear canal to the other on front and
and back, the shape of your ear,the size of your ear, where it
is on your head, all these things.

(24:37):
And that's why now because of basically AI based tools, you
can do things like this like in an in an iPhone, you can
actually use the video camera tokind of get a model of your
personalized HRTF. Dolby does the same thing for
people working in Atmos where you can get a customized HRTF
curve just using your phone and it actually improves things

(24:59):
greatly. And if you can, if you can go
the extra mile of getting a sofafile, I can't remember what that
stands for, but it's spelled just like a couch sofa.
It stands for something, but it's basically they, they
actually go in and they do thesereally detailed measurements and
they measure impulse responses and blah, blah, blah.
And they make you a very customized file that you can

(25:22):
apply in headphone software thataccepts it, like APL Virtuoso,
for instance. You can actually input your own
sofa file there and it will customize it for you.
So it's it's tailored to your listening experience.
It's almost like if we just translate that to the clothing,
you know, at the moment HRTF in say the Dolby Atmos renderer or

(25:43):
Apple Music or whatever, if you're using a very generic
HRTF, it's sort of like A1 size fits all clothing brand, very
boxy. You know, it doesn't really,
it's not really made for it's made for the average person.
It's not. And, and by the way, average
white guy, it's really. Define what average means.
It's, it's for the average whiteguy, average middle-aged white

(26:05):
guy probably. So, you know, if, if you fall
with outside that realm, then it's not going to work very well
for you and your experience of the dimensionality of, of
listening to headphones is decreased.
But if you can get to a point where now, OK, I found some
clothes that fit me or maybe I get them tailored and that's
what we're talking about. Custom sofa file is like when

(26:25):
you have a tailor come in and they measure everything and they
make a garment just for you and it fits perfect.
That's what a sofa file does in terms of hearing on headphones.
Wow would would would Odyssey bedoing any kind of software like
that? Not that I'm aware of.
We're not really a software company.
The software that we've made hasbeen to serve a specific purpose

(26:47):
related to working with whateverheadphone that we're talking
about South, like with Maxwell, there's, there's an app, right,
the Odyssey HQ app which allows you to do 10 band EQ, so you can
customize it to your, your liking or your purpose or
whatever. And it also helps with other
stuff. But it really, you know, we're
not really a software company. We had to hire somebody outside

(27:07):
to help us make that and we don't really want to devote a
lot of resources to that. We wanted to vote resources and
R&D dollars to making better headphones.
Well, that's that sounds like a really good priority.
Yeah, yeah. So that's why we're really glad
for companies like like APL making Virtuoso, and they've
integrated Maxwell head tracking, the Dolby Atmos

(27:28):
renderer, same thing, they've integrated Maxwell head
tracking. So the head tracking data that
Maxwell has always produced actually gets sent to those
applications and it helps with the overall experience.
Yeah, that, and that's, that's fantastic.
And I, I know that you guys are always going around and actually
visiting a lot of conventions and spreading a lot of

(27:50):
educational content as well. It's one of the things that I
love about Odyssey. Shout out to everybody at the
team at Odyssey. Love everybody there.
There's so much love that Odyssey puts into their products
and they put it into their people as well.
I've got so many good things about Odyssey to say.
So Chris, you know, this has been such an enlightening

(28:11):
conversation. You know, especially going into
the future with immersive audio versus stereo.
Odyssey is here to help you basically get the best result
that you can possibly make. It eliminates the factors, the
variables of the unknown or at least it unveils more factors

(28:33):
than you heard before. And I, I, I can't, I can't
express enough gratitude for that and how much excitement for
the new products that are comingout the S 20, it already has
been on sale. We're just about I think in one
month into orders and stuff likethat.
But you know, Chris, do you wantto share any last either words

(28:56):
or information about the new headphones that our audience can
find? Oh yeah, LCDS 20 is starting to
ship now. We're getting a second batch at
the end of this month. So we're going to fulfill.
Basically we're fulfilling all pre sale direct orders this
coming week and then after that,when the second batch arrives,
we'll be able to fulfill any other outstanding orders.

(29:17):
Dealers are getting headphones. They're they're basically
starting to get out there in themarket now and we won't have a
problem with supply moving forward.
Incredible. Well, thank you so much, Chris
for all of your time. Enjoy your vacation.
I know this was your day off so I appreciate.
You 10 days off starting now. Well, thank you everybody for

(29:38):
watching and if you're curious about more information about
Odyssey, go to odyssey.com. And we also have resources on
metal Mastermind for metal and rock musicians to learn how to
do better production, how to to do better music, how to do
Better Business, and all of that.
So go ahead and check our resources for anybody who's
interested. Until then, we'll see you on the

(29:58):
next one. And always remember to create
your own sound.