I have personally hit my price bottleneck for right now and plan to sit back and just enjoying the music. The decision will be up to the buyer on what they want for their money and how much are willing to spend for it. At the end of the day these are all great products to propel the listen into something special. With that being said, the Audeze LCD-2 and Burson Soloist are also double if not triple the price of the AKG K702 and Schiit Valhalla 2. I am extremely taken by the performance and listening experience that I get with the Audeze LCD-2 and Burson Soloist combination. I think the Burson Soloist provides me with a little more oomph in delivery. The Burson Soloist has replaced the Schiit Valhalla 2 in my daily listening setup.
The Valhalla 2 is a very capable and enjoyable headphone amplifier, I listened to it for several months, Monday-Friday for hours on end. Where I still own the AKG K702, it just isn't my cup of tea for a long listen. I feel like it is light in the low and mid range and doesn't provide the same balance to the music like the other headphones are capable of. I summed this up as involvement and emotion in my review of the Valhalla 2, I would take that further and call it the meat and potatoes of what I enjoy in a headphone. However, I still feel like it is missing something that both the Audeze LCD-1 and Grado SR225e provide for me. This stands true with both the Burson Soloist and Shiit Valhalla 2 amplifiers. Overall, I think the headphone has great resolution, good separation, and surprisingly good depth. It is leaner than that of other headphones, specifically the Audeze LCD-2. I am currently using the Burson Soloist and find the same attributes of the AKG K702 to be there. I found after my review of the Valhalla 2 that my experience with the AKG K702 wasn't limited to the Valhalla 2. Not sure if I actually had a question to ask, but if you can think of other albums that are master classes in production (not just of reverb) and why, I for one, would be interested in checking them out.TinearedOne - Sorry for the delayed response to your question. You actually have to turn up the volume! No loudness wars back then. The other thing I love about these albums is that when you buy them on MP3 they are noticeably quieter than music these days. One thing that Trevor Horne does that I particularly like are the many high pitched belly percussive sounds that feature reverbs with long silky tails on them which to me are a joy to listen to. I am sure the Lexicon 224 is all over them. Not the greatest albums of all time by a long stretch, but both demonstrate how, with skill and the right kit, you can use large amounts of different types of reverb in the same track to devastating effect. These are "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome" by Frankie goes to Hollywood and Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm". He produced two albums in the 80s which, for me, are a master class in reverb. When I listen to the UAD reverb plugins, the one producer I immediately think of is Trevor Horne. Many times I have been thinking I have got a Lexicon PCM (way too expensive here in the UK) on a track and no, its VRoom doing its thing. The Vroom is just amazing value and punches way above its weight.
The Aether is a very special plugin with some beautiful sounds and a great GUI and I particularly like how the developers are on many mailing list supporting their product. Of the natives, I am going to buy the Aether, and the VRoom. Aether remains the deeper of the two, and I would say that depth gives it a greater capability for subtlety. But just look at the controls in Aether compared to B2.
I was sold, bought them all and another card so that I could run them with ease. Aether came first, so its reasonable to assume there were things learned while implementing Aether that were applied to B2. I demoed EMT140, Lex224 and EMT250 and immediately knew that I was in the presence of greatness. However, the one set of reverbs I could not test on demo were the UAD ones that so many people recommended in the list so I took the plunge and bought a solo UAD 2 card. Valhalla Room Reverb (or VRoom as it is affectionately known)Īll great reverbs. To cut a very long story short, I narrowed the list down of over 15 native plugins to this: I read every mailing list thread I could find and noted every recommendation that was made in them. It has to be said that I am fascinated by reverb and the effect, both good and bad, it can have on a track. A couple of months ago I began a comparison test of every Reverb plug in I could get my hands on in demo form.