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Banned
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HD600
My favorite headphone, it is smooth, accurate, and enjoyable. The bass is solid down to 40 hz as far as I can tell and the treble is extended and controlled out to 18,000 hz, what it does beyond either of those extremes I cannot hear well.
I think these headphones sound the best with piano and VERY well recorded stringed instruments. I am not so impressed with their rendition of symphonic pieces, they tend to sound just a little small, but it may be the nature of the headphone soundstage that creates most of that effect. With the solo piano however there is IMO not a single headphone that can touch what this headphone will do, crisp yet softly beautiful, ethereal but unflinching. Chopin's Grand Pollonaise is delicate, and meaningful. His preludes soar as easily as they come to a tender rest. The decay of the notes is magical, there is a sensation of life to each note, and that translates into a sensation of reality, a striking reality that is sometimes hypnotically beautiful. For strings, they do tend to overemphasize bad recordings. Violins sound the best descending down to cellos. My favorite instrument is the cello and it sounds fantastic with the headphones but sometimes they do get a little strained when the musician really digs in and plays aggressively.
Female vocals are also an incredible strength of these headphones. Eva Cassidy's carefully intoned voice caresses in a way that is more than just real, it's like she is transported into your room, into your bed, lying there with you as she sings intimately in your ear. The nature of a soft exhale, the sound of air in the throat, the sound of the lungs, its all there, but its there in a way that shimmers. Every aspect of the process which results in a voice, from the exhalation of air, to the flitting tongue, is reproduced in a way that combines to create a sound that is more than just a bunch of details.
For electronic music these are also excellent, but you start to see places where these cans fall somewhat short. They are fantastic for rendering complex electronica or anything with a heavy beat. But when you get into the grunge of a TB 303 the sound is just a little to clean, it's like the headphones take away a little bit of the musical noise that made the 303 such a fantastic instrument.
For rock these vary between great and bad. Rock recordings are often equalized very weirdly and the HD600's can reveal this unforgivingly. Also, the grunge of the guitars often is just too smooth. For an indie-rock group like pavement however, the sound is near perfect, the vocals sit up front and are finely detailed, the drums pop with authority, and the guitars which are not too grungy sound full bodied... But still, there is a certain "jive" which is missing.
These are also great for ambient music. Anything with slowly rising and falling synths will be portrayed very well. If an ambient synth had a voice in the natural world, like the sound of wind, it would be presented by these headphones with a scary realness.
In short, these headphones really excell with calm music, with slow moving music or fast music that has explicitly defined notes such as a synthesized bass line, or a drum solo, and with musical textures that are fine to very fine!! Heavy course textures such as what would be found in grunge rock tend to be smoothed out to much to be fully enjoyable.
These headphones are very revealing and will only shine their brightest with the best components. The most important things are in fact the source and the amp. It's a battle between those two, but I think the amp wins out in the case of the HD600's by a hair. They simply require alot of power for headphones. Not for high volume but for low volume listening where they can sound dynamically compressed if not properly powered!! This is very important, alot of people post about compressed sound, hashed highs, etc... With the proper amp this dissapears greatly! I have owned the Melos SHA-1 and I believe that even it lacks the power to fully drive the HD600 at very low volumes. People do not realize that these headphones will NOT sound great out of your soundcard or equivalent piece of **** amplifier, if you think they do you do NOT know what trully awesome sound is!
I also own the Cardas cable and can state with ease that it is not only an upgrade to the stock cable but to the Clou Red as well which I owned previously. It helps to give a faster more detailed bass response, somewhat deeper bass, and less of a midbass hump. It also gives a fuller sound to the midrange and a more extended less hashed sounding high end. Improvements across the board IMO.
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