The world's MOST EXPENSIVE noise-cancelling HEADPHONES (T+A vs. Mark Levinson)

Come on, thanks at the end of last year we reviewed a lot of Bluetooth

headphones

with active

noise

cancellation on board. We made the Sony wh-1000xm5, the Bowers and Wilkins choose 7s2, the Bowers and Wilkins px8, the Batiste focal and then also the Sennheiser. push for wireless technology and although Sennheiser ended up being, I guess, what I would call my daily driver since then, they are definitely my choice of those Bluetooth

headphones

that we reviewed late last year and I found them to be a good option. They are more of a budget headset. I know that 400 euros or 300 euros for Bluetooth headphones with active

noise

cancellation are

expensive

, but they are not as

expensive

as the ones we are going to cover today because today we will look at one, maybe two.

Rune 2.0, the revolutionary music player designed for real music, features a very expensive Bluetooth headset with built-in active noise cancellation in this video. Fans, click ruinelabs.com for more information. Welcome everybody. Yes, early 2022. Mark Levinson really surprised us. with a 1000 euro active noise canceling Bluetooth headset called the number 5909 and really moved the needle on what one could expect from an active noise canceling Bluetooth headset both in terms of price and performance because Sgt. eBay came in sixmoons and I reviewed the number 5909 on the Darco audio podcast mid last year and we both found that they were really a cut above the competition both in terms of price and performance, but I also guess there's one thing we tend to forget o often forget about Mark Levinson headphones is that they can be used as passive headphones, they don't really need to be used as Bluetooth headphones, you can plug them into a normal headphone amp and do namaste like those Mark Levinson headphones that completely whip Sennheiser is my daily driver, Sennheiser, in terms of clarity, layer separation and refinement, but May 2022 brought another Contender to the high-end Bluetooth active noise canceling headphone space and that was the Solitaire T from t plus a, which is It sells for 1300 euros per pair. now they are the

most

expensive bluetooth headphones in the

world

that title still belongs to Audio Technica but I think the t plus a or t plus r or however you want to say it I think they are the

most

expensive active noise canceling headphones in the

world

at the moment of the recording, so in this video we're going to perform the mother of all side-by-side comparisons to see if the new Solitaire T of t plus r blows the Levinson brand number five nine 109 out of the water.

Now, this video is predominantly about these t plus a solitaire teas, but we're going to feature the Levinson brand heavily, obviously, as a comparator to find out how good these t plus a actually are or aren't, obviously because both of them. headphones are designed to be used on the street, so that not much noise enters the ear or much sound escapes from the headphones, obviously, they are closed models and the t plus uses 42 millimeter biocellulose. drivers and that's a little bit larger than the 40 millimeter drivers found within the Levinson brand that are coated with beryllium which I know really excites people who love beryllium tweeters, they get very hot when listening The word beryllium is like catnip to some. audio files, but while we compare numbers, the t plus r headphones give us a whopping 70 hours of operation on a full charge of its battery, that's almost double what the Levinson brand promised us and it's really on par with my favorite Sennheisers that also offer around 70 hours between charges, which I think is absolutely fantastic for a pair of headphones if you're taking them on a long-haul flight or, yes, basically on vacation, and also both headphones, both the number 5909 and the Solitaire T-shirt offer multipoint connectivity so you can pair them with more than one device if you need to.

I don't really do that often, I don't know, it's just not something that's really part of my everyday type, but I know it is for a lot of you, so I mention it here. Oh, foreign codec support because that can have an impact on what we hear from our active noise canceling Bluetooth headphones. Well, Solitaire T gives us SBC, which is standard. in the headphones according to the Bluetooth specification we also get AAC and then we get aptx and aptx HD, while the Levinson brand changes the aptx HD to ldac, so that is the Sony codec that is now inside all phones Android, but obviously yes If you are using an iPhone, your connection will always be an AAC connection and I think this is a good time to remind people that none of these headphones, no matter what they say on the box, do not have high resolution or even CD quality Audio without compressing it slightly and without wasting some data.

