 Etymotic
Research ER-4P Headphones
In Edward Tanner's 1997 book Why Things Bite
Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Tanner proposes that
solutions cause problems. Well, not exactly. What he really reports is that
solutions to obvious problems frequently cause unforeseen consequences that may actually
create bigger crises than the ones they are designed to "fix." A classic example
is the way air-conditioned subway cars raise the platform temperatures by as much as 10
degrees, or how severe bone and muscle injuries have increased since the adoption
of armor-like football protective gear.
However, unintentional consequences don't have to be
negative. While many audiophiles have determined that MP3s and portable players like the
iPod are the work of the devil, they also represent a tremendous opportunity: every one of
those iPods is going to require a pair of headphones.
Oh sure, those cute little players all come with a
pair of earbuds, but even the best of them sound so bad that they represent an opportunity
to introduce people to real high fidelity. Wouldn't it be ironic if the scorned MP3
caused a hi-fi renaissance, hipping "ordinary" listeners to the simple fact that
they can hear a difference -- and that it matters to them?
If that does take place, the headphones that people will
aspire to very well may be the Etymotic ER-4Ps. They ain't cheap at $330 USD
($250/street), but neither is a good MP3 player -- and I'd cheap out on a player before I
gave up my ER-4Ps.
I've been addicted to Etymotic's headphones for going on a
decade, having first fallen in love with the company's flagship ER-4S, and later
succumbing to the siren spell of its more affordable sibling the ER-6. Both are excellent products, but the ER-4P
manages to combine the extreme fidelity of the hard-to-drive ER-4S with the
portable-friendly impedance of the ER-6.
Now that's a combination to reckon with.
Truth or consequences
Etymotic Research really does research -- into
audiometric design, actually. Mead Killion, the company's guiding light, has been active
in the design and construction of earphones and hearing aids since 1983. Killion has been
issued more than 18 different patents for headphone and hearing-aid advances, and has been
credited by more than one industry source as having revolutionized hearing-aid design.
Etymotic Research also developed technologies that have been employed by the military in a
variety of personal communications devices. Recently, they've begun producing in-ear
accessories for cellular phone use as well.
What is most obviously different about Etymotic's
in-the-ear-canal design is that the transducers don't rest in the outer ear -- like
earbuds -- but get inserted firmly into the canal itself. And when I say firmly, I mean shoved
in there, creating an airtight seal. This may very well be a make-or-break proposition for
most listeners. Over the years, I have come to welcome this sensation, but I've met many
people who are just creeped-out by it.
Get over that "stick it in your ear" queasiness,
however, and you'll notice two things: a drastic reduction in external noise (about 23dB)
and dynamic sound with overtones of warmth and fullness almost never associated with
portable listening -- at least not without some form of amplification.
And that's the big difference between the ER-4Ps and the
ER-4Ses: the 4Ps have greater sensitivity (9dB greater output for a 1mV signal), which has
an (ahem) intended consequence of equalizing the frequency response to produce
better bass from the typically wimpy output of a portable player.
In other words, the ER-4S remains the king of the hill for
in-the-ear listening to a no-holds-barred hi-fi system (and that includes portables
driving headphone amplifiers), but for no-muss, no-fuss music on the run, the ER-4P is
your go-to guy.
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools
But let's slow down for a minute and examine the ER-4P.
Superficially, it resembles all those disposable earbuds out there, but the Etymotics are not
your typical $10 throwaways. The 4Ps consist of a molded right-angle 1/8" minijack
attached to 42" of hefty 3/16" wire, which separates to two 14" flexible
twisted-pair cables at a rugged barrel break-out (which also serves as the attachment
point for the Etymotic-supplied clothing clip). The flexible leads are terminated by
molded two-pin connectors (one red, one blue), which, in turn, attach to a stepped
7/8" cylinder, which contains the miniscule transducer and a screened protective
filter. Slip-on "eartips" are supplied to create a tight in-canal seal between
the transducer housing and, um, you.
This seal is essential if you want to hear what the ER-4Ps
can really do. If you don't get the transducers firmly seated within the ear canal, you'll
hear tinny, bass-shy squawking. Etymotic Research supplies two types of eartip -- simple
foam cylinders and triple-flanged cones made of silicon rubber. I find the foam cylinders
uncomfortable, preferring the tighter seal and greater ambient noise reduction of the
flanged cones, but I know folks who have the reverse reaction.
