Review: Dekoni Blue – Anything but blue

Sound

The problem lies with how Blue sounds. After a few months, I don’t really care to listen to other headphones. That’s not a flippant comment: Blue strikes a sweet balance between sensitivity and voltage-hunger. It doesn’t hiss. It gets loud enough, but takes extra voltage with ease, and grace, and returns the sweetest sound I’ve heard from a ‘fun’ headphone in a hell of a long time. It covers every base I feel must be covered in a sealed home/studio headphone.  

What Blue really nails is transition to mids from bass. It’s not only really smooth, it’s practically lubed up, gliding from big, soft-edged lows to expressive upper bass as well as I’ve heard from any non-reference headphone. That’s the major reason I’ve kept my other headphones boxed up since walking away from SoCal with Blue. (In fact, so boxed are my other headphones that my wife keeps inching them towards the pawn shop.) 

Typically I prefer bass that’s got crispier fade edges, but gosh, Blue does soft fades like no one else. That is, despite obviously lower levels of low-end texture and relatively high low-end pressure, Blue’s bass character is well anchored, steers clear of bloom, and doesn’t duff out. It also trends slightly wet, which I love in semi relaxed-sounding headphones. I’ve seen Blue’s unsmoothed frequency graphs. I’m not sure how well they represent Blue. I say that because mids aren’t really sucked out as the graph suggests, nor does the U-shaped graph show up with really elevated treble sound pressure. Mids definitely deflate a bit next to highs, but not nearly what you’d expect from the graph. 

To be sure, there is plenty of high-frequency information. But it fits really well fit into the upper mids, glossing up higher frequency sounds without a hint of scratchiness. In fact, I reckon that cymbals and other high-frequency shimmer instruments are minimally smoothed over. That said, highs extend well, and like Blue’s lows, texture detail isn’t huge, but its overall feel and sound pressure are just right on. They are free of sibilance, somewhat wet, and super melodic. 

One reason I didn’t get the TR50 MKIII is that, though I liked its basic nature, I didn’t jive with its highs, which, to me, are grainier than Blue’s. Then there’s the comfort angle. And the looks. 

Its interesting to listen to progressive trance and melodic metal through Blue. For sure, there’s less a live sound to either genre, and the shimmery, long-fading bite you get from clashing cymbals in large-venue recordings, is smoothed over somewhat. That also means that that ’trance’ vibe you get from deep high-frequency gradations in well-recorded trance flattens. You’ll not weave and bob in trance if you’re listening to Tiesto and Armin Van Buuren through Blue. Instead, you’ll get a melodic take on trance, and a super melodic, somewhat bitey version of melodic metal. 

The short and maybe only bad of this is that Blue’s soundstage is pretty narrow. It extends neither laterally very far, though, depending on the recording has a bit of z-axis depth. Imaging also doesn’t go that high. Again, this works against trance. Instrument separation is above average, but generally they sidle up one to another.

Interesting, fun, addictive. That’s how I’d shorten this essay. 

End words

I’ll be damned if Dekoni Blue doesn’t make my end of year list. Apart from its cluttered cups and strange jungle logo, it blows my mind in the best possible way. I love the blue. How’s about comfort? Damn good. Sound? Quite possibly the most addictive non-reference headphone these ears have heard in ages. Reference level? No. Not at all. But smoothness, speed, melody, and extension? Dekoni nailed each. 

This is a great headphone.

Well done. 

3.7/5 - (38 votes)
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin

Back before he became the main photographer for bunches of audio magazines and stuff, Nathan was fiddling with pretty cool audio gear all day long at TouchMyApps. He loves Depeche Mode, trance, colonial hip-hop, and raisins. Sometimes, he gets to listening. Sometimes, he gets to shooting. Usually he's got a smile on his face. Always, he's got a whisky in his prehensile grip.

6 Comments

  • Reply July 13, 2018

    El

    Very nice review. I saw them on Massdrop but didn’t buy them until I got a good feedback from it. God bless!

    • Reply July 13, 2018

      ohm image

      It’s a crazy good headphone. Enjoy.

      • Reply July 22, 2018

        AJ

        A lot of T50RP mods are, they’re just such a good base to work with. LOVED my Alpha Primes, it stung selling them.

  • Reply September 18, 2019

    Aksel hoff

    How’s the bass on these cans? I’m basshead audio junkie, so I appreciate high-end sound but I want ear-thumping, head-rattling bass. I got this experience from Audeze’s LCD X / LCD 3 but they are way too expenisve. My old Denon D5000s were the closest I came to experiencing that Audeze sound but they’ve broken after 11-12 years of use so I need to replace them. Dekoni Blue’s or Fostex TX-00 ?

  • Reply April 28, 2020

    1

    s fixtures, results and live match commentaryHe has shone as Ralph Hasenhuttls newly-promoted side have made a shock assault on the Bundesliga title.

  • Reply October 19, 2020

    tst

    Terrible review. Doesn’t talk anything about the specs, no description of mids/highs/lows, how to drive them, what he used, etc. Half of it is him pumping filler about a Sony, a box, whatever. FFS, you could swing a dead-cat on head-fi.org and find a better review.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.