Both headphones come with a companion smartphone app that works well but isn't as sophisticated as the app provided by, say, Sony or Sennheiser and, to be honest, I didn't really need it. To use any of these apps unless you wanted to update the firmware on each of these earbuds, now the t plus has a key advantage over the Levinson brand because they give us gesture control on the right earbud so we can swipe up and down below. to control the volume and tap it to pause playback and then if we press the circular area that is

mark

ed on the right earbud, we can activate the transparency mode.

Now I've found it a bit tricky to listen to until I realize you can just use them like Sony just put your hand on it and it will temporarily activate transparency mode then take it off and go back to normal active noise cancellation or not , depending on what I have activated at the time, but I do have one. The criticism regarding the haptics of the t plus earbuds is that I wish the buttons on the back of each earbud were larger or better spaced because sometimes I put my hand around the back of one of the earbuds thinking it was turning on noise cancellation, but it turns out I just turned on my Google assistant or Siri or something, so it's not very intuitive on the back of each earbud and I hope so, also, keep those criticisms in mind. and maybe consider that for the next version of these headphones we'll pause for a moment to talk about a recommended album this week.

I want to recommend ABC's lexicon of love, which is a pop record at heart, but I've always found that it has a kind of dark, artistic side. Maybe it's due to Trevor Horn's excellent production intelligence, I don't know, but This 2023 edition comes in this case on a Blu-ray disc and has a Dolby Atmos mix made by Stephen Wilson, but it also has a stereo remix and an instrumental stereo remix also made by Stephen Wilson. Now those stereo remixes, including the instrumental version, are also available on streaming services and are also available for purchase and I acquired a set of flags of each, but Dolby Atmos only does the stereo and instrumental mix and I ran them through of Mart's Dr offline Mark II software and I must say that I was absolutely amazed by the result.

The dynamic range of these new Stephen Wilson mixes in 2023 has an average dynamic range of 14. That's incredible for this particular year where dynamic range compression, as we know, is much more prevalent than it was, so I Hats off to Steve Wilson for executing a new remix, so yes, it's slightly different from the original, but it's not a radical change, but it also keeps the dynamic. range of the recording because I have the original CD here somewhere, the original CD just arrived, in fact, I just bought this, it has a dynamic range of 14. So yeah, well done, Stephen Wilson, I actually You made me go and order another album. from the Super Deluxe Edition online store which also has Steven Wilson remixes and maybe I'll feature it in an upcoming video thanks foreign cancellation here I'd say it's only two thirds as good as Apple's Airpods Max and I'd say the same goes for Mark Levinson in the sense that the Solitaire T-shirt may eliminate the low traffic noise from what you hear behind your headphones, but they don't really block out coffee conversation as well as the Airpods Max do.

It's not really a criticism because it's just that Apple is so good at active noise cancellation that anyone trying to get into that game will always come up short, it's just the nature of the Beast because obviously Apple can spend a lot more money on this. problem and I would also say the same with the transparency mode, it's not as good as Apple's Airpods Max but it's pretty much on par with the Levinson brand. Now we come to the first party trick of Solitaire Tees and it is called HQ mode. that in normal active noise cancellation mode there is a communication chip that receives the Bluetooth signal and then passes it to a Sony chip that is responsible for the conversion and amplification of ANC phone calls, but in HQ mode, The output of the Qualcomm chips that I squared is diverted to a different chip, it is diverted to an ESS saber chip and that ESS saber chip does not perform active noise cancellation, but it offers, according to t plus, a higher quality conversion and amplification than the Sony chip, which was obviously up and running when they were having normal active noise cancellation in play, you know what I mean?

