Rosson Audio Design RAD-O planar magnetic headphones

The implacable low frequencies of The Bug’s ‘Poison Dart’ are served up with depth and substance, carry an absolute stack of information regarding both texture and their origin – and yet they’re utterly controlled. Too often this kind of bottom-end presence is undermined by ill-disciplined entry into or exit from individual notes, but the RAD-O brook no argument – and as a consequence, Warrior Queen’s imprecations in the midrange are beautifully poised and defined, alive with both detail and malevolence.

‘Malevolence’, in fact, is what the RAD-O extract, in quantity, from Nina Simone’s hair-raising pass through Brecht and Weill’s ‘Pirate Jenny’. No detail is too transient or too minor to escape the attention of these headphones, and the result is a complete description of a vocal performance peerless in its intensity. Few are the singers who can inhabit a lyric like Nina Simone, and few are the headphones that will give you such a vivid account of her doing so.

And when Martha Argerich extends her right hand towards the upper register of her instrument during her staggeringly eloquent run at the Prokofiev pieces, the headphones’ treble response proves the equal of everything happening beneath it. The RAD-O has attack and bite to spare where the highest frequencies are concerned – but, yet again, the almost martial control these headphones exhibit means there’s never any danger of hardness, or blurring of the edges of an individual key-strike.

The integration from the top of the frequency range to the bottom is seamless, consistency of tonality is unquestionable, and the impression of straightforward transparency is difficult not to admire. The RAD-O simply get out of the way of a recording and let it express itself, for better or worse – they do not stick their oar in. In fact, on this evidence one would question whether they even have possession of an oar in the first place.