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Icemat Audio Siberia Review |
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An Audio Whiteout! |
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by Ryan Rayda |
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Also included in the package is a fancy little microphone that clips onto the interconnect cable by where your mouth should theoretically be. The cable for the mic is, in keeping with the Siberia’s theme, white and capped with a standard 1/8” gold-plated stereo plug. It has some handy guides that clip on to both the interconnect and mic cables thereby keeping your desk both tidy and neat. The mic is a pretty little thing with a perforated metal grille and a nice Icemat Audio silkscreen logo on the white plastic body. In my brief checking of the mic, I found it was fairly low gain, but nothing a little software tweaking on the PC couldn’t fix. That’s pretty much all I have to say about the form-factor type of stuff for these cans, overall a nice package. I will tell you now I was impressed just looking at these things, but then came the listening, and…… Listening Before I get into the sound of these cans I’d better tell you just how I went about testing them. I figured there would be three realworld situations in which the Siberias would be used on a regular basis: portable listening, home listening, and computer listening. My controls in this abominable experiment were my main music system and a few other sets of cans I have around the house. I tested the Siberias fairly thoroughly in each situation and was basically impressed with them under every circumstance. Read on to find out exactly what I mean. Portable Listening The set-up: Icemat Audio Siberias using mostly only the captive interconnect cable and a rotation of an Apple iPod photo 4G and a Creative Nomad Zen MuVo TX. I spent most of my time with the iPod because the Siberias look so darn sexy with it, but I wanted to see how another offering agreed with the cans, so I threw in the Creative player. And boy, did they ever agree.
Did we mention that there was ample cable with this set? I started by cooking up a playlist aptly named “hi-fi” in iTunes and syncing it to my iPod. I mirrored most of that playlist on the Zen (it is only a 256MB player, so I really only used select tracks). All of the portable music I used to evaluate the Siberias was in mp3 format and ripped at 44.1kHz/192kbps by myself using a combination of iTunes and Poikosoft’s Easy CD-D/A extractor. I pretty much use 192kbps exclusively anymore because I find it to be the best trade-off between file size and sound quality. I have dabbled in AAC and hi-bitrate VBR mp3s with somewhat better results in the fidelity department but astronomically higher file sizes. For the remainder of this section I will forgo mentioning encoding artifacts I could hear and just concentrate on the quality of the phones. So just remember, the evaluation material here is not of the highest quality, but the source material is beyond reproach. For example: Dead Can Dance’s seminal live recording, “Toward the Within,” sounded downright mind-blowing on these cans. “I am Stretched on your Grave” is one of my favorite demo pieces because of the amazing sense of space and depth it conveys. The drums on this track, which will rumble you to your very soul, came through swimmingly on these cans, albeit with none of the visceral impact afforded by my main system. And that was no fault of the Siberias, you just can’t expect the physiological effects from cans like you can a normal open-air system. What I can say though, is the emotional impact was all there, and it was great. Some of my other notes: on the Nuclear Whales’ “Fanfare for the Common Man” (you know, the Olympics song; which, by the way, I once heard played as our country’s national anthem at the fairgrounds here in Laramie to a bewildered crowd, all the way through, because the announcer said “I couldn’t stop it, it was just such good music”) the drums were just so right, so excellent, that I couldn’t stop it either. The ‘Whales are a saxophone orchestra that basically just rocks you with every saxophone known to man and a smoking percussion section, and boy, are they good. They record live direct to two tracks, so what you hear is what you get, and they just wail. Suffice to say the Siberias did them justice. There is a song on this albumc (Thar They Blow is the album title, if you think you need to pick up a copy… and you do, trust me) called “The Casbah Shuffle” that is just so perfect and so well-performed that it literally makes me cry when played on a good system. The horns are just singing, the tablahs are slapping away, and the overall effect remains something of a mystery to me. The Siberias did not make me get all bleary-eyed, but they were close, and that’s saying quite a bit for an $80 set of cans and an mp3 player.
This isn't Ryan's child, but it shows exactly how adaptable these headpones are. Tai is 3 years old and the phones fit him fine. Ryan is 6'3" and is a large fellow, and the phones fit him fine as well. There is not much difference between the mp3 players while I think of it. The iPod seemed to be a little better matched to the Siberias than the MuVo, I could listen comfortably at about ½ volume outside or in and it just seemed right. I can’t help but think that somehow these cans were designed for use with an iPod specifically, what with the white-on-white design and their obvious affinity for the thing. Speaking of outside listening brings me to one of the love-it-or-leave-it features of the Siberias: their open design. For those of you not hip to can lingo, there are basically two separate schools of design for phones: open and sealed. Open designs actually are open to the outside world between the drivers and the muffs, which does let noise in but often make the cans sound more airy and open. Sealed cans do not let anything get in the muffs other than the drivers, but can lend the phones to sounding a little stuffy at the benefit of working better in noisy environments and giving that last iota of bass punch. I walked all over town in these cans, in the famous Wyoming wind, and never once did I wish they were of a sealed design. Sure, every now and then a loud diesel rolled by or the wind nearly deafened me with its whistling, but for the most part the Siberias made me feel enveloped in sound. And good sound. Surprisingly good sound.
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Copyright 1999-2005 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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