Ultrasone iCans

I couldn't do a review of in-ear phones without comparing them to at least one pair of headphones, in this case, the Ultrasone iCans.

These on-ear phones (they press against the entire ear) retail for $129.

They are open, in the sense that the sound can come out the sides a bit, thus the actual designation "semi-open." The driver is dynamic and 30 mm in diameter, much larger than found in the in-ear phones.

Impedance is 35 ohms, and they weigh about 3 ounces.

The drivers are decentralized in the ear cup, and they call this technology S-Logic. It is supposed to give you a more realistic sound, as the music bounces off the external portions of your ears (the pinna) before entering the ear canals.

The iCans fold up compactly, so they are a reasonable choice for taking on a trip. However, you have to be careful when folding them up. I also found them difficult to adjust the headband length. The sliders are very tight.

To me, the iCans did not sound that great, at least not as good as any of the in-ear phones. There was just not much "life" to them.

I don't have an ear approximation to test headphones yet, so I simply placed the microphone very close to one of the phone cups for the bench tests.

The frequency response was all over the place. However, because I was not able to place the phone against a surface similar to the ear, I would tend to ignore the roll-off below about 1 kHz. What I wanted to show here is the response above 10 kHz not having the extreme dips that the in-ear phones do. I believe this is due to the driver being so much larger, but also because the headphones do not have the narrow plastic output channel that the in-ear phones have, and thus, no resulting diffraction effects.

I could not obtain a reasonable 20 Hz response, due to the open testing. I could only get 87 dB at 1 kHz before the driver went into very high distortion. Therefore, I only show the 10 kHz response here.

The second harmonic was reasonable, but larger than those seen with most of the in-ear phones I tested in this set.

My feeling is that there are some superb headphones out there, but the iCans are not one of them. I gave them a 5 for sound (your mileage may vary), but they do fit nicely and are comfortable, so a 9 on the fit.

Conclusions

Well, the MP3 players are a bit weak on the midrange and bass, and many of the available in-ear phones also have weak bass. No wonder I have not been very happy so far. However, there are a couple of performers here. Overall, I preferred the Denon AH-C700s for their combination of good sound (using some EQ to smooth out a hump), which includes the very low IMD measurements, and really nice fit. The Ultimate Ears Pro EBs come in second, but only because they are a bit cumbersome in my ears. They have a very good, flat response, so EQ is not required. You can get both of these ear phones at significantly less than the MSRPs, and they are a BIG improvement over the ear buds that come with iPods.

A report on more phones is underway.
 

- John E. Johnson, Jr. -

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