You have active noise cancellation or you have HQ mode, but HQ mode and its higher quality playback has an impact on battery life; it actually cuts the battery life of these in half. headphones, which then brings them more in line with what we get from The Mark Levinson Now, in my listening tests, I found that the HQ mode offered much better clarity and detail when playing Neil Young and Crazy Horses Ragged Glory, the new version of it smells like horse like it's noticeably better than when we have ANC mode on even though the ANC benefit is good I don't think it beats what we get from hkey mode oh yeah the sun is rising and therefore I prefer to listen to the Solitario t-shirt. with HQ mode on so ANC off even when I'm walking the streets of Berlin and that's probably because the Solitaire has passive isolation so the way it covers the ears is pretty good, people likes to argue that high-res audio or lossless audio is wasted in portable audio when we're on the road and I certainly used to think this way, but there is a purity to a higher quality signal or high quality playback that we get sometimes even with active noise cancellation. is compromised, it doesn't really affect Purity, what about the phone calls?

Because I have used both the t plus a and the Levinson brand for phone calls on the streets of Berlin for the last six to eight weeks since then. I've had them and I think it's pretty conclusive as far as I'm concerned when I talk to other people, the other people I call tell me that my voice doesn't suffer from a sort of harder, sharper edge in the hands of the Solitaire tea like it does. does in the hands of Mark Levinson and the people on the other side, these mysterious people also tell me that the t plus a seems to move further away or eliminate wind noise and traffic noise better.

Foreign Foreign's second-hand trick because not only are they Bluetooth headphones with active noise cancellation, but they can also be used as passive headphones without any power on, you can simply connect them to a headphone amplifier or a portable player and ready. The runs are like the Levinson brand now the impedance here is 64 ohms which is double the Levinson but I think the Solitaire T is more sensitive but regardless of what the math or impedance numbers tell us or sensitivity numbers, you'll have no problem handling the solitaire even from a fairly modest power source. I use them with an Aston Kern sp3000 which is obviously a very expensive portable player, but I also had no problems powering them with a fio ka2 dongle DAC connected to my phone and I was able to do it because Inside the box, plus an analog cable with termination of three and a half mil, there's also a 4.4 mil balanced pentacon terminated cable which is very useful and it's also cool that these aren't Y split cables, they just go into one earphone. but if I had to be very picky about the t plus a, I would say it's a shame that compared to the Levinson brand cables, the t plus a cables feel a little cheap because they are plastic-sheathed and are a bit un They are not very microphonic and the Levinson brand cables, I don't think they are, and they are covered in some kind of fabric.

As an interesting aside, it's a little unusual to see an analog connection between a phone and a pair of headphones where the earpiece ends. It's actually a USB C jack even though it's an analog connection and that's what we get with the Levinson, so don't be scared if you see that and think, "Oh, that has to go on the phone because it doesn't.goes to the headphones." while the sa tip is more traditional and the end of the headphone cable is a 2.5 millimeter jack, now where these headphones diverge is in the target curve tuning because the Levinson brand is made by Harman International, so it's really predictable that they have It's been tuned pretty close to the damage and targeting curve, but when I talked to the guys at t plus a few months ago they told me that they didn't think Harman's targeting curve was the same. right choice for them and they went in a different direction when expressing their headphones, so let's talk a little more about the sound quality because I would say that the Solitaire T is more detailed than the Mark Levinson when reproducing backlight, turn up the Solon Arc , that's electronic music, but we play something like giant arena so we get more air, I guess, more obviously from the recording of a t plus a than by The Mark Levinson and the t plus a don't sound as relaxed as Mark Levinson's, they're more sharp.

They are more incisive, they just have that kind of cleaner vibe than the number 5909 and I would also say that the Solitaire tea hits a little bit harder in the lows, so I would say that the transient response is a bit Keener of the t plus a, alternatively , we could refer to that superior transom response as better dynamics, now the sonotate tea is not as good with dynamics as the focal stelia, but then again, what is it? Those Focal headphones are strictly passive and are almost double the price of the Solitaire T-shirt and if we look for a more comparable model in the passive world, I would say that the Levinson brand is closer in its general Gestalt to the meze letter, but it is a fact which needs to be stressed several times that both Some of these active noise canceling Bluetooth headphones can also function as passive headphones and both do so admirably.

