The trouble with comparisons is that I find the NightHawk to be pretty unique-it’s not really like anything else that I have heard or owned. It’s relaxed, it’s deep, it’s dark, and yet it’s still detailed enough to be hi-fi but non-fatiguing. All this combined is why I say the NightHawk is excellent for late-night listening. It easily hides the flaws of weak recordings and low-res streaming audio sibilance and tipped-up treble are non-existent and the mid-range tuning is dialed in to a point where it retains nice vocal and instrumental clarity and detail retrieval without being forward or analytical. The powerful bass and rolled off treble will undoubtedly be deterrents to audio purists looking for flat response curves, but this is what I like about the NightHawk. What I mean by polite is that the NightHawk plays it safe with its warm and inviting sound signature that’s skewed to the lower end of the response curve. And, given time to immerse your ears in its sound, AudioQuest’s NightHawk proves to be a true high-fidelity headphone-albeit a polite one. But when you pause, sit back, and actually listen, giving your ears and brain several minutes to acclimate, you start to hear a darkness in the NightHawk, a deep musical presentation that’s actually far more revealing, natural, and delicate than expected. This feeling is further reinforced when quickly switching to the NightHawk from headphones like Sennheiser’s HD650 or Beyerdynamic’s Amiron Home, which both have more forward, mid-centric tunings. To my ears, at first listen, the NightHawk comes off as sounding kind of hollow and reverb-y, almost too unbalanced, like a half empty music venue during sound check. Sure, it looks lovely and is surprisingly comfortable, but its sound made no sense to me, and it still continues to surprise me from time to time. In fact, I hated it the first time I put it on my head-and quickly cursed myself for dropping a couple hundred dollars on a lightly used unit.

But this isn’t a realization that came quickly for me.Īt first listen you’ll think something is amiss with the NightHawk-or at least I did. There’s just something about its uniquely rich tuning that compliments the albums I spin up when I want to drift off into the darkness. Whether its name was aptly chosen or just coincidental I don’t know, but after 10 months with AudioQuest’s first-ever headphone (yes, I was late to the game), I find myself reaching for the NightHawk whenever I’m settling in for the evening. It’s that time of year when longer nights get passed in pursuit of #AudioNirvana. It’s fall, which means my outdoor activities are winding down for the season, night comes early, and the tubes on my amp start glowing a bit more. For me, the NightHawk’s place is wherever I do my late-night listening. But if there’s anything I can say about my audio experiences, it’s that every product worth writing about, discussing, photographing, and hearing has a place. So often in audio, enthusiasts position a product in the black or white, better or worse, endgame or bust. And its performance appears to be either loved or hated. Its place in the market is as contested as its creator’s cables-OK maybe not that contested.

Adventurequest 3d no sound