Listening and Review: Ironclad: Live at Yoshi’s, the Cedar Walton Trio, as heard through a pair of Faudio Mezzo LE IEMs

My First IEMs. A favorite album. Do they work with live jazz?

The first thing I notice about IEMs is that they are in my ear, and that’s a huge difference from wearing over-ear headphones. Next, outside sound is practically zero. There’s little question of talking with someone when wearing IEMs. Third, all I hear is music. Right now, listening to the first track of the Cedar Walton Trio’s live album at Yoshi’s, Ironclad, the trio is all I can hear. And they sound good. The IEMs are brighter than the headphones I’m used to wearing, and I’d read that was true about them. I got these on sale on the 4^th of July, on impulse, and, well, I’d been meaning to pick out some IEMs. This made it easy. Just pick out a pair that was on sale, that had good reviews for the types of music I like. I only put so much into reviews. I write them, and I recognize they are limited in their usefulness. A pair of headphones, with the same set-up and the same music, can sound different at different times, on different days, in different moods, at different energy levels. If I’m tired, music probably won’t sound as good as it would if I were well rested.

The first track, “Bremond’s Blues,” begins with a simplified arrangement of the chord changes of the beginning of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Didn’t I just talk about the use of these “Coltrane changes” in a previous post? Yes, I did. Avid listeners of jazz of the traditional and post-bop type will find these changes are in many performances from the 90s and 2000s. The Alex Blake album I wrote about is just one more of these recordings with musicians, playing very different instruments, paying homage to Coltrane by using his most famous chords. Billy Higgins is bashing and rolling on his snare and tapping steadily on his ride cymbal. His drum set is miked and mixed so that it covers the entire sound stage. And here are the Coltrane changes again, as the track winds down and applause breaks out.

The bass response is good in these, though, as far as IEMs go, I have nothing to compare these to. With the album, I’ve listened to it with different headphones—though I forget which—and I know it is a good quality recording. One of my favorite things is the way Cedar Walton talks: pretty much as little as possible and with great authoritativeness of tone. He sounds “ironclad.” The acoustic bass is mostly dark and deep, with some higher pitched “rosiny” bits thrown in. Walton is a master of the piano. It sounds as if there are two pianists, as if his right and left hand have different personalities, which can join in banging out large chords. His right hand on the second track, “My Old Flame,” is often stroking the keys in light flurries of notes that go up and down the modes. I am not a pianist, so what he’s doing that a pianist might be likely to notice almost certainly escapes me. One thing that is clear from the start is that his piano is double-miked, and it covers the width of the soundstage, so his runs and jumps move the music side to side in large ways.

I have gotten used to the lighter weight of the IEMs, the wires that wrap around my ears like glass earpads, and the freedom of feeling the air and my long hair with my ear lobes and auricles. The bass is strong, yes—and so are the mids and treble. This is a hybrid driver system inside these these IEMs, and, while I don’t intend to get into technical specs I don’t fully understand, there are different driver types—dynamic type and piezo type drivers—in each earphone. Why the designers chose to use these driver types is beyond the scope of my knowledge. IEMs are different beasts than over-ear headphones. I am comfortable, that is the main thing. Almost all—probably all, without exception—in-ear earphones I have used, such as earbuds, tend to press against my narrow ear canals and cause pain, and they usually reach a point where they get loose, so the sound degrades, and they fall out altogether. Not so with these IEMs, which come with three or four different types and diameters of plugs or pads. I am using a rubbery pair, the smallest I noticed among the group. I’m sure there are reasons people give for choosing one type over another. I am not there yet.

Getting back to “My Old Flame,” which goes on for quite a bit, it would be a typical piano-bar piece—slow, pretty quiet, pretty calm—except we have Cedar Walton & Co., and they make a real musical performance out of it. The bass walks with a rich, low-heavy tone, while Billy Higgins focuses on bringing out the highs of his drum set, using brushes to rub the snare-drum head and send cymbals “spinning,” as the sound always conjures that image for me. I often wonder what beautiful highs I can no longer hear, when I hear a cymbal that just sizzles like drops of water on a hot pan. Walton’s piano is like two separate players. The miking is done so the left and right hands are typically in left and right channels, and he separates the musical characters of his hands so they sound as if they belong to two people and not both to him.

“N.P.S.” begins with piano, then bass and snare drum enter, with the drum playing military-style rolls and flams. Walton doesn’t allow the feeling to become overly martial, and the bass plays a line closely imitative of Walton’s left hand. The marching feel gives way to a swing, with Higgins swinging us all on his ride cymbal. The highs he gets out of that cymbal! I have a ride cymbal, and I don’t know if he is EQ-ing his, but mine does not have the beautiful whisper of his. The bass is animated in this track, with some impressive gymnastics, pull-offs and moving between the higher and lower strings gives a variety in the tonal character of the instrument’s sound.

