Austrian Audio

The Composer Headphones

USD $2,699

Given that AKG had been designing and manufacturing extremely well-regarded products from its base in Vienna for almost seventy years, parent company Harman won't have been too surprised that not every one of its employees decided to up sticks to California during 2016's Great Relocation. Indeed, some former AKG staff opted to stay home and launch their own headphone-and-microphone brand called Austrian Audio.

This new company quickly became successful, soon becoming a force to be reckoned with in affordable consumer headphones and pro audio microphones. And now – apparently to demonstrate that no area of the headphones market is off-limits – Austrian Audio has launched The Composer. This pair of wired, over-ear phones aims to shake up the premium sector that Grado, Sennheiser and, more pointedly, AKG might have thought they had nicely boxed off. Austrian Audio has been busily establishing its pedigree – so can it take the next step?

UP CLOSE

Within the strict parameters of over-ear headphone design, I quite like the way The Composer looks. Sennheiser's alternatives at this price point tend to look a bit, you know, like a piece of laboratory equipment, while Grado's offerings all look like a quiet corner of a garden centre. So the slender lines of The Composer, the elegant and tactile mix of 'pleather' and aluminium, the impeccable fit and finish, and the stripling 385g weight all combine to deliver a design that appears stripped back in the way a Formula One car seems compared to a family saloon.

The double-decker headband ensures a secure fit and a head that doesn't get too hot too quickly. The earcups can be tilted into one of four positions, which (along with the available amount of headband adjustment) means an enduringly comfortable fit is easily achievable. The wire mesh covering the rear of the earcups affords a glimpse at the back of the 49mm dynamic drivers and the casual bit of 'A' branding on them. The driver diaphragms are coated in Diamond-Like Carbon for rigidity and responsiveness and are said to be good for a frequency response of 5Hz to 44kHz.

Each earcup needs to be wired, and to that end, Austrian Audio has developed a dual banana-plug system with a connection that articulates with the frame of The Composer rather than being captive in some area of the earcup itself. There are three cables in the big, posh wooden box that The Composer travels in – two are 3m long and terminated in either a four-pin XLR or a 3.5mm jack that can accept a 6.3mm adapter. The other is 1.3m long and has a 4.4mm Pentacon termination.

THE LISTENING

There are no two ways about it, The Composer is one of the less tolerant headphone designs around. It doesn't take too happily to inferior music sources and isn't especially relaxed about smaller, more highly compressed digital audio files or inferior quality recordings delivered at high resolution. So if you like to listen to, say, The Ramones on Spotify's free tier via the headphone socket of your laptop, this pair of headphones will be wanting you to reevaluate your choices.

However, feed The Composer with an accomplished recording rendered at a high bitrate or via a good quality vinyl spinner or Compact Disc player, and this design becomes a thrillingly complete and enjoyable listen. Indeed, off the top of my head, I cannot think of a more direct, upfront recording than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. This pair of headphones soars when given a 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC file to play with. Via the 4.4mm output of the extremely capable iFi iDSD Diablo 2 headphone amplifier, things have never sounded more upfront or direct.

The Composer demonstrates fearsome powers of midrange communication, making the unaffected vocal sound both strident and earnest in equal measure. The amount of detail retrieved, not only in the midrange but throughout the frequency range, really is prodigious. Also, this headphone design is more than capable of giving even the most transient occurrences proper weight and emphasis. There's a positivity to how the voice in this recording is presented, a kind of unswerving immediacy that makes 'realistic' seem too weak a word.

Switch to the slightly more sophisticated charms of Grapevine by Weyes Blood as a 24-bit/96kHz FLAC, and not only does the purity of her tone get the prominence it deserves, but it also allows the Austrian Audio cans to demonstrate their natural, neutral top-to-bottom tonal balance. No area of the frequency range is underplayed, no area is over-egged, and at every point, the tonality of the headphones is entirely convincing. They're a confident, coherent listen, with a stack of observations to make regarding texture and timbre at every point.

The soundstage created is big in every direction, properly organised, and easy to follow. As a design, The Composer is alert to spaces and silences just as surely as it is to actual occurrences – and not only does it lay a stage out in the most explicit manner, it even seems able to articulate the kind of stage it is. Once through a vinyl copy of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night via the 3.5mm headphone socket of a Naim Uniti Nova PE (which is, in turn, being served by a Clearaudio Concept and Chord Huei phono stage) is enough to confirm the relative size and shape of the room. I can clearly hear the assembled musicians staggering through the piece and discern how they deliver the scandalously sloppy mic pops that riddle the vocal line. The atmosphere of the recording is almost tangible.

Low-frequency speed and control are never in any doubt, so even a slightly lumpy rhythm such as Fat Mama Kick by The Walker Brothers gets full expression and enjoys decent momentum to go along with the weight and punch. This design has considerable dynamic headroom, too, so no matter if it's the variations in intensity of this recording or the simple shifts in volume and attack of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (the Columbia Philharmonic Orchestra, wrangled by Leonard Bernstein in 1959), the disparities are explicit.

There's nothing showy about The Composer. This pair of headphones is not tricky to drive, although obviously, you get the best results from a decent headphone amp and a proper, grown-up music source. Its character is such that it tries to stay out of the action, preferring instead to serve the recording for good or bad, rather than sticking an oar in, so to speak. All the same, there's very much an enthusiastic rather than analytical approach to music making, which makes even long listening sessions just fly by. This is about as unequivocal a compliment as it's possible to pay.

THE VERDICT

Austrian Audio isn't the first company intrepid enough to take a decisive step out of its comfort zone, but with The Composer, it has become one of the most immediately successful. Where high-end, hard-wired, premium-priced headphones are concerned, it has most certainly introduced the cat to the pigeons. And the company has managed to do so without recourse to esoteric or complicated technologies but rather by implementing established technologies exceptionally well. If you're fortunate enough to be in the market for headphones at this sort of money, you really do need to hear The Composer.

Visit Austrian Audio for more information