Grover Neville

Are headphones - all grown up? My big takeaway from CanJam Socal 2019 was just how far headphones have come in the last few years. There’s a real sense that the industry has ‘grown up’ and come into its own.

I’ve mentioned that I enjoy Manley Labs gear before, but I had a chance to really sit down with the Absolute headamp this CanJam and take a deeper listen.

Two companies that were part of the large Shenzen Audio booth were S.M.S.L. and Matrix Audio. The Matrix audio booth was showing a handful of all-in-one streaming, DAC and headphone amp models, as well as their flagship X-Sabre Pro. The Matrix models are mostly in the over $1,000 USD range, but looking at their feature sets it’s easy to see why.

I hit up the FiiO booth to listen to their new FH7 IEM and M11 DAP, both of which retail for $450 USD. A lot of my friends and new acquaintances had been telling me I absolutely had to hear the new FH7 IEM from FiiO. Moving on to other IEMS, another product that was getting highly positive show-floor comments was the Moondrop audio booth.