There is no sensible way to pretend that spending around £1,000 on a pair of headphones is normal working-class behaviour. You can buy a decent television for that. You can probably buy a used car. You can even, if you are quick, still buy a games console for it. The Audeze LCD-X are not an impulse purchase unless your impulses are significantly better funded than mine.
That makes reviewing them slightly awkward because I should probably spend the next 1,500 words attempting to justify the price, but I am not an audiophile. I have ruined my ears with years of DJing and loud gigs and music, I have, I think, a little bit of tinnitus. These are absolutely wasted on me, but I want to get the important bit out of the way immediately.
The Audeze LCD-X are still easily the best headphones I have ever used.
Not the best headphones I’ve used this year. Not the best gaming headphones. Not the best headphones I’ve tried under a particular arbitrary price point.
The best. Now you can say for the price, they should be, and I am with you on that, but once you have used them, unfortunately, this creates another problem. Once you’ve spent a decent amount of time listening to things through the LCD-X, going back to perfectly good headphones suddenly feels like somebody has quietly removed half the sound while you weren’t looking. Not the obvious sounds, it’s not like part of it is missing, and yet something, even to my ear, is.
These aren’t really gaming headphonesAudeze doesn’t sell the LCD-X as a gaming headset. There is no microphone hanging off the side, no RGB lighting and no software offering you an “FPS Footstep Extreme Pro” equalizer preset.
These are serious studio headphones for super-serious people, er, like me.
The LCD-X have been around in various forms since 2013 and are primarily aimed at audio engineers, producers and musicians who need to hear exactly what is happening in a recording. They use enormous 106mm planar magnetic drivers rather than the more common dynamic drivers found inside most consumer headphones.
Planar magnetic headphones work differently, using an extremely thin diaphragm suspended inside a magnetic field. There is a lot more physics involved, obviously, but the important bit from my perspective is what happens when you stick them on your head.
Everything becomes astonishingly clear and this took me aback a bit.
The LCD-X don’t initially smack you around the face with exaggerated bass or artificially sparkly treble. In fact, if you’re moving over from headphones specifically tuned to sound immediately exciting, your first few minutes might almost seem understated. At first I thought it may be a placebo, did they sound better than my Anker Soundcore Space 2’s I currently use when on planes and the like. Or even better than my AirPod Pro3s. Did I want want to Mulder it and just simply, want to believe?
No, i was definitely noticing things – tiny things.
The decay of a cymbal. The sound of fingers moving along guitar strings. Echoes behind vocals that previously blended into the background. Little production elements sitting off to one side of a mix that you’ve somehow never noticed despite hearing the same track hundreds of times.
I found myself doing something I haven’t done with a new bit of audio gear in ages: digging through old music specifically to find out what it sounded like now.
This was dangerous as I lost an hour playing different kinds of my favorite music. I hammered hard techno (Charlotte de Witte), drum and bass (Chase & Statu’s Badadan), and moved through some of my fave old music – Pennies from Heaven by Inner City and something completely different – Dire Straits Sultans of Swing from Alchemy Live, which contains one of the greatest ever multi-minute guitar solos ever performed. I have heard Mark Knopfler’s magnum opus a 1000 times, and here, I heard it differently. I just can’t explain why. It was magical.
The bass is ridiculous, just not in the way you might expectBass is probably where people coming from gaming headsets will initially misunderstand the LCD-X. These aren’t Beats-style headphones attempting to rearrange your fillings 140 times per minute. The bass here is incredibly deep, but it is also controlled. It doesn’t mush everything together. Not that the Space2s do, they they are £150 headphones.
Electronic music is particularly spectacular. A proper low synth doesn’t simply become a generic rumble somewhere beneath the rest of the track. You can hear its texture, the movement in it, and where it sits alongside the kick, but it was also the hats that got me. Maybe that is something to do with the wear my hearing is at, but I noticed that patterns in Kevin Saunderson’s programming in Pennies from Heaven – a house tune I have loved for decades, that I simply did not know were there. It’s astonishing.
There is a speed to the LCD-X that keeps everything separate. A big bass hit arrives, does exactly what it is supposed to do and gets out of the way again. It doesn’t smear itself across whatever happens next.
Nothing feels as though it is competing for space.
Then I played games with themThis is The Escapist, though, so eventually we need to stop pretending we’re all mastering the next Radiohead album and play some games.
The LCD-X are open-back headphones, which means the earcups deliberately allow sound to pass through rather than sealing you away from the outside world.
There are obviously huge potential disadvantages to that. Anybody sitting nearby can hear what you’re listening to and you can hear what’s going on around you. If I used these on a plane, somebody would, quite rightly, attack me and force the flight to be diverted to the nearest airport
At a desk in a games room, however, open-back headphones can create an enormous sense of space and if you game in a room away from humans, well these will become your favorite (£1000) headphones
In something atmospheric such as No Man’s Sky, that makes an enormous difference. Wind, machinery, wildlife, distant environmental sounds and music all occupy their own positions rather than collapsing into a wall of audio.
Switch to a shooter and positional information becomes almost laughably easy to pick out.
You don’t need a virtual 7.1 gaming mode creating artificial surround effects. The stereo imaging is so precise that your brain simply understands where things are, because it sounds how it is supposed to be.
I found footsteps aren’t merely “left.” They can be left, further away, slightly behind you and moving toward the centre.
Good game audio has been doing this for years, of course. The problem is that most of us haven’t been listening to it through equipment capable of exposing quite how much information is actually there.
They are enormousThere had to be a catch somewhere. Well, there are two. The first is the price. The second is that the LCD-X weigh 612 grams. and that is a lot of headphone.
