Solo UL noise cut ten-fold!

Since the launch of the Solo Ultra-Linear nearly two and a half years ago, the popularity of ultra-high sensitivity headphones has soared.

The Ultra-Linear was purposely designed to cater for the difficult headphones of 3 or more years ago, and has done a really good job of it, but 3 years is a long time compared with the rate of "progress".

Although numbers of members here are quite happy with the existing Solo Ultra-Linear noise floor, some of the younger generation with a hankering after ultra sensitivity headphones have put together their more sensitive hearing with even more sensitivity from the earpieces, and obviously can hear a whisper level hiss. What they really want is a completely dead background.

I may bemoan such trends but I nevertheless have to grasp the problem and come up with the solution. So, I've been working on ways to reduce noise from the UL's considerably low 78dB output noise.

It's no good reducing noise and not doing the same for the distortion. Noise masks distortion and I reckon if people can hear hiss at something like -78dB then it could be possible they'd hear distortion at 0.015% (typical for a Solo Ultra-Linear) because that's -76dB at the outputs.

What I've managed to do without doing away with the Ultra-Linear technology is get the noise down 10 times lower at -98dB and distortion down to 0.0072% (typical) which is -83dB THD+N.

Now, should we add yet another Solo to the range?

I think not. The lower noise UL has all the sonic hallmarks of the existing one, so I reckon we simply move over to the revised edition.

But what about the Solo SRGII. It sold to those who didn't want to compromise noise performance. With an ultra-low noise Solo Ultra-Linear, the SRGII would seem superfluous?

hotmog wrote: I don't see why that should make the Solo SRGII superfluous, though, any more than it will the Novo. You cannot simply have a "flagship" model on its own, without others in a range by which to define it as such. They all have their own sound signatures and occupy different pricing-points, so each has its place in appealing to people with differing budgets and feature needs accordingly.

Thank you for your words of wisdom

Given the rather sizeable userbase of those "hard to drive" cans, one assumes that the ability to drive them is not lessened by the further noise reduction development.

I do tend to agree WRT continuing the availability of the SRG II, much as the EGV continues, for those who prefer that signature.

tg wrote: Given the rather sizeable userbase of those "hard to drive" cans, one assumes that the ability to drive them is not lessened by the further noise reduction development.

Good question. I don't have every headphone on the market but I do have a selection of 10 headphones to hand...

300 Ohm units:
HD800
HD600
HD650 (out on loan)
HD250 (now two pairs)
Canford DMH285

32 Ohm units:
PMX200
SR60 (pre-i)
ATH A900

64 Ohm units:
ATH A700
K701

...out of which, the SR60 is proving to be the hardest to coax a performance out of right now.