I had heard that IEMs don’t have the same kind of soundstage that headphones have. I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I’ve been hearing with this album sounds like a headphone soundstage to me. It is a wide soundstage, and it has some depth. The liveness of the recording gives air to the aural space, allowing the instruments to coexist without blurring into each other. I’d heard the music might seem to be “in the head,” and that is not what I’m finding. The brightness of IEMs makes applause sound a bit strained, as if it is artificial, but EQ-ing could help that—and these IEMs have adjustment switches for boosting highs, mids, and lows separately. I have not experimented with those. I will do that now. I will boost the lows and mids.

The low end is punchier now. “Fiesta Español” features a long drum solo by Billy Higgins. The bass has some sub-bass, the sizzle of the cymbal doesn’t stand out as much—I miss it. The piano is almost unchanged. It is the louder low-end in the bass that stands out most. Applause still sounds tinny. I have just now lowered the switch used to boost the mids, leaving only the bass boosted, and I think this is more satisfying. I get the sub-bass, and the cymbals do stand out as they had when no switches were activated. The tom-toms on the drum set are more present in the mix. The piano is relatively unchanged. Applause still sounds a bit off, compared to listening to it with over-ear Focal Clear Mg’s, but it’s better than when the mid switch was turned “on.” Higgins’s kick drum sounds like mid-tuned tom-tom when he taps on it as he does during his solo. There is a lot of stick noise, and often I think such clicking together of the drumsticks signals a mistake, but here it is a stick or two on the rims of drums. The kick drum, even when played more loudly, has a tom-tom-like tone to it. When the technique of having the bass and kick drum play together is used, as it just was on this track, the kick drum and bass benefit, and their powers are greatly increased.

“Over the Rainbow,” famous from its being in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, starring (and sung by) Judy Garland, begins as a piano solo, an elaborate exhibition of interpretative skill and creativity by Walton. The melody is clear, and there is a lot of ornamentation that sounds appropriate, as if it is string-section accompaniment. The bass comes in, there is sparse, light applause following the solo piano section, and drums are brushes on snare with the hi-hat keeping time. Walton’s hands both seem to belong to him now. They are working together and have the same character.

Much of the latter section of the piece, on piano, is a combination of large chords played with both hands, and separate, rapid, single-note lines. I read in the liner notes of an Ahmad Jamal album, that Jamal was one of the first jazz pianists to find that if the pianist played the head of a tune, the audience would accept whatever improvised solo followed. This is what Walton has done here. He has played the entire tune, and now is soloing to his heart’s content, it seems. I heard a laugh following the drum and bass changing up the rhythm to a brisk swing. And now it is double time, with bursts of playing between several measures of double-time drumming and fast piano. Walton returns to a section of the standard melody, and all the instruments come together in a flurry of notes, building to a crescendo, to a climax, and relaxing to end the piece.

Surprisingly, flipping the (tiny!) switch for the treble, switch 1, made the applause sound more live and more real. I have a kind of scooped mid EQ profile now, with bass and treble boosted and mid left normal. The beginning of “On the Trail” is a bass solo, and when the song picks up, the piano comes in with a jolly, jaunty repeated motif, and the drums tap and sizzle with the hi-hat and ride cymbals keeping time in a minimal way. And then everything gets into a heavy groove. The bass starts a more elaborate, faster line, the drums put some snare work in, and the piano is all over with single-note lines, up and down. Again, Walton’s left hand seems as if it were someone else’s. The EQ boost to the bass puts in some super sub-bass when the acoustic bass plays its low notes, plucking the strings in that way that tends to leave out the treble part of the bass’s sonic capabilities. The jaunty rhythm figure, repeated so many times, becomes monotonous, and I am thankful for the bass solos. These IEMs are super. The bass comes through, treble, mids, bass, and sub-bass, all balanced nicely with this EQ-ing. After a bit of soloing, the band booms the ending of the piece, and Walton calls out bassist David Williams, identifying him for the first time on this recording.

