Introduction

Known as MrSpeakers until 2019, Dan Clark founded the eponymous Dan Clark Audio (DCA) brand in 2012. Dan has been in the audio business for a few decades now and we first got a taste of the brand’s work in the form of the Drop + DCA Aeon Closed X—a set of closed-back planar magnetic headphones which bucked the trend of poorly tuned such offerings in the market and presented a good entry point to the use of dampening materials in headphones. Dan Clark and his team have been working on this concept for a while now and we saw how it all came together in the electrostatic headphones world with the exceptional CORINA that continues to be a set I listen to more than most others here. The CORINA is just one of three sets using Dan’s patented Acoustic Metamaterial Tuning System (AMTS) which was introduced with the STEALTH.

Today we examine the Dan Clark Audio STEALTH in detail. This is a flagship closed-back set which builds upon all the learnings from the Aeon line and aims to put out a product which sounds as if you were listening to two well-tuned speakers in a treated room. On top of that, the STEALTH has already been acknowledged as one of the most comfortable headphones on the market. A quick look at the photo above shows it is still shaped like the Aeon Closed-X with D-shaped ear cups that aim to follow the natural shape of human ears. However, we also see it uses a similar self-adjusting headband system that worked out so well in the CORINA. The STEALTH is also highly portable owing to a novel frame that uses foldable gimbals to collapse the entire product into a much more compact form factor. There is so much to unpack here so let’s begin right away with a look at the product specifications in the table below. Thanks to Dan Clark Audio for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp!

Specifications