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Ultimate Ears Personal Reference Monitors

Ultimate Ears Personal Reference Monitors

As you will discover (if you haven’t already), one of the many shocks your flesh is heir to as you grow older is the way your hearing deteriorates. (And before you make that leap into ageism, understand that this deterioration happens to everyone—and it starts early in life.) I, for example, have known for better than two decades that my left ear has a slightly different response to certain midband frequencies than my right one, and (much more recently) that I’ve begun to lose sensitivity to the highest frequencies, particularly in my left ear. (Though I can still hear out to 12kHz without any boosts, 16kHz and above have become an increasing challenge.) When you combine these vicissitudes with the problems everyone, regardless of age, has hearing very high and very low frequencies at less than thunderous levels (e.g., the Fletcher-Munson curve), assessing the actual value of flat frequency response in a speaker (or any component) becomes a lot more complicated, and dubious, proposition.

Of course, if there were a way to equalize our ears—to make them identically flat in response—it might be a different story. Then again would you really want perfectly flat hearing? Aren’t the very different ways that our ears work (or don’t), together or apart, fundamental to our taste in gear and music? Can the sound of gear and music even be said to exist for each of us apart from the way we’re used to hearing them?

All these thoughts went through my mind when I ordered up a pair of Personal Reference Monitors from Ultimate Ears.

These $1999 in-ears are unique to my experience in two major respects. First, they are custom-made to fit your ears—and yours alone. When you order a pair of PRMs you have to visit an audiologist (who belongs to the network of audiologists associated with Ultimate Ears) and have him or her make thermo-plastic molds of your inner and outer ears. Those molds are then sent to Ultimate Ears where they are used to build a set of PRMs that fit you perfectly and perfectly seal against ambient noise. Second, you must eq your PRMs for your own hearing or your own taste. You do this by using Ultimate Ears’ Tuning EQ box and a “test” pair of PRMs at Ultimate Ears’ Southern California facility, at a show, or at another venue where the company is exhibiting. The “test” pair of PRMs is fully functional and equipped with variously sized earpieces, though not yet ideally shaped for you. The Tuning EQ box allows you to dial-in equalization in the bass, midrange, and treble. (What you are actually doing is tuning the four crossovers among the PRM’s six balanced-armature drivers to suit your different sensitivity to these frequency bands in each ear.) Who said you can’t equalize your hearing?

Of course, the big question is how to equalize your hearing. Do you want to eq your PRMs to compensate for the inevitable aural vicissitudes I talked about, and that we all perforce live with—to make the sound transmitted by them come closer to equal volume in all frequency bands by correcting for known losses and other differences in your hearing in either ear? Or do you simply want to generically “sweeten” the sound—to make it more appealing at anything short of jet-engine SPLs by boosting the lows and highs (where the ear/brain is least sensitive) and slightly reducing the upper mids (where the ear/brain is most sensitive), rather in the way that Raidho (and others) “voice” their loudspeakers.

Happily, you can do a bit of each of these things with the PRMs, which was the path I chose: I eq’d to compensate for the differences in the way I hear certain frequency bands in either ear by dialing in different adjustments for the left and right channels, and I also eq’d both channels to slightly boost the bass and top treble to make these bands sound more or less equal in volume to the midband for the SPLs at which I typically listen.

Be forewarned: Though the three pairs of dials on UE’s Tuning EQ box seemingly allow for big increases and decreases in level within their various bands, the changes they effect are actually deliberately limited in scope, which means you can dial in the presentation you want with a good deal of subtlety. Nonetheless, don’t overdo the dial twiddling, particularly in the bass. Also be sure to listen to a wide variety of music through the “test” in-ears before deciding on your final settings.

