Moondrop Para 2 Review — Exceptional Planar Drivers with Hidden Potential

Okay, so a while ago I made a video talking about my favorite headphones under $1,000. And in the top spot there was the Moondrop Cosmo. Now the Cosmo is a headphone that in my opinion deserves more attention than it got, in large part because of its unique sound signature, but also it has a very unique kind of driver. If you're curious about that, I'll link the video that I did on that headphone below. But it was also $1,000, so it's out of reach for many people. And now, Moondrop have released this. This is the Para 2, which comes in at $500, and it is very similar to the Cosmo, just at half the price. In fact, in many ways, this is kind of like a baby Cosmo, and I think it's very interesting. So, in this video, we're going to check it out, and I'm going to let you know if it's any good. Okay, let's get going. Just a quick disclaimer, this unit was sent to me by Shenzhen Audio for review. Big thanks to Shenzhen Audio for sending it in, but of course, they haven't paid me to say anything in particular about it, and all thoughts and opinions here are my own. Alright, so the Para 2. The first thing you'll notice here is that I've got some different pads on this. More about that in a minute. These are the default pads that it comes with, and there are reasons why I have swapped over. But first, let's talk a little bit about what this is, and then the build, the design, and the comfort, and all that good stuff. The Para 2 is very similar to the Cosmo. I actually prefer the way this looks over the Cosmo. It looks less like robot wagon wheels, which I think is a very nice thing. The headband is still cursed. It's huge. I don't have to go to the very bottom clicks for my giant head, but I imagine for people with more normal sized heads that, you know, this just will be too big. You can increase the clamp theoretically by bending in the spring steel headband. That is in theory possible to do, but I find that even after doing that, it's, it doesn't feel quite as secure on my head as I'd like. Like I've reviewed the Horizon recently and folks let me know, yeah, you can just bend that in and they're right. Like it does help, but it's still not as secure as I would like. With that said, I do find this headphone to be mostly comfortable. And that's because it has this really wide suspension strap going on underneath. And having a larger surface area for this bit really does help distribute the weight across the top of the head. So this avoids kind of the hotspot issues with smaller, narrower headbands. I find this one to be reasonably comfortable. I actually find it to be more comfortable than the Cosmo for some reason. I don't think the weight is that much different. Like it's still a planar, so it is still fairly heavy, but this is more comfortable for me than like the FiiO FT7, for example. So I believe the weight for this one is going to be around 500 grams. So it's still a heavy headphone. It's still a large headphone, probably too big. And the headband, they should move to something else. Maybe there's a way for them to make this overall a bit smaller. Because again, like who is going to use this? Like, like even for me, for my giant head, this is now the top. This is where the top of my ear is. It's actually protruding past the top of the pads. Who is going to wear it? like this. It's just wild. Now, one of the things that actually helped me with the comfort was switching to different pads because the default pads that you get here with this headphone are fairly narrow, particularly at the front angled end. That made it so that the already loose fit was even looser. When I swapped to these pads, which I will talk about in a moment, that really did help make it more secure on my head. Just another note here, the cable is not great. This is the cable here. It's a flat cable. Not a fan of that. This thing tangles like crazy. Maybe just use a different kind of cable because you got 3.5 millimeter connectors on the cup side. All right, now let's talk about the sound. For drivability, I'll put the specs up on the screen here, but I measured the impedance for this and it is linear impedance. So you should be fine with most amplifiers. You're not going to dramatically change the sound by running it from higher output impedance sources, but this one is also a little bit harder to drive than your average headphone that's coming out these days, at least to get it loud enough. And actually, if you're unsure about the power requirements that you need for a headphone, we have a power calculator that is listed up on headphones.com. That has just recently been overhauled and looks really nice, so check that out. That'll be linked in the description. And speaking of headphones.com, this is probably the best segue that I could do to our channel sponsor, who makes all these videos possible. Headphones.com is, of course, a great place to learn about and buy headphones. They make it possible for us to have access to the gear that we review, the measurement equipment that we use. They make it possible for us to speak our minds about these products, to say it like it is, and not gloss over the negatives. So, if you find any of this stuff valuable, if you find it interesting, if you want to support this kind of initiative, consider headphones.com the next time you're in the market for new audio gear. Okay, let's go back to the video. So, the Para 2. Now, for sound quality with this