his is the latest advancement of our famous LCD-X (effective March 2021). Many say the LCD-X is the most neutral of the LCD Collection; they’re used by sound engineers and musicians to create the most accurate recordings. Just Google Manny Marroquin, Stuart Hawkes, Frank Filipetti, Ed Cherney, George Massenburg, Elliot Scheiner, or Brent Burge for a few examples of our Audeze users. They do a great job of translating your mix to the real world. The X and its brother, the closed-back XC, are sensitive enough to be driven directly by portable players like iPods, iPhones, and some of the better smartphones, but you’ll enjoy the much better sound with an external amplifier. Its impedance is 20 ohms. Audeze started in 2008 in a garage (of course!) when its founders came across a revolutionary flexible circuit material developed for NASA. Realizing this could be a great advance in planar magnetic technology, they first started to make pro audio PA speakers, but dropped this project and started making headphones. Taking this first headphone to the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, it was a tremendous hit, and that successfully launched the company. Hanging on that garage wall was the 2001 Space Odyssey poster, and that inspired the company’s name. The founders wanted a name that had something to do with a “journey through audio,” so Odyssey would be perfect, and that’s how the name Audeze (pronounced “odyssey”) was born.