I have no objections to its performance in the passive domain with a portable player or connected to one of the many amplifiers I use here and in fact the Solitaire T was first designed as a passive headphone, only later did they decide to add the necessary electronics to make it They function as a kind of leaving-the-house type headset. Foreign batiste. I can't tell you because I gave him those focal Batistes. on my patreon, so I don't have them anymore, but before giving them away I did a side-by-side comparison between the Batiste and the Levinson 5909 and, for me, the Levinson in almost every metric available in terms of clarity. and transparency and also in head comfort, that's where I think the Levinsons are much better than the Batiste focals and I think the t plus a are a step ahead of the Levinsons, especially when it comes to overall transparency and snap rhythmic, however, I would say that Don't think that the construction or the look and feel of these t plus a headphones do not cost 1300 euros.

Yeah, I think maybe Levinson can have a better sense of being a luxury product than these t plus a. but let's not forget that the success of the headphones also depends a lot on their comfort factor and both headphones grip my head very well, so they are not as loose as the Apple Airpods Max, but not as tight as the Bowers and Wilkins px7s2 or the px8. They're kind of a Goldilocks fit and feel, which I think is really great, but this brings us to why, for me, Solitaire tea gets the nod over the Levinson brand and not just in terms of sound quality because we really need to talk about the Cyberman effect and this is how headphones make me, as a six-foot-tall person, look like a damn cyberman when I'm on the street.

I first realized this when I saw the footage we shot when filming the meze lyric video about what a year ago, a year and a half ago I thought, Oh my god, yeah, I really look like a big monster there, like that I really pay attention to this now when we shoot the b-roll for these videos and The Levinsons, I have to say I wouldn't wear them out of the house very often, they make me feel very self-conscious because I feel like they have a bigger Cyberman effect than tea Solitaire, although nothing really competes with Al Batiste's folk in That Respect for Me, I think they are the best Cyberman effect headphones, but it is worth reminding ourselves that of course, headphones used at home and alone at home do not They have to conform to no aesthetic standards because no one can really see how ridiculous we look. when we savor music the way we choose and every Abyss owner knows exactly what I'm talking about, but when it comes to headphones that work at home like the Solitaire tee like the 5909 but are also designed to go out on the street or in the street. train or yes on a plane.

I think aesthetics matter because they look more like clothes and so for me at least the Cyberman effect is very real and the t plus a doesn't make me feel that way as much as Mark Levinson. I think the t-plus sounds better than the Levinson brand, but I'm more likely to pick them up than the Levinson effect, I'm almost always more likely to pick them up than the Levinson when I leave the house for the day, and in fact, So much so. that these t plus a have now displaced my previous pick, the Sennheiser, the most affordable Sennheiser as my everyday active noise canceling Bluetooth headset and let me be very clear that the t plus a solitary T whips the Sennheiser in terms of clarity separation , so the layer separation and refinement is even greater than the Levinson brand, anyway, the light is now fading because I'm recording this at the end of the day, so if you like this video, consider giving us a like below, especially if I thought it was informative or entertaining or a little of both and if you like my attitude towards active noise canceling Bluetooth headphones, I'm also willing to tackle the more expensive active noise canceling headphones of the planet right now, I mean, why not?

Really, if you like it, consider subscribing to this channel and, as always, thank you very much for watching. Hello again, you are watching this video on YouTube, but if you are watching it on Patreon, you will be able to see a longer version. with a ton of errors at the end that show me filling up many, many times and patreon is also the only place you'll find my review of the Sony wf-1000 xm5 true wireless IMS, that video will never make it to YouTube, it's only on patreon so If you would consider supporting me there, even if it's just for a month, just to buy me a cup of coffee or something, that would be amazing, thank you very much.