The process of getting a truly good seal has been likened
to "wrestling with your own head" -- you pull on your earlobe with one hand
while inserting the eartip into the ear canal with the other. With practice, you can do
this quickly enough to avoid people pointing at you and laughing; with enough practice,
you can do it one-handed.
It's always possible that your ears have odd-sized canals.
If you can't achieve a proper seal any other way, you can order custom earmolds from a
hearing-aid specialist. That's an expensive option, but I know a few folks who have done
this and they all rave about the results.
The Etymotic ER-4Ps come in a molded plastic case that
contains several essential accessories in addition to the eartips. These extras aren't
audio jewelry designed to make you feel as though you're getting your money's worth,
they're essential tools you'd better keep close at hand.
The most obvious is a small carrying case. Use it -- the
ER-4Ps are rugged, but they'll last a lot longer if you don't put unnecessary strain on
the cables by tightly wrapping them around the player and throwing them into your gym bag
to rub up against your running shoes. Treat the 4Ps like the reference-quality transducers
they are.
That "shirt" clip is slightly less obvious, but
no less essential to the 4P's performance. Attaching the cable to your shirt keeps its
weight from pulling on the earpieces, but that's not its real purpose, which is
cable-dress -- a term that may be unfamiliar to those of you unaccustomed to turntable set
up.
When assembling a sprung-chassis turntable, such as a Linn
LP-12, for example, you have to pay attention to the way the tonearm cable is
"dressed" between the tonearm and the plinth. If it just hangs down (or is
stretched tight), the cable can transmit environmental vibration to the arm, where it can
be picked up by the cartridge and pollute the sound of the disc itself. Achieving the
right amount of slack (the right amount of "spring," actually) is considered an
arcane art among set-up gurus -- and it's an essential skill in getting the most out of
the ER-4Ps. Attach the shirt clip high enough on your torso that there's a slight bow in
the flexible twisted-pair cable and you'll eliminate about 80% of all microphony caused by
the cable itself.
Before leaving the whole cable subject, that little bit of
wire is another difference between the ER-4P and the ER-4S. The 4S's less-than-pliant
cable was the cause of major microphony and many complaints -- including mine. You may
have to pay more attention to the subject of cable dress with the 4P than with the average
earbud, but the 4P's flexible dielectric has produced a noticeable improvement over the
original 4S, at least in terms of using the phones on the go. If you only listen while
sitting very, very still, this may not seem like too big a deal, but if you fidget or
boogie when exposed to music, it's a very good thing.
The other "extras" included with the ER-4Ps are
Etymotic's "green filters," a filter changing tool, and a 1/8"-to-1/4"
adaptor. The green filters are tiny little wire-screened hollow cylinders (smaller than
half a grain of rice) which fit into the transducer housing, protecting the transducers
from earwax and other detritus and providing some finely calculated EQ (think of them as
speaker grilles for your ears).
If it's the business of consequence, do it yourself!
Etymotic says it didn't make any mechanical changes in the
4S to produce the 4P. Instead, "slightly" modifying the frequency response
(introducing "a gradual reduction of the mid-high frequencies") made the 4P's
bass response seem slightly elevated. Etymotic Research publishes measurements for the two
models, which highlight their differences in diffuse-field-referenced eardrum-pressure
response, if that's the sort of thing that turns you on.
What are the sonic differences? Warmth, mostly.
Mostly? Well, assuming you can even drive the 4S
with a portable in order to make the comparison in the first place. The 4S represents a
100-ohm load, while the 4P is a mere 27 ohms. What does that really mean? In
measurable terms, that results in nearly 10dB of gain (although gain is frequency
dependent and hard to quantify across the spectrum). In listening terms, the 4P is nearly
twice as dynamic -- and one heck of a lot warmer.
Now please notice that I'm emphasizing the differences
between the two models when used with a portable, which, after all, is what the 4P
is designed for. Etymotic says the P stands for power, but I know better: it stands
for portable. (I recently received word from Etymotic that the engineers have
finally convinced the marketing department that P should have meant portable all along, so
that's what they're now telling people.) If you've got power -- if you're listening at
home with a hefty headphone amplifier, say -- you probably want the increased clarity and
uncompromised bass slam of the 4S, but if you want to travel as light as possible (and
what jogger, or even commuter, doesn't?), the 4P is what you're seeking.
I'm a big fan of the clarity and precision of the ER-4Ses,
but they can sound chilly and a tad tipped-up -- or, on less-than-ideal source material, very
etched and shrieky. When the transducer is shoved all the way down your ear canal within a
fraction of an inch from your eardrum (and, let's not forget, sealing out 20dB of ambient
noise), this can be waay too much of what, under more ideal circumstances, would
normally be considered a good thing.
