Grell OAE2 open over-ear test: Why these headphones tick differently and therefore sound better | News

A natural, spatial sound experience with headphones is difficult to achieve. If you don’t want to create a spatial sound illusion with massive computing power, you have to resort to other means. Just like Grell Audio with the exceptional OAE2. REWIND reveals what’s behind it and what it sounds like.

There is a lot of crowd in the upper headphone price range around 500 euros. There are mostly better Bluetooth over-ear headphones from renowned brands such as B&W, Focal or the new Apple AirPods Max 2. But passive, wired headphones for high sound standards are also well represented in this price range, because it seems to represent a kind of sound barrier. Of course, there are much more expensive headphones, but if a manufacturer wants to sell relatively large quantities, they shouldn’t charge much more than the aforementioned 500 euros.

Perhaps this is also how Grell Audio calculated when developing the OAE2, because it is well below this limit. But these are very special headphones that only look conventional at first glance, but technically they consistently develop an older approach and take it to a new level.

By the way, there is no stranger behind this. The namesake and developer Axel Grell is well known in the headphone scene. Not only is he distinguished for the development of such well-known and successful top headphones as the Sennheiser HD800, but numerous other headphones from renowned manufacturers have also grown from his muck. Grell’s consulting work includes Neumann (NDH30), Adam Audio (H200) and others. If anyone knows anything about headphones, it’s him.

What makes the OAE2 so special
First of all, the most important basic properties of the OAE2. These are purely passive, wired headband headphones with over-ear housings in an open design and with dynamic drivers (40 mm diameter). It can be operated symmetrically or unbalanced on almost any of today’s common headphone outputs or special headphone amplifiers, which is thanks to its good-natured electrical parameters: 38 ohm impedance with a sensitivity of 100 dB make it a very good-natured and easy-to-drive headphone. Its comfort zone is definitely stationary operation, but technically there is nothing against using mobile players or dongle DACs with smartphones.

What initially looks like run-of-the-mill construction methods takes a completely different approach in crucial areas. Namely in the driver arrangement and their acoustic integration into the housing. If you take a look into the hearing capsules, you will find this unusual view:

Huh? Was the fitter bumped into something while working and accidentally screwed the drivers into the wrong place? Of course not. The position at the very front of the housing is something like the consistent use of an old trick with which one tries to achieve something like front-positioning by tilting the drivers, which is difficult to achieve with headphones. Everyone knows the feeling when listening to headphones that the music seems to be in the middle of their head.

The reason for this is the way our hearing works. The outer ear (our strangely shaped listening lobes) and the head itself play an important role in spatial acoustic perception. Our brain determines the direction through differences in transit time and the filter-like effect of sound passing through the outer ear. That’s why the definition for the outer ear is “direction-selective filter for localizing sound sources in the median plane”.

So far, some headphone manufacturers have tried to trick the ear into thinking that the sound is coming from the front by installing the drivers at an angle. But only with moderate success, because the drivers are still very close and usually arranged directly above the ear canal. There are also other factors that play a role in exact location, which cannot be easily eliminated with this trick.