Pros: Comfortable, detailed, big soundstage
Cons: Artificial sounding, anemic in the bass, overpriced
I have listened to the HD800 twice, and I never really warmed up to it. Its clarity and resolution sounds artificial to me instead of natural, and it has no authority in the sub-bass region. I'm one of those people who simply cannot consider a pair of headphones to be "amazing" or "the best of" if it's lacking neutrality in a chunk of the frequency range. A amazing pair of headphones should sound like a full-range speaker system that reaches down to 30Hz and remains substantial and authoritative--anything less than that is not "amazing" to me. It's sort of like if a girl is really hot with an awesome body, but her ass is flat, barely able to fill any pair of jeans--would that still be considered an amazing body? Not in my book. Even the HD650 has more sub-bass extension and weight, and it costs far less than the flagship model. I understand that there's a portion of people whose idea of neutral bass is in fact anemic bass to me. I stand my ground on the issue because anyone who's ever heard a full-range speaker system that reaches down to 30Hz or lower, will know that neutral bass in in fact quite authoritative and substantial. There are headphones out there that can reach down low and feel very authoritative--for example, the Stax 007MKII, Denon AH-D7000, Audio-Technica ATH-M50, ES-10...etc, so it's not like the HD800 is somehow limited by physics--it was a choice the engineers at Sennheiser made.



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