Take the aggressive bite of Michael Mantler's trumpet on
the 1982 Ballad of the Fallen [ECM 811516-2] by Charlie Haden and Carla Bley, for
example. The 4S (again, driving a portable, such as my 30GB iPod) presents this
with too much edge -- not quite an icepick to the ears, but painfully close. The 4P blunts
the bleeding edge of Mantler's attack, leaving it sharp and properly blatty, but not too
much so.
There's an overall roundness of tone to the disc's big
brass choirs, which is all to the good, of course, but Haden's acoustic bass also steps
about ten paces further forward in the mix -- which seems quite apt since it is his
disc, after all.
Trying the same comparison using my HeadRoom Max headphone
amplifier driven by the Classé CDP-10, I could hear that the 4P actually appears to boost
the lower midbass rather than the deep bass. While this was noticeable with the
Classé/HeadRoom combo, my perception with an unaugmented portable was that there was more
low end overall. Since Ballad of the Fallen has a bright tonal balance in the first
place, I still preferred the midrange to HF presentation of the 4P, even with the Max.
What if you want the best of both worlds -- what if you
want to listen at home and take it to the streets? Etymotic offers a conversion
cable for $65 that, the company says, changes the 4P into a 4S. I haven't tried it, but if
you need it, it's out there.
The applause of a single human being is of great
consequence
Let us not get bogged down in comparing the ER-4S with the
4P. They're different, but not as drastically different as the Etymotics are to pretty
much everything else out there. Etymotic also makes a less-expensive headphone, the ER-6,
which is waay recommended, but doesn't offer either the bass or the detail of the
ER-4 of either persuasion.
What the ER-4P has going for it is balance. If you want to
walk (or jog) around, experiencing the sort of feed-your-head aural envelopment that you
get from the big home-based headphone rigs like the Sennheiser HD 600s, the 4Ps are the
only rig I know of that will get you close.
If you've only experienced an iPod playing compressed files
through a cheap set of disposable 'buds," you have no idea what I'm talking about.
But set the player to a high-rez bit-rate and plug in a pair of 4Ps and you'll start to
think like an audio geek.
I certainly did -- listening to the vast washes of cymbal
sound Elvin Jones generates on Africa Brass [Impulse Import 9008], I began to
imagine I could hear Jones choosing the precise position to strike, stroke, or strum each
Zildjian. I engage in that kind of audiophilism at home all the time, but I seldom do it
while blissing-out on an elliptical trainer.
My recent flight to and from Vegas for the Consumer
Electronics Show was made immensely simpler by the ER-4Ps. In years past, I've taken a bag
filled with CD player, HeadRoom amp, extra battery packs, and a stack of CDs -- this year,
I just slipped an iPod and a pair of 4Ps into my jacket pocket.
But I didn't sacrifice my musical enjoyment just to travel
light. The 4Ps cut the jet noise down to a mild thrum, allowing me to lose myself in David
Russell's Music of Giuliani [Telarc CD-80525 CD]. A solo guitar recording!
On an airplane!
It wasn't just the noise reduction offered by the Etymotics
that allowed me to inhabit Giuliani's crystalline clarity -- it was the full-bodied
presentation of Russell's vivid tone, the ER-4P's ability to capture both the percussive
attack and the slow decay of his instrument's overtones. This is real hi-fi, not just a
pale reflection of it.
There are neither rewards nor punishments -- there are
consequences
The Etymotic ER-4P is exactly what the high-end road
warrior needs. It is designed to work with the reduced output and rolled-off bass
of portable players, enhancing them rather than simply coexisting with them.
Is it unique in this? I can't say for certain. Shure has
been getting a lot of buzz lately with its in-canal headphones, but I have yet to
hear them.
If you're staying at home, you have lots of choices,
including the ER-4Ses, Sennheiser's 600-series phones, and AKG's justly acclaimed K 1000s,
but of the 'phones I have heard that are designed to be taken out and about, nothing else
comes close to the ER-4Ps.
And that's almost certainly not unintentional.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
Etymotic Research ER-4P
Earphones
Price: $330 USD.
Warranty: 90 days parts and labor.
Etymotic Research, Inc.
61 Martin Lane
Elk Grove Village, IL 60007
Phone: (847) 228-0006
Website: www.etymotic.com
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