Pick them up and there is no pretending otherwise. These things feel like somebody has manufactured a pair of headphones using materials normally reserved for building bridges. Of course if you are dropping a grand you don’t want them to feel plastic and cheap.
Fortunately, Audeze has done a very good job of distributing that weight. The wide suspension headband spreads the load across your head and the huge cushioned ear pads are excellent. Once they’re positioned properly I can wear them comfortably for surprisingly long sessions.
But physics gonna physic. You never forget you’re wearing them.
There is metal everywhere, the earcups are huge, the detachable cable feels substantial and the entire thing gives the impression it could survive years of studio abuse without much complaint.
They also come with a proper travel flight case, although describing something weighing more than half a kilo as particularly travel-friendly feels optimistic. It’s a great box though. I like boxes, and even the clasp had me playing with opening and closing it for longer than I should have. I am easily amused.
Back to the cable, though – so often the failure point of headphones. My first pair of Beats years ago, the cable barely lasted the abuse I threw at it for a couple of months. This one is like it’s made out of a rubberised chain mail. For God’s sake, don’t break it, though, as you aren’t going to be able to order a replacement from Amazon. It also highlighted how little of an audiophile I am. You plug the cable into both earcups, rather than one side you may be used to. This then runs down to an XLR connector, which obviously won’t fit into much. Audeze then supplies an XLR to a 3.5mm jack plug, which will fit in a hi-fi, but now something like my iPod or Akai MPC Sample. Fortunately, there is also a heavy-duty adapter to take it from 3.5mm to 1.75mm, but the downside is that you have something akin to a nightclub bouncer’s cosh dangling close to the end of it. It all works, and I assume it doesn’t affect quality, but for a grand, maybe a cable to a more commonplace 1.75mm jack could have been included for us audio philistines.
You don’t technically need a massive amplifierHigh-end headphones often bring another hidden cost: discovering your shiny new purchase now requires several hundred pounds worth of DAC and headphone amplifier before it will perform properly. The LCD-X are unusually forgiving here. At 20 ohms and with relatively high sensitivity for planar headphones, they’re much easier to drive than you might expect.
You can plug them into plenty of ordinary headphone outputs and get perfectly respectable results like I did but that doesn’t mean better equipment is pointless.
For PC gaming in particular, it means you can build towards a ridiculous audio setup rather than having to purchase everything simultaneously.
The downside of hearing everything is hearing everythingThere is another slightly unexpected consequence of headphones this revealing. Bad audio sounds bad. Not charmingly bad. A bit shit.
Poorly compressed music you ripped from YouTube five years ago, dodgy recordings and mediocre game audio have nowhere to hide. Even Spotify compression will hit it if you have ears better than mine I imagine. If there is harshness in a recording, the LCD-X aren’t going to smear Vaseline across it for you.
These Audeze are not cruel headphones, but they are honest ones.
That is obviously part of the appeal for professional users. If you’re mixing something, you don’t want headphones politely disguising your mistakes. I have used studio headphones before for mixing with Ableton and you absolutely need a good pair to do anything justice. These are a good pair, and I say that conservatively, because they are better than that.
£1,000 is still £1,000Here is where my reality needs to intervene. I love the Audeze LCD-X. I don’t think everybody should buy them. I didn’t, they were sent kindly for review, and I am not sure I could ever justify to the fam £1000 on headphones. I’d probably just lie like usual.
Spending around £1,000 on headphones is absurd for most people. There are excellent headphones available for a fraction of the price, and the law of diminishing returns is absolutely alive and well in high-end audio.
The LCD-X aren’t ten times better than a good £100 pair of headphones because audio simply doesn’t work like that. What they provide is refinement.
More detail. Better separation. Cleaner bass. More convincing spatial information. Lower distortion. A sense that very little information between the recording and your ears is being lost.
Those improvements become progressively more expensive the further up the audio ladder you climb.
Whether that final chunk of performance is worth hundreds of pounds is something nobody else can answer for you. It is certainly not something I would buy on a whim.
But there is another way of looking at it.
I’ve owned countless gaming headsets over the years. They arrive, they get used for a while, and eventually something newer comes along promising better drivers, spatial audio, wireless technology or some other reason to replace them. The LCD-X don’t feel like that.
They feel like the point where I will never need another pair of headphones until i die. And I’d quite like it if you buried me with them.
The best headphones I have ever usedThere are products I review where the conclusion takes some working out. This isn’t one of them.
Every time I put the Audeze LCD-X on, I want to keep listening. I’m genuinely nnot making that up. I am one of the dorks that has rediscovered the joys of having my music on a hacked iPod capable of playing FLACs. I was scrolling through thinking, I wonder what that will sound like? And that?
Then I go back to running outdoors with my Airpods and immediately wonder where everything went. That is perhaps the biggest compliment I can give them.
They haven’t simply made music and games sound better. They’ve made me actively seek out things to listen to which is a crazy thing to have happened.
They’re beautifully made, extraordinarily revealing, spectacular with games and capable of producing some of the cleanest, deepest and most controlled bass I’ve heard through headphones. They’re also massive, heavy, open-backed and cost roughly a thousand pounds.
So no, I’m not going to sit here and tell you they’re a bargain or even a sensible purchase, because, for most people, they are just not. But if you are not most people…
I’ve used a lot of headphones over the years. These are the best.
And frankly, I wish I’d never heard them because everything else now has a lot of explaining to do.
VerdictPros
- Staggeringly detailed sound
- Exceptional planar bass
- Superb imaging and soundstage for gaming
- Excellent build quality
- Surprisingly easy to drive
- Quite simply the best headphones I’ve used
Cons
- Around £1,000
- 612g is seriously heavy
- Open-back design makes them unsuitable for noisy or shared environments
- Once you’ve heard them, your other headphones are bang in trouble
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