Livin' in my headphones...
These are the single greatest pair of portable headphones I've ever experienced.
When I say "experienced," I mean it. As someone who takes music as seriously as I do, I know that a good pair of headphones allow you to not just listen to music, but you get to experience it. If you're listening to a pair of muffled, cheap headphones, you're simply not hearing the whole song, and that's the honest to God truth. Even if you aren't an audiophile, you'll still notice the difference when you start hearing things in songs you simply didn't hear before.
These Sennheisers are un-fucking-believable for the price I paid for them ($42, shipped). They blow lots of larger, closed-ear headphones out of the fucking water. I've never heard such pristine sound coming from a pair of headphones. They sound at least twice as loud as the pair of cheap Sony's I had before and the difference in bass response is like night and day, apples and oranges, black and white, or any other opposing metaphor you can think of.
I'm giving them the full-on testing treatment with my iPod right now. I've got the iPod on full volume to test if the phones will distort, and so far not a single song has been able to reproduce the ugly, obnoxious rattling effect I got with those Sony's time and time again. The best test was The Album Leaf's "Red-Eye". The bass in that song is incredibly heavy and deep, but even at full volume there was no real distortion. The cups rattled a tiny bit, but nowhere NEAR the point my Sony's did (it was so bad I couldn't listen to the song about 3/4 volume on the Sony's because all I heard was rattling).
I've listened to selected tracks from BT's This Binary Universe and I discovered elements in the music I'd never heard before. The ending of "The Antikythera Mechanism" was really impressive. The song was meant to be heard in 5.1 and I always thought that the 2.0 stereo downmix that appears on the CD sounded like a mess when the song climaxes with some insane stutter edits. In these phones, though, it replicated the 5.1 sound much better. It obviously still wasn't nearly as good as hearing the album in DTS, the way it was intended, but it didn't just sound like a jumbled mash-up. There was very distinct stereo shifting, certain parts came through clearer in the foreground and certain parts were obviously mixed further down, but it was all audible instead of muffled.
I'm listening to a range of music to see how they handle different styles and so far, they've delivered incredible results in every genre. I've never heard such punchy, deep bass and drum response out of portables in my entire life. The drum beats thump in your ears, just like they should. Quieter songs sound crystal clear. Guitars in rock music scream instead of crackling through the cups.
If there's any downside, it's that sometimes they're almost TOO pristine. In older CDs I have ripped, you can hear every imperfection in the mastering and all the hiss and fuzz. Prince's 1999 is the best example, as the CD was actually mastered right off vinyl and it becomes PAINFULLY obvious in these phones. Really, that's more of a fault of the piss poor mastering than the headphones, but they sound so damn good that they bring out all those defects much more than cheaper headphones would.
Honest to God, if you care about music at all, you shouldn't be without a good pair of headphones anyways. For the price, you really can't go wrong with these babies. They're small, and they collapse nicely (like a pair of sunglasses) to make them easy to take with you on the go. They'll even sound good on a larger stereo system (if you've got the adapter). Unless you're a super heavy duty audiophile and you need a pair for $500+ headphones, these will suit entry level and average music fans, and even some of the more hardcore (like myself) who don't have the money to blow on super expensive cans.
When I say "experienced," I mean it. As someone who takes music as seriously as I do, I know that a good pair of headphones allow you to not just listen to music, but you get to experience it. If you're listening to a pair of muffled, cheap headphones, you're simply not hearing the whole song, and that's the honest to God truth. Even if you aren't an audiophile, you'll still notice the difference when you start hearing things in songs you simply didn't hear before.
These Sennheisers are un-fucking-believable for the price I paid for them ($42, shipped). They blow lots of larger, closed-ear headphones out of the fucking water. I've never heard such pristine sound coming from a pair of headphones. They sound at least twice as loud as the pair of cheap Sony's I had before and the difference in bass response is like night and day, apples and oranges, black and white, or any other opposing metaphor you can think of.
I'm giving them the full-on testing treatment with my iPod right now. I've got the iPod on full volume to test if the phones will distort, and so far not a single song has been able to reproduce the ugly, obnoxious rattling effect I got with those Sony's time and time again. The best test was The Album Leaf's "Red-Eye". The bass in that song is incredibly heavy and deep, but even at full volume there was no real distortion. The cups rattled a tiny bit, but nowhere NEAR the point my Sony's did (it was so bad I couldn't listen to the song about 3/4 volume on the Sony's because all I heard was rattling).
I've listened to selected tracks from BT's This Binary Universe and I discovered elements in the music I'd never heard before. The ending of "The Antikythera Mechanism" was really impressive. The song was meant to be heard in 5.1 and I always thought that the 2.0 stereo downmix that appears on the CD sounded like a mess when the song climaxes with some insane stutter edits. In these phones, though, it replicated the 5.1 sound much better. It obviously still wasn't nearly as good as hearing the album in DTS, the way it was intended, but it didn't just sound like a jumbled mash-up. There was very distinct stereo shifting, certain parts came through clearer in the foreground and certain parts were obviously mixed further down, but it was all audible instead of muffled.
I'm listening to a range of music to see how they handle different styles and so far, they've delivered incredible results in every genre. I've never heard such punchy, deep bass and drum response out of portables in my entire life. The drum beats thump in your ears, just like they should. Quieter songs sound crystal clear. Guitars in rock music scream instead of crackling through the cups.
If there's any downside, it's that sometimes they're almost TOO pristine. In older CDs I have ripped, you can hear every imperfection in the mastering and all the hiss and fuzz. Prince's 1999 is the best example, as the CD was actually mastered right off vinyl and it becomes PAINFULLY obvious in these phones. Really, that's more of a fault of the piss poor mastering than the headphones, but they sound so damn good that they bring out all those defects much more than cheaper headphones would.
Honest to God, if you care about music at all, you shouldn't be without a good pair of headphones anyways. For the price, you really can't go wrong with these babies. They're small, and they collapse nicely (like a pair of sunglasses) to make them easy to take with you on the go. They'll even sound good on a larger stereo system (if you've got the adapter). Unless you're a super heavy duty audiophile and you need a pair for $500+ headphones, these will suit entry level and average music fans, and even some of the more hardcore (like myself) who don't have the money to blow on super expensive cans.