The title track, “Ironclad,” is, as Walton announces, a Walton original. It begins with the trio playing together, with David Williams in center stage, dominant, on bass. Higgins’s drums are limited to a bit of cymbal time keeping and some tom-tom tapping that seems to be close to the sound of a rimshot. I suspect he is striking the drumhead near the edge. Elaborate tom-tom work punctuates the sparse piano, and the bass stays in its low-end range, repeating a simple and effective, catchy figure. It may be the EQ on the IEMs, but the bass has dominated throughout. Occasionally, we get some finger gymnastics—prestidigitation of the best kind—by Williams, bringing out some higher frequencies in his tone. By this point, Williams’s repetitions have let my ear take his playing for granted, and I am more attuned to the piano. I think Walton is playing louder, too. The stereo separation of his right and left hands is excellent. When they come together, they sound as one, and when they are apart, they are far apart.

The seating of the IEM pads in my ears is critical to the sound. Powerful bass comes through only when there is a complete seal. Hearing ambient noises with any amount of treble is almost certainly indicative of a leak. The difficulty I find using these IEMs, as compared to using my usual open-back headphones, is that I cannot hear what anyone says while I am listening. Different open-back phones allow differing amounts of audibility of ambient sounds, especially at the frequencies of human speech, but these IEMs—and I do have them turned up just a bit louder than normal, for this concentrated listening period—seal out what’s making noise around me.

“Ironclad” will probably never become a classic jazz piece. It has its merits. After an already excellent performance, heard via an excellent recording played through some excellent hardware, I am ready for the end of the concert. The end of “Ironclad” is sleepy as well. Everyone just peters out before coming back in for a classic let’s-play-every-note climax, and I am happy to be done. All this close listening has tired me out. And perhaps I am experiencing fatigue from not being accustomed to the IEMs and having the volume up a bit too loud, with the treble boosted on already-bright IEMs. I have heard these IEMs are “the best” for classical music. I will, in a bit, try that experiment out.

Classical Listening

The Sound of Trumpets, by the New York Trumpet Ensemble with conductor Gerard Schwarz (Delos label), is an album I figure will test whether the IEMs reproduce high pitches well. They are reputed to be brighter than headphones, and this brightness should be of good quality. So, starting afresh, with all IEM EQ switches in the “off” position, I have put the balanced (4.4-mm) TRRS-to-single-ended (6.53-mm) TRS adapter on the IEMs, which, I haven’t mentioned yet, are wired with a balanced connector out of the box. Plugging into my Valhalla tube headphone amp, I am listening to a CD. I notice quiet noise that is unchanged by volume level. My cable management is extremely poor, so it is likely some RCA cable is running alongside a 60-Hz 120-VAC power cable.

There is harpsichord, there is a string section, and there are trumpets. The trumpets sound great. Even at high volume and through my tube amp, the sound is clear. They are bright and loud, and their attacks are sharp. The strings have good mid-range to them. The sound stage is wide. The basses are powerfully stacked in their low end. The bassoon appears, after several short tracks. There is good instrument separation. There is good imaging, with different trumpets coming from different locations. This is a two-microphone recording made in a concert hall, so I am not surprised the recording allows for good imaging. The trumpets have some reverb, but it is not expansive. The trumpet trills are clearly defined notes, not a smearing and loss of attack and decay suddenness. The quiet harpsichord does get overwhelmed by the trumpets at times. It is audible throughout, except during the loudest parts where trumpets and tympani are playing. The bassoon and harpsichord sound as if they are coming from below the trumpets, which are at eye level. This is a satisfactory listening session for a classical recording, but the low-level noise is annoying, and I am going to return to using a digital source separate from my home stereo.

Now I am listening with the McIntosh MHA50 (reviewed here https://open.substack.com/pub/hanscox/p/review-mcintosh-mha50-decoding-headphone and here https://open.substack.com/pub/hanscox/p/review-mcintosh-mha50-decoding-headphone-09e). I’m using the Bluetooth connection to a Windows (Dell) laptop. The bass on track 5, “Chant,” of the solo piano album, Solo (2015), by Nils Frahm, is stunning. I have swapped out the earpads for the smallest pair, a tiny, rubber pair. The seal in my ear canal is excellent. I am completely sealed off from ambient noise. There is a lot of noise, and I think it is from the original recording, which also features lots of amplified sounds of movement by the performer, Frahm. Check out this recording, made on a huge piano (piano: https://klavins-pianos.com/productsold/model-370/, music freely downloadable: https://www.nilsfrahm.com/works/sol/ —not a typo).

Today I was full up with things to do and didn’t get to work on this before right now. I think there is plenty for now. In answer to the question, do they work with live jazz, I find that boosting the treble and lows gives applause a realistic sound. As I complained ( :-) ) earlier, with all EQ switches in the “off” position, the applause sounded artificial. Other than the applause, the IEMs worked wonderfully, “un-EQ-ed,” for this live album, one of my favorites. I may give a second installation on the IEMs. Happy listening!