The LTB shipped with a remote for adjusting volume and mute (it has both left and right volume adjustment but only one side actually did anything, maybe this was their "universal remote" that does more with their other headphone offerings) which were the same buttons on top of the amp. At first listen, I just used the on-amp controls to adjust volume, but I couldn’t find a level that I liked. On the maximum setting the headphones will make you deaf and on the next notch down they were too soft and the movie lost all sonic impact. I then turned to the remote’s finer volume adjustment. It seems the on-amp controls are a gain trim from the raw Dolby Digital signal and the remote volume adjusts from there. I liked to listen on the highest gain and then adjust one remote volume press down from there. This level was still slightly too loud but I got used to it the longer I listened.

The next issue I ran into had to do with headphone cable length, it’s only 4 feet long. For my initial tests the cable was pulled tight between my head sitting in my home theater’s sweet spot and the LTB Amp in my cabinet, to the point where any simple gesture would pull the unit off the shelf. LTB does sell a 13 foot extension cable through their online store, which I now have (you can’t just use any old mini-plug extension cable because the LTB cable has a special mini plug and surround that delivers all 5.1 channels to the multiple drivers in the headphones, they have a chart that points to the different bits of mini-plug and which channels they send).

The LTB’s listening experience is much more exciting than regular stereo headphones, but no where near the experience of a properly set up 5.1 loudspeaker system. Last night I skipped my way through Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (though all the prequels are terrible, they are impressive home theater demonstration material, I wish Lucasfilm would re-release Phantom Menace with proper color decoding (since it was shot on HD cameras I have to assume it looks great in the Rec. 709 color spec, but through the DVD production got badly switched to SDTV’s Rec. 601 (if you’re curious about what the hell I’m talking about head on over to the AVS Forum) and without edge-enhancement)) looking for obvious active surround scenes. This Star Wars installment had plenty of fly-by’s, laser gun chases and light saber swings to really push the LTB’s performance to their limit (you can easily skip every other chapter in the first two-thirds of the film without missing anything, just following Obi-Wan Kenobi’s detective adventure (Behind the Scenes: George Lucas’s direction: Okay, Ewan, you can play this scene like all the others, just pretend you’re an 8 year old playing Star Wars over walkie-talkies with your teddy bear./ Ewan: Right, so this isn’t the scene with my contractual full frontal nudity?/ George Lucas: Yeah, we have to talk…)). The first major fly-over, the queen’s silver wing ship that tended to blow up as the passengers are safely exiting, had major bass flowing out of the ship’s engines and actually broke up a little in the headphones. Other than this difficult effect, bass performance was exceptional and definitely engaged and grounded me into the movie. Aided by the bass extension the headphones presented a wide front sound stage. The surround effects were less obvious, and ideally, they should be subtle and not overpower the direct action in the fronts. I never felt that effects came from far behind me, like they can with properly spaced and calibrated surround loudspeakers. Laser beams, characters stiffly delivering lines off screen and John Williams score all just arrived near the back of my ear, not the back of my head. Despite this, the headphones still presented a very clear auditory picture of the action on screen.