Recording - November 2014 - 30

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

Blue first appeared in our magazine in
November 1996, in a small article about
then-Editor Nick Batzdorf's visit to what started out as a mic-refurbishing business. With a
factory in Latvia doing the heavy lifting and
an office in the Los Angeles area pairing mics
with buyers, Blue's intent was to take vintage
mics and restore them to fighting trim for use
in real-world studios rather than moldering
away in collections.
Not long after that, Blue started making its
own uniquely designed and cool-sounding
mics. We've premiered any number of Blue
products in our pages, including reviews of
the now-classic Mouse and Dragonfly mics
before anyone else got them, and we've
watched the firm expand into new areas:
mic preamplification with Robbie, USB miking with the Snowball, and podcast-friendly
I/O solutions for miking and monitoring
with the Yeti.

Out of the box
The Mo-Fi phones are very unusually
designed; rather than the usual padded
headband or spring-loaded sling that
adjusts to the skull, the Mo-Fi headband is a
5-piece articulated metal design with springloaded joints. The horizontal top piece with
its thick padding contains a dial to loosen or
tighten the tension in the two metal pieces at
the sides of the head, and the earcups themselves are mounted to joints that allow upand-down movement just above the ears.
The overall intent is a sturdy design that
conforms to any head shape.
The closed-back earcups themselves are teardrop-shaped to fit
the ears fairly closely, rather than
being round or oval. The luxuriously thick padding around the
earcups creates a tight seal
when combined with the spring

Blue Mo-Fi
For nearly a year, we've been waiting on
Blue's newest effort: a promised re-imagining
of headphones that Blue calls Mo-Fi. The wait
is over, the Mo-Fi headphones are here, and
here's what I found after living with a pair for
a few weeks.
From hi-fi to Mo-Fi
The guiding principle behind Mo-Fi is
simple, and relates directly to the idea
behind powered studio monitors and
active ribbon mics. If you put the critical
amplification stage inside the product,
right along with the moving transducer
(whether said transducer is a mic element
or a speaker), you can assure that they are
perfectly matched, no matter what they're
connected to.
That's what Blue purports to have done
with Mo-Fi. The headphones can operate as
an ordinary pair of passive cans, or you can
turn on the internal amp for more volume and
greater dynamic range. While Blue has been
pitching Mo-Fi to any listener who wants consistently great audio, the primary push is for
mobile listening-an attempt to overcome the
shortcomings of the relatively weak audio circuits in many mobile devices. With that in
mind, I tested the Mo-Fi with a variety of budget and high-end audio interfaces, and with
my Apple iPhone 5 and iPad Retina Mini.
30

RECORDING November 2014

The next revolution in headphone design is here... and....
action of the articulated frame, making
these the best-isolated headphones I've
heard in a long time. When listening at normal safe levels, no one standing near the listener will even be able to tell if they're on,
and they block outside audio better than
any headphone short of a dedicated isolation phone like the Direct Sound EX-29.
Both earcups have small green LEDs that
illuminate when the headphones are powered up and flash slowly when they're
plugged into the wall and charging. The
phones sense whether the earcups are close
to one another, turning themselves off when
you take them off. This prolongs the battery
life of the amp, which gives about 12 hours'
audio playback on a single charge (my
results matched that estimate reasonably
well) and takes 3 to 4 hours to charge fully.
The Mo-Fi comes with two straight
cables, a 1.2-meter cable with a standard
3-button iOS volume/pause control and a
3-meter cable sans controls. The cable
plugs into a deep socket on the left earcup,
and the other end is terminated in a standard TRS or TRRS minijack depending on
the cable chosen. A 1/4" TRS snap-on
adapter is included, along with a wall
charger, 1-meter micro-B USB cable for

charging the phones (the charging port is
on the left earcup near the cable socket),
airline 2-prong adaptor, and a large pouch
with a magnetic closure to carry it all.
Before we get to my listening sessions,
here are a few specs for your interest. The
Mo-Fi has drivers with a very generous 50
mm in diameter, a frequency response of 15
Hz to 20 kHz (no tolerances given), and a
42 ohm impedance. The internal amp
claims a Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise
below 0.004%, a Signal/Noise ratio
greater than 105 dB, and a power output of
240 mW, a pretty hefty jolt for something
strapped to your ears.
Switched Off, switched On, switched On+
The amp in the Mo-Fi is controlled by a
rotary Off/On/On+ switch that surrounds
the cable socket. When Off, this is a conventional passive headphone; when On,
the amp kicks in, and the On+ setting adds
a "fun/exciting" low-mid boost. The gain
structure is fixed-there's no volume control on the phones themselves.
Blue warns in several places that the amp
makes these headphones really loud, and
they're not kidding. As a rough rule of
thumb, I found that on my iPhone and iPad,

Recording - November 2014

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