 

When you’re done with the audiologist and the Tuning EQ box, the molds and your eq settings are sent to Ultimate Ears in Irvine, California. A couple of weeks later the PRMs will be delivered to your door in a dandy little metal box with your name on it. The PRMs come with a plug-in, user-replaceable, 48″-long braided cable terminated with a 1/8″ headphone jack (an optional 60″ cable is available for an extra $30). You also get instructions on how to insert the PRMs into and remove them from your ears. If you’re used to those painfully ill-fitting generic earbuds that Apple supplies with its iPhones (or to heavy headphones, for that matter), you won’t believe the perfect fit, nearly air-tight seal, and feather weight of these designed-for-you numbers. Ergonomically, this is high fidelity at its most portable and precise. Just plug the PRMs into an iPhone, or a dedicated server/amp/DAC like an Astell&Kern, or a portable high-end amp/DAC like a Chord Hugo (connected via USB-to-Lightning to an iPhone/server), and you can easily carry your music all over the world.

What does a finished pair of PRMs sound like once eq has been painstakingly dialed-in? Well, rather like a pair of $220k Raidho D-5s, with closer-to-equal output in either channel (giving spotlit voices and instruments a dead-center fixity, focus, and solidity), every bit as much inner detail, less emphasis and physical impact in the low bass and midbass (rather more like sealed-box bass than Raidho’s ported bass), and, of course, less room sound (including room boom, but also less room-augmented breadth and depth).

Indeed, on something like the “Drinking Song of the Earth” from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (in the superb 2011 EMI remastering of the Klemperer/Philharmonia/New Philharmonia recording with Fritz Wunderlich and Christa Ludwig), the very first thing that struck me—beyond hearing the entire soundstage inside my head, stretching from the plane of my ears to the back of my skull and from just outside one ear to just outside the other—was the absence of the usual sound of my room. What I was hearing instead was the famously glorious ambience of Kingsway Hall in February and November 1964 (on the Philharmonia segments) and of Abbey Road Studio 1 in July 1966 (on the New Philharmonia ones).

Even to an old hand like me, the purity of hearing instruments in the actual acoustic of the hall, rather than that acoustic as “interpreted” by my room, was startling—and revealing. I’m not sure that the always gorgeous Philharmonia and New Philharmonia strings, wind, and brass have ever shone forth more beautifully than they did through the PRMs.

Yes, psychoacoustically, this was an entirely different kind of listening experience—greatly reduced in size and scale from what I’m used to via loudspeakers, with an entirely different “inside your head” rather than “outside your head” perspective. And yet the PRM’s presentation was so transparent, so finely detailed, so beautiful in timbre, and in its own way so effortlessly powerful in dynamics that nothing of the performance was lost. In fact, because of the PRM’s superior transparency, purity, timbre, and dynamics, much was there to be found. Little details of instrumentation and articulation, such as the touches of orientalism in Wunderlich’s delivery, were laid bare; at the same time, the big picture—the staggeringly expressive effect of Klemperer’s slower tempi and of the Philharmonia/New Philharmonia’s superb ensemble and sensitive solo playing, for examples—was also clarified. That this is a great performance has always been acknowledged; that this is, without schmaltz or melodramatics, a greatly heartfelt one, too, has seldom before been made more apparent, at least to this listener. This closer connection to the artistry, the music, and the performance is what a top-flight hi-fi can give you—even one you can slip in your pocket.

I could go through dozens of examples of different kinds of music, all illustrating the same point: The PRM is a superb high-fidelity transducer that, thanks to its perfect fit and unique voicing (designed for and by me—and me alone), pleases my ears more completely and enjoyably than any other in-ear I’ve tried. There is a reason, folks, why so many performers use these things on stage and in studios. The PRMs let them hear themselves the way they want to be heard.

Do I recommend the Ultimate Ears Personal Reference Monitors? Hell, yes.

SPECS & PRICING

Input sensitivity: 107dB@1kHz/1mW
Frequency response: 5Hz–22kHz
Noise isolation: -26 decibels of ambient stage noise
Impedance: 31 ohms@1kHz
Internal speaker configuration: 6 balanced armatures and 4 passive crossovers
Input connector: 1/8″ headphone jack, compatible with all systems
Price: $1999

ULTIMATE EARS PRO
3 Jenner Street, Suite 180
Irvine, CA 92618
(800) 589-6531
customsales@ultimateears.com

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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