Sound Summary
The Horizon is a warmish-neutral headphone with a peculiar mid-bass roll-off, followed by a cleanly dissolving sub-bass floor.
Starting with the midrange, there is a conservative rise in the lower-midrange that isn’t heavy-handed, resulting in a smoother, inoffensive timbre that’s quite addictive. Voicings and instrumentation feature a gentle attack and accentuated decay. This is a typical dynamic driver affair.
But the Horizon can’t be described as dark because of its significant recession in the lower-end. When people listen to darker headphones with a mellower timbre, they anticipate some form of bass bloom, punch, or chest-shaking rumble. Bizarrely, the Horizon subverts those expectations. What we’re left with is a warmish neutrality that’s not quite bright, but not quite dark.
There seems to be a similar trend in the treble region, sounding slightly dulled and veiled from an upper-treble taper. The conservative amount of lower-treble, again, sabotages its perceived layering chops, with weaker technicalities from a lack of contrasting brightness and sparkle.
We’ll dive into these eccentricities in the next few sections.
Bass
The strangest quirk on the Horizon has to be its truncated low-end. If you’re expecting bass aplomb, look elsewhere, for this is the wrong tree to bark up. The Horizon’s sub-bass is deeply rolled off octaves below the mid-bass. There’s no tangible or tactile slam or weight. The pluck of the stand-up bass still retains its core character, but it lacks its signature reverb and draggy character. Bass timbre is rather lifeless. It’s there, but it isn’t quite correct.
Bass drums are hollow, mostly focused on the mid-bass for fast-dissipating landing, with no real excitement or macrodynamic impact. For a dynamic driver headphone, this is a slightly disappointing characteristic of the Horizon. However, the bass retains a clean definition in the mid-bass, which is less recessed than the lower-bass regions. Sadly, it still lacks the characteristic bounce from abrupt changes in amplitude.
The lack of physicality to the bass is rather odd concerning the rest of the frequency response, which will soon be explored.
Midrange
The Horizon’s midrange is arguably the focal point of the Horizon’s tuning, with a fundamentally lower-mid dominant slope, adding a warmish tint to the entire midrange. The result is a relaxed, unfatiguing but fairly clear midrange front with gently contoured notes for an inoffensive but clarity-driven listen. This translates into a comfortable headphone that’s appropriate for long listening sessions.
Voicings sound like they are being played back on a turntable, modestly uplifting the even-harmonic tones that permeate old recordings with audible distortion. Its midrange is slightly sweet, slightly forward. A jack of all trades. In terms of layering, discernability between voicings and instrumentation is decent but not great. Cues begin to gel together with a poorly defined image in complex stanzas of music with violent crescendos.
This begs the question: why the bass-roll off? Yes, open-backs suffer from the lack of chambered bass, where everything is enclosed in a sealed space. But it’s demonstrated lack subverts the natural expectation of dark headphones that there should be bass.
Treble
The Horizon’s treble is a dark affair. The good news is that (to my ears), there is a peak or slope near 5 – 6kHz for some added spice or energy. This helps to uplift an already lower-midrange dominant headphone. Sadly, there’s virtually no perceived sense of air, porousity, or spatiality from the dearth of upper-treble, nor is there enough lower-treble zest for added contrast.
This greatly delimits the pseudo-perception of the Horizon’s speed and technical performance. The unique metallic character and abrasiveness of saxophones sound muddy, lacking their nasally timbre. Synth stabs sound blunted, with too slow a PRAT to sound satisfyingly assertive.
The entire image starts to sound cloistered together. Strangely, as odd as this tuning is, it does sound relatively ‘correct’ vis-à-vis an equally rolled-off lower-end. This presentation is understandable as a whole, but that doesn’t leave us with an exciting or toe-tapping presentation.
But given that the brilliance region represents the core of listeners’ ‘wow factors’, the Horizon’s aversion to airiness makes the headphone sound ‘darker’, but again, it’s still not quite correct to describe the Horizon as dark per se.
Soundstage and imaging
The Horizon’s open-back nature naturally allows more sound to radiate outward relative to the ear as a reference point. Everything sounds naturally more ‘open’, with commendable L-R lateral width. Z-axis width with swings and pans between both channels is apparent.
However, its ability to layer instruments with precision, with their distinctive timbres intact, is hamstrung by a blunted treble. The lack of airiness results in a colder presentation that can be best described as intimate and slightly boxed-inward, with a collapsed centre-image.
Turn to the next page for Synergy, A Brief Comparison, and Conclusive Remarks
