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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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Home Listening Speaking of the really good sound, this is where the Siberias really strut their stuff. I dug out my old 1/8” to 1/4” adapter and plugged these bad boys into my reference system. Most listening was done from the variable outputs of my CD player, the amazing Sony CDP-XA20ES. If you’ve never seen one of these boxes, you are really missing out. Probably one of the most unique CD players ever designed, it actually uses a fixed pick-up mechanism and moves the disc in the transport. Anyhow, with the Siberias hooked up to this, I was one step closer to audio nirvana. First came my standard “can you rock, then?” test which is basically listening to “Into the Void” from Nine Inch Nails’ somewhat recent album, “The Fragile”. Now, this is not the best music in the world, but this track is hideously well-recorded and about a minute into the track, you should be getting donkey-kicked all over the place… and loving every last blow. The Siberias have the tight drum-synth interplay just right and revealed all of the depths of this multi-layered recording quite respectably. Not quite up to par with my reference system, but it also costs a lot less (a whole lot less, like $10k type of less). I could be happy listening to these; actually, I was happy almost all of the time I was listening to these, but…
This is the hated volume control that causes a dramatic decrease in audio quality. I’ve got to air my first (and likely only) gripe about these cans right now. And it’s really not even about the cans so much as one of the design decisions Icemat made with the interconnects. Remember, we have a one meter captive cable and a two meter-ish detachable cable with an inline volume control. There’s the problem; that infernal volume control. The thing looks nice, but it does not sound nice. I noticed a marked difference between the sole use of the captive cable and having that cheap rheostat (almost certainly the way that volume pot works, I never actually disassembled the Siberias, but trust me on this one). Think of it like this, you have the music, Miles Davis, or whoever, rocking right in front of your face, then you take this fur-lined bag and put it over your head (making sure to punch some airholes in it first). That’s what adding the extension interconnect reminded me of. Which would not be so bad if the captive cord was a little longer (three feet ain’t much, kids), or if the inline volume control was not actually built into the extension cable, but it is. And happy about that I ain’t. I guess the one plus of this is that it’s handy to have in-line volume control and you never really notice it when listening to lower-fidelity sources, which brings me to: Computer Listening The set-up here is my black Tsunami encased beauty which somewhat proudly cradles a Creative Audigy 2 ZS card. Not the last word in high-end sound, but better than the on-board stuff I had before. What I tested here was how the phones could resolve effects from games, mostly. I fired up some Half-Life 2, some San Andreas, and some Fable: The Lost Chapters. The sound on these games is as different as can be from one another, as well as the music I was using in the other tests. The Siberias still sounded great. No muddiness, pretty darned precise localization of the sounds in things like CS (and that’s important, you know), no breaking up on heavy explosion effects, lotsa goodness, really. And boy does that almost-three meter long cable come in handy here, no crouching over your box to keep your phones plugged in here. And that inline volume control was handy when things got a tad too loud.
You can see the plastic clip where the mic cable attaches. Quite handy actually. What it all Means Well, if you’ve made it this far, I congratulate you. Now I’ll tell you what I really think of the Siberias. They are excellent and that’s basically all I have to say. They are comfortable, have some unique styling (I walked over to Ace’s Hardware a few days back and the guy working the counter said something to the effect of “What the hell are those? Oh, headphones, cool.”), sound excellent on most any material you throw their way, and almost best of all they are a darned good deal. Consumers would normally need to spend a lot more than this to get a package this good. The only real gripes I have involve the interconnects, and a simple change like making the inline volume control removable would fix this issue STAT. But mostly, they just sound good and at an MSRP of only $80 bucks, that’s saying a lot. In fact, I liked them so much, they’re my new reference cans. What more needs to be said? An Aside to Present an Arguably Useful Equation that may be helpful in Evaluating these Cans I know these subjective evaluations throw some people, so here’s some math for all you scientist-types out there. The format is like this: numerical values have been randomly assigned, the equation has been entirely invented by my war-torn mind, and the algebra may or may not be correct. You decide: [S Pluses] (-) {S Minuses} = A number, where high is good, and low is bad Example problem for earbuds provided with the MuVo: [Small] – {sound like garbage + ugly + weird off-center cords} = 24 Another example for some Sony cans I used to use: [Black + Nice long interconnect cord] – {On-the-ear discomfort + So-so sound + Cheap build quality} = 216 Non-example evaluation of the Siberias: [Comfortable + Sound great + Versatile + Unique style + Well-made] – {Weird interconnect length decisions + crappy inline volume control} = about 642 So, as you can plainly see, the numbers do not lie and these are good, you should buy some.
Overall Score: 90%
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