REVIEW OF THE UM2 BY OUR CUSTOMER AND FRIEND ROBERT HALLIDAY

Westone's UM2 are probably the best headphones around. Like many other listeners who like classical music I had thought for years that portable audio devices were a convenient make-do, nice when you were travelling or relaxing outside the house but a poor substitute for serious listening on a good system. Then, a couple of years ago, I read about the Etymotics company in the US and their "canal phones", tiny, earbud-type phones that you shoved right into the canal of your ear to enjoy astonishing fidelity of sound.

Much intrigued, I invested in a pair of their ER-4P phones, which are designed for use with portable players. I plugged them into my iPod and was so amazed by what I heard that I raved about the phones at length in a column that appeared here at the time. Since then I have occasionally compared the Etymotics phones with others made by companies like Sony and Shure that have been recommended by friends and on weblogs, but the ER-4Ps always came out on top, unique in their extremely detailed and refined sound and natural, unboosted bass range.

This past week, I finally had to admit that a serious challenger had come my way. After reading about Westone's UM2 Dual-Driver Universal Monitors on a weblog, I was intrigued enough to invest US$325-plus-plus in a pair. Perhaps the best way I can find to say how good they are is to say that I think serious listeners who can afford them will find them more than worth the price.

The UM2's come with three pairs of Comply eartips that are used to fit them snugly into the ear canal. After slipping them onto the phones, you compress the tips with your fingers, push them into the ears and hold them in place until they expand to fill the ear canal. They create a seal that allows bass sounds to be heard at full fidelity, but are comfortable to wear. The tips are provided in two sizes.

I plugged them first into an iPod and then into a Sony portable CD player, and had the same feeling of having discovered something miraculous that I did when I first tried out the Etymotics phones. The first piece of music that I listened to was the Gergiev/Kirov recordings of Stravinsky: The Firebird, that I had imported into my iPod from the Philips CD using the AAC encoder with a custom setting of 320 kbps.

The first thing I noticed was that the quiet opening, very low in the bass, had a weight and presence that even the Etymotics phones didn't catch. It wasn't boomy or exaggerated, but was in perfect perspective with the full but beautifully transparent sound that the phones realised from the compressed AAC transfer. Even the Etymotics didn't quite match them here.

Pianissimo high-string passages, of which there are many in the score, had the same feeling of weightlessness and luminosity they do when heard through the ER-4P's, and the mid-range, even in the loudest passages, was natural and without stridency. Immediate comparison of the Westone and Etymotics phones showed the ER-4P's to be very slightly less resonant, with an almost imperceptible advantage in clarity, while the UM2's had better bass reproduction and were very close to matching the ideal clarity of the ER-4P's. A near-tied score here, but if I could only hear this music through one set of phones, I would choose the UM2's.

Their virtues became even more pronounced when I listened to Stockhausen's electronic composition, Oktophonie as recorded on the CD published by the composer himself, Stockhausen Verlag CD 41. The eight-channel work has been remixed to two channels, but not in the usual way.

I listened to the piece through the UM2 phones plugged into Sony portable CD player D-EJ01, which is no longer in production but which in my option is the best portable CD player that Sony ever produced. Heard through this setup, the music's masses of bass sound opened up like a chasm, while Stockhausen's arcs and meteors of electronic sound seemed to pass behind me, in front of me, and over my head. The effect was so dizzying and disorienting that I had to sit down and listen with closed eyes. I had heard Oktophanie many times through good speakers and through the ER-4P's, but the effect was never as engulfing as this, and the UM2's ability to reproduce carefully contoured sound objects deep in the bass register was an important part of the experience.

For a final test, I chose Voices of Light, Dawn Upshaw's superb recital of modern, mostly French songs imported into my iPod using the same settings as were used for The Firebird. Here the realism with which Upshaw's voice and Gilbert Kalish's piano accompaniment was perfection, in no way inferior to the quality of sound heard using the ER-4P's.

If I were to pick a pair of headphones that would do full justice to the music in my iPod, and money was no object, it would be a tough choice, but I would go with the Westone UM2's. I bought my UM2's online from Earphone Solutions at www.earphonesolutions.com.