I am fully immersed in the tones of Jonathan Wilson’s stereo guitars on “Desert Raven,” practically able to hear the pick on each jangly strum. The stereo image is as wide as you can possibly expect from a pair of closed-back headphones. It’s still leaning out to each side more than fully spreading out into space like it might with speakers or open-backed headphones, but the gorgeous tonality of the reproduction never makes anything feel smaller than it should.
The ability to fully recreate the entire soundstage in warm and exacting detail is like a French chef making something simple with only the finest ingredients. These headphones don’t add a hi-fi Instagram-filter tonality to your favorite music; instead, they act like a beautiful Leica lens. Old favorites simply sound better when played through these headphones, especially in DAC mode.
Photograph: Parker Hall
Plugging into your laptop via USB-C and using DAC mode essentially lets you use these headphones as their own digital audio decoder—better than Bluetooth, and in the vast majority of cases better than using your laptop or tablet’s built-in 3.5-mm port, if the device even has one. By plugging straight into USB, you can enjoy full digital fidelity the likes of which you won’t get wirelessly, and it makes these a real treat to take with you for wired listening on the go.
Instead of having to bring a dedicated headphone amp like the Astell & Kern HC4 ($220), you can just bring these and a USB-C cable. The dongles I usually bring aren’t large, but I’ll take one less thing in my travel kit.
I loved cueing up old favorites like The Commodores’ “Easy,” to hear the difference between DAC mode and wireless listening. It’s particularly noticeable in the high end, where the hi-hats and cymbals just seem to shimmer a bit more when listening with the USB-C cable. That said, wireless playback is shockingly on par, which is telling to folks who continue to pooh-pooh any form of Bluetooth listening at the high end. I was able to deeply enjoy music both wired and wirelessly on the Bathys MG.
As a do-it-all audio accessory, you can think of this pair as something like Bentley or Rolls-Royce class, rather than a Ferrari. Sure, they’re not as sharp, shiny, or perfect as more premium wired models for true analog nerds (which Focal also makes), but this pair is the type that you really want to drive daily. They’re comfortable, and they sound good enough that you can truly forget the mess that is the world around you for at least a song or two. Isn’t that what money is for?
