Review on:

Sennheiser IE 8 In-Ear Headphones

Audio Quality

Comfort

Design

Isolation

Value

miniero’s Rating

Purchase Date: January 2012

Purchase Price: $340.00

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Community Rating:

(31 reviews)

First impressions

IE 8 is really an outstanding in-ear phone. It's built for an almost perfect sound reproduction, but it's not what I thought when I used them for the first time.

Burn-in is a highly discussed topic. Some say it works and some swear it's ********. But this is the truth: an IE 8 needs some time to sound great. During the first hours they sounded terrible just like those Apple earbuds. They were too bright, had an annoying bass and the mids weren't there. All these issues were gone after the second day of almost continuous use.

When they got home and I unboxed them, I was a little amazed (must confess). But when I saw all those pairs of earplugs I went crazy and thought: now I've got something that really fits inside my ears (they're little and earplugs like those ones shipped with The Plug simply won't fit).

The earplugs and the sound tuning

I heard lots of people saying the sound tuning feature is almost useless, but in certain conditions it's not true. All those who said that also said IE 8 has poor sound isolation. Sound tuning makes a huge difference in bass response, but it's this feature that showed me how tricky is to find the correct earplug. And I tried all the pairs.

Lots of the pairs seem to fit perfectly. And this happens because all of them are slightly different in size and shape, except for some. Here, the secret I found is to stay in a noisy environment and try each pair until you decide the pair that seems to attenuate the most of the external sound. This pair will be the one that seems to apply a little (only a little) pressure inside the ear canals and they will be uncomfortable until you get used to them.

Every plug that doesn't fit perfectly will give you an undesired sound with too bright highs and almost no bass. Sometimes they can also pop out your ear canals.

Once you find the perfect plugs, it's time to play with the sound tuning feature. Try the lowest if you love electronic music and the highest if you love metal. The tuning will depend on your feelings and preferences, but it works and it's certainly an awesome feature.

Basses, highs and soundstage

Mids are simply perfect! Basses and highs are tricky due to the earplug and sound tuning as I described, but they're incredible too.

The bass response may drive you crazy. It's crisp and profound, but not excessive. It will depend, however, on the sound source you use. Just like lots of other phones, bad sound source means awful bass response. If