one, what's most interesting to me is what you can do with different pads. And that's because the driver here is very good. Now, with that said, the default sound signature that you get here with the pads that it comes with, this sounds very similar to the Cosmo, just a little bit brighter, right? So it's got a bit more treble energy. And in my view, that's actually not great. I actually really like the overall treble level that this has. This sounds very detailed. It sounds spacious. It does all of those, again, subjectively desirable audiophile things, that sort of plucked character that I've called it in the past. And it sounds good. But in combination with the rest of its sound signature for the mids and for the upper mids, this one can come across a bit too lean for me. So while it's great for jazz music, instrumental music, like this is an absolute detail monster for certain recordings, like the recordings from Adam Baldiach, sort of, you know, violin, string, viola kind of stuff. It's insane for that. I find it lacks the kind of body and warmth that you would need to make that sound signature really work for a wider range of music. So I find vocals can come across a little bit on the lean side. There's a bit of sort of a hollow character to certain types of tones where they would benefit from a little bit more gumption down low. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the bass here. Actually, I think the bass is, it has the potential to be exceptional. I'll just put it that way. But the way that the sound signature, again, with these default pads comes across is just a little bit on the disjointed side, where on the Cosmo, I find it to be a bit more refined and less wonky because it's a bit darker in the treble. Somehow on the Cosmo, that balance worked a little bit better. And the Cosmo could already sound a little bit lean sometimes because there was a bit of a forwardness to, you know, 1 to 2 kilohertz, that whole range. And the same is true for the Para 2. It's just that now it also has more treble. So to me, the default sound signature here is kind of more just like a specialist and not something that's particularly versatile or a great all-rounder, unless you EQ, of course. Now, with that said, as soon as I started swapping pads, That's where the real magic of this headphone starts to come in. And this is actually one of the best sounding headphones when I put these mystery pads on here. Should I tell you what the pads are? Okay, so these pads are actually the FiiO FT1 Pro pads. And I'm a bit sad that I can't just like go out and recommend those. It's not something that they offer with the product, unfortunately. So let's dive into the data here. And I'm showing you guys this on the B&K 5128 with all the positional variation that this has. And if you guys are new to reading any of this, this is essentially the preference bounds that have been lifted from the Harman Research. That dotted line you see in the middle there, that's tilted diffuse field by about 10 dB. And it is more likely that things will be found palatable if they fall somewhere within this range. You can see that for the Para 2, it has some of these same quirks and features and colorations that the Moondrop Cosmo also has. So it has a bit of that flare at around 1 to 2 kHz. And this is in part what makes this headphone sound lean. This combined with the more downward sloping bass response that this has, all the way down into the low mids and into the bass, it's still well extended, it still goes all the way into the sub bass, it's just that you would like to see a little bit more bass energy there, or low frequency energy in general, to kind of balance this out with this more forward character at around 1kHz. So I find what this does is it kind of accentuates certain harmonics within the music, and this can lead to an extra sense of detail, but that comes at the cost of leanness because the fundamental is not as present. But again, this is where I find the overall treble level to be quite good. It's just that you can't look at this stuff in isolation. You have to kind of look at it in relation to everything else. And this makes the overall sound signature sound a little bit on the bright side, a little lean, a little bright, even though it's not obviously so from the data. And this is also where, let's compare to the Cosmo now, and you can see that, you know, the Cosmo is not quite as bright there in the treble, even though the sound signature is pretty similar. And this is kind of what makes the Cosmo work a little bit. It's definitely on the more colored side being a bit darker, but that is a better balance with the more lean kind of low frequency response that that headphone has. and for the Para 2 it doesn't come across quite as balanced for the entire sound signature even though I prefer the treble level that this has. Now let me show you how this measures with the FiiO FT1 Pro pads and again I tried this with the Cosmo as well and it was also excellent. So with these pads it kind of smooths everything out a bit in the treble and then it also accentuates the upper treble a little bit more. That's the one thing that I think might be a bit much for some people with these pads but for the rest of the treble it is overall more balanced and you'll note this doesn't have the same kind of forward character at around one kilohertz one to two kilohertz that you get with the default pads so this to my ear mostly fixes the leanness problem and