A mini survey of ear-bogglingly good headphones and headphone amplifiers

I'd like to let you in on a little secret: You can buy terrific headphones for next to nothing. That's not to say they all sound great, but a bigger budget definitely buys better build and sound quality.

For this roundup I've selected three contenders for the world's best headphone: the Denon AH-D5000, Grado Labs GS-1000, and the Ultrasone Edition 9, plus a pair of headphone amplifiers, Benchmark's DAC1 USB and Woo Audio's WA5-LE.

If you really want to hear every last bit of music on your favorite recordings, headphones have it all over loudspeakers. The reasons for headphones’ sonic superiority are easy to fathom. First and foremost, the vagaries of room acoustics that play havoc with speakers’ sound matter not a nit to headphones. With a headphone squirting sound directly into your ears, there is nothing between you and your music. That sort of intimacy is impossible to achieve with speakers.

Rational Exuberance

John Curl is a superstar high-end electronics designer. In the early 1970s, he worked his magic on the Grateful Dead’s concert and recording sound systems and later kept the Jefferson Airplane aloft, just before tackling film sound in Hollywood. All of that led to collaborations with high-end pioneer Mark Levinson; together they raised the stakes, considerably, with their legendary solid-state preamplifier, the JC 2, in 1974.

The very best audiophile gear is, like most of today's luxury products, substantially sized, glamorous, and breathtakingly expensive. Lucky me, I live with steady parade of the stuff, but maybe I need a breather, just as some restaurant critics enjoy the pleasures afforded by a simple meal prepared with just a few well-chosen ingredients. Enter Atoll Electronique. It is French, reasonably priced, and has definite audiophile street cred, so Atoll might be just the "palate cleanser" I am looking for.

AMERICAN HI-FI REDUX
Based in Ogden, Utah, Zu Cable and Loudspeakers is reinvigorating high-end speaker design.

Superstar chef Mario Batali’s credo, "Wretched excess is just barely enough," could be applied to most luxury pursuits: cars, watches, boats and my favorite indulgence, high-end audio. Dan D’Agostino, Krell Industries’ co-founder and chief designer, has a bit of Mario in him—he is an accomplished cook and drives a silver Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder "for the fun of it."

Where most upscale components flaunt bravado and power, the Classé Audio CAP-2100 Delta Integrated Amplifier’s gracefully curved metalwork and sky blue touchscreen display send a very different message. Better yet, the beauty is more than skin deep—fresh thinking is evident in every aspect of its design.

The eight boldfaced bullet points include "Four HDMI Inputs" and "Leading-Edge Format Video Conversion." In fact, every paragraph on the page has to do with video. Am I reading a sales sheet for a plasma TV? No, I am looking over the press release for the new Anthem Statement D2 surround-sound processor. The entire document concentrates on video switching and processing. A surround processor is supposed to be about sound, right?