Introduction

Audeze is one of the biggest names in the relatively tiny world of planar magnetic headphones, having used its nearly 15 years of existence to develop a related history of successful products and patented technologies. There are now six series of headphones and IEMs under the Audeze umbrella, including the brand-new Manny Marroquin series that is highly relevant to this article. For a while now, Audeze has been trying hard and somewhat succeeding in getting into the pro audio world, with several of their products being critically acclaimed by audio engineers and mixing artists. However, maybe it’s the company being younger than others, such as Sony, Sennheiser, and beyerdynamic or their products being too expensive for the budding professional, but providing a reference set used by everyone has been generally challenging. One Audeze product that did make it in this world is the venerable LCD-X. It is easily Audeze’s most popular set of headphones, often selling out whenever a new batch comes out. The LCD-X was also updated recently, along with the LCD-XC we saw before, and thanks to Audeze for providing a review sample of the LCD-X (2021) to TechPowerUp and giving me the opportunity to examine it for myself!

In addition to the headphones themselves, Audeze has a multi-prong approach to get into the pro audio world. The Reveal+ plug-in, which we also examined previously, provides not only for personalized sound with the head response transfer function (HRTF)—basically your specific audio preference—factored in, but also allows for the reproduction of professional recording studio environments in your own home courtesy specific profiles for Audeze headphones. Reveal+ was immensely interesting to me when I first tested it. It is one of several products from Embody that also makes the more universal Immerse Virtual Studio, and they asked if I’d be interested in testing it out more since I had a few questions on the effectiveness of their algorithms in addition to how they were generated in the first place. So this is a two-in-one review about how Embody developed the Reveal+ plug-in with Audeze’s help and the LCD-X (2021) as a tool to compare the effectiveness of Reveal+ over stock performance. Thanks also to Embody for providing a test license of their program and sharing resources on how everything comes together. We begin this article with a look at the product specifications for the LCD-X (2021) in the table below.

Specifications