Floats On

Do the Jecklin Floats sound as idiosyncratic as they look? Malcolm Steward warms his ears…

This review first appeared in Hi-Fi Review magazine in January 1990

Jurg Jecklin, fomer cheif sound engineer of Swiss Radio, and inventor of the Jecklin Headphone

I haven’t listened to any head­phones for some time now, so when the Jecklin Float 2′s arrived at the office I thought I’d right that situation. As I’ve said before, I’m not a keen headphone listener: I find the experience so unnatural, having sounds squirted directly into my auditory canal, that I nor­mally avoid it whenever possible. But the £99 Floats promised som­ething different, so I was interested to try them out.

Because of their unusual const­ruction — correct me if I’m wrong but I’d say they are unique in this respect — the Floats allow some space to obtain between the lis­tener’s ears and the phone’s trans­ducers, in so doing making them­selves less like headphones and more like a pair of speakers sus­pended either side of the wearer’s cranium. Lest this makes them sound heavy and cumbersome to wear I state from the outset that they are not: they are, in fact, the most comfortable headphones I’ve ever encountered.

They are lightweight (385 gram­mes) and rest only on the top of the wearer’s head — there’s none of the vice-style gripping of more conventional phones. However, they are very nicely balanced and do not ‘wander’ in use. And bec­ause the earpieces are distanced from the wearer’s head they allow a free flow of air between them­selves and the ears. This avoids that unpleasant sweatiness one normally has to suffer if one is lis­tening through phones for any length of time. On a further comfort note, the Float 2 also comes with a three metre flat cable, which exits from one side of the phones: this means that plenty of movement is allo­wed, the cable, not being coiled, doesn’t try to drag them off your head, and the one-sided exit of the cable ensures that it doesn’t wind itself in knots and attempt to strangle the wearer. One of the stated design aims for the Float was that it should provide maxi­mum user comfort and an abs­ence of listener fatigue; in this area they are certainly an unqualified success.

On the technical front, the litera­ture that accompanied the Float 2s disclosed that their frequency response extends from 30Hz up lo 20kHz, with distortion of less than 0.8%. The principle of the design is a completely open, dynamic ‘phone with aperiodic damping, and their impedance is 200 ohms. The physical ‘open­ness’ of the design will tell you that the Float will both allow in outside sound and permit its own output to invade the room. I turned the vol­ume up to a reasonable level and asked a third party to gauge the amount of sound that spilled out: they felt that whilst it was audible, being full bandwidth it wasn’t nearly so annoying as the insuf­ferable tish-tish-tish one overhears from Walkman type phones. How­ever, if you want ‘phones that will permit others in the same room to watch TV while you listen to music, the Floats will not be suita­ble^: the music will be audible to the others and the TV will be audi­ble to you.

My regular home system would not allow me to listen to the Floats easily, as the active Naim amplifier set-up I use doesn’t facilitate headphone listening. It could be configured to do so but it requires more effort than I was prepared to expend, so I hooked up my record deck, an LP12/Naim ARO/Audio Technica ART1 to an Ion Systems Obelisk 3X/X-PAK1 amplifier (with ‘enhanced’ moving coil input boards) which has a regular 6.3mm headphone socket provi­ded on its front panel. This ampli­fier drove the Floats quite happily, and I rarely had to advance the volume control past the 11 or 12 o’clock position to obtain ‘realistic’ listening levels. Even when I did I was pleased to note that the Floats did not make a meal of rec­ord surface noise or tape hiss: sure, it was audible but it was not over-emphasised in the manner of many headphones. I suspect, sub­jectively, that the Floats have a bit of a downward tilt in their fre­quency response but if this is so it is no bad thing and it did not affect my enjoyment of the music.

Such was the level of comfort offered by the Float 2s that they had more than the usual amount of music passed through them than is normal when I test head­phones. They took it all in their stride no matter what it was: the AAM playing Vivaldi trumpet and violin concertos on period instru­ments, Jonas Hellborg popping and slapping an electric bass, or the Jesus and Mary Chain gener-

ating the kind of feedback that would have most sound engineers wrenching the mains plug out of the wall. Even an extremely old, well-worn recording of a 1943 Horowitz/NBC SO Tchaikovsky piano concerto, for which I had been relieved of £1.50 in a junk shop, was presented in such a way that only the music mattered. So to specifics. The track It’s The Pits, Slight Return on the Jonas Hellborg album Elegant Punk was the first to be played. This is stunt bass at its most extreme; the full frequency range of the instrument is exploited and Hellborg plays at breakneck speed — there’s not much in the way of musical integrity to render the track a regular favourite but there’s plenty of speed and dyn­amics to make up for that for short term listening. The Floats exhibited good leading edge attack: it was crisp but not over-accentuated despite the album’s treble biased equalisation; they kept up the track’s momentum well. They were however a little vague on some of the notes at the lowest end of the spectrum but in all fairness these do pose a stern test. To hear then reproduced properly one is talking about a pair of spea­kers like the Naim SBL or Linn Isobarik — neither of which can be strapped to one’s head easily. The overall presentation in terms of soundstaging was spacious and airy but the Floats — as would any headphone — did rather focus attention on the peculiar way this album has been recorded with hard left and right images boun­cing around the central image.

On the Hogwood/MM record­ings the Floats were most enjoya­ble to listen to: the intriguing timbral and dynamic qualities of the period (and reproduction) inst­ruments were well portrayed.

More importantly, the sheer cohe­sion and fluidity of the Academy’s playing was brought out. As was that of Horowitz on the RCA Red Seal recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1. This record­ing — transcribed from a broad­cast that went out 46 years ago — isn’t going to appeal to a hardcore hi-fi freak, but once one gets over the hurdle of the ‘primitive’ record­ing one discovers that the music therein is simply magical. Horo­witz’ playing is spellbinding and masterly, and the Floats allowed me easy access to this aspect of the record. The beauty of this per­formance — his delicate. meas­ured touch on the keys, and the marvelous flowing quality of his phrasing — was communicated convincingly, without the intrusion of the ‘mechanical’ side of listening to a record that is nearly thirty years old and clearly hasn’t spent its life inside its sleeve or being cosseted by a sophisticated turn­table. Headphones normally high­light record imperfections; the Floats did not.

The Jesus and Mary Chain are not normally good headphone fod­der. Their abrasive, gritty music demands high volume reproduc­tion but its very nature tends to preclude the intimacy forced upon the listener by headphones. With the Floats I found I could have the volume I desired — sufficient to retain the music’s impact — but without the normally attendant headache afterwards. And while the Floats do not have the air of overt detailing and forwardness about them that many ‘phones dis­play, there was no problem keep­ing track of what was happening within the music. Vocal lines, for example, were presented with clarity and articulation.

The Floats do not present music in the way that most headphones do: there is little of the sense of the recording being put under an aural microscope and then dissected. They are more holistic in their approach and one listens to the music as a piece rather than as a collection of pieces.

I still do not favour headphone listening over loudspeakers but the Float 2 makes the former a lit­tle more like the latter. They’re cer­tainly worth checking out if you are of like mind and want a reasonably priced pair of good headphones.