you'll note this also gives it a little bit more low frequency energy which is nice you can actually increase that even more by introducing some kind of leak so if you wear glasses this is going to be even more bass and i find that with these pads that can kind of happen a little bit more easily given the nature of these pads and that's where this driver is very good So for the nerdier sides of things, this driver has a very low resonance frequency. It's got a massive diaphragm with a massive moving surface area. And this allows them to have a very low resonance frequency, meaning that if you break the seal, the bass doesn't just disappear. It actually goes up, it boosts, similar to what you get with the Hi-Fi Man headphones. So because of these acoustic characteristics to do with the driver here, this opens up the potential for this kind of sound signature to be so many different things. And again, with these pads, the FT1 Pro pads, it sounds like, it sounds almost kind of like Susvara-like. And that's kind of crazy, to me at least. It sounds very good. Now again, that's cheating because I have an FT1 Pro here and I was able to do this. There's all kinds of other pads that you could use because the pad mounting system for this is just a magnetic metal plate that you just put into whatever pads you want that are round and fit it. And then you just pop it on, right? It's a very easy, simple pad swap system. So if you were the kind of person who would ever want to get into pad swapping, this is an excellent candidate for it. And the pads that I'm actually going to recommend for this are the Yaxi Comfort pads that I believe are meant for the Fostex TH something. I'll put it on the screen here. No affiliates or anything like that. That's just what these are. And those are the ones that I recommend for the Cosmo as well. They do the same thing. They make it more comfortable and they kind of linearize the sound a little bit. Now, of course, The other thing that you could do here is you could just EQ it. That would be the free way to do this. And I recommend doing that, of course. I had no trouble EQing this headphone. But also, it's one that has such good acoustic properties for the driver that you also, like, you could get this to sound however you would want, right? You can give it more bass energy by introducing a leak somehow. You can give it more treble energy. You can kind of fix that forward character at around 1kHz in the mids, right, if you want to do that. There's all kinds of stuff you could do with this acoustically with different pads. And so that's why I love this platform for the driver. And quite frankly, that's the most impressive thing to me about this headphone. It's what you can do with it. So if you're interested in more of those measurements, so if you want to see what this looks like with the leak or some of the distortion measurements, I'll leave that link in the description below. But suffice to say, I'm impressed by the driver. And the default sound signature is interesting, but kind of wonky at the same time for certain parts of it. And overall, I think the Cosmo is still just a little bit better. To give you a sense of how this compares, this is not a planar like what you get with the typical Hi-Fi Man sound signatures. It's also not a planar that sounds like, you know, the Odyssey ones. This is, again, just like the Cosmo, a planar that sounds kind of more like a Focal sound signature combined with an Odyssey sound signature. It's something along those lines. And it does something unique. It's definitely got some colorations going on, but they are done in a mostly tasteful way that can really work with certain genres of music, even if they're not quite as versatile as I would like. But that's where pad swapping comes in and you get that versatility should you want it. And actually, for me, I would take this headphone over most at $500. Again, not for any sense of neutrality or even spectral balance or anything like that. But because it does some things a bit wonky, and for the genres that I happen to listen to a lot, this is some of the most detailed kind of sound that you can get, I find at least. And then of course, all the potential in the world for the drivers. So my conclusion of this one's a bit weird, because it's like, I would not necessarily recommend this for everybody, for all genres of music. I think you're probably better off getting something like a Sennheiser HD 550 if you just want neutrality or something like that. But if you're looking for a particular kind of flavor that is hyper detailed and spacious and all that kind of stuff, this is one that does a lot of those qualities very well. This one's a little bit more like blue cheese. It's going to work really well for some things, but it's not going to be for everybody. So that's kind of how I see it. And for all the folks out there who complain about everything kind of shooting for the same kind of sound signature because that's what the graphs tell us is good. check this one out because it's doing something a bit different and it's very good. Okay, that's going to do it for this review. Once again, if you're interested in all the measurements of this headphone, that will be linked in the description at forum.headphones.com, where other folks will be chiming in as well. And if you want to chat with me or other like-minded audio folks, you can do so in our Discord also linked below. Until next time, I'll see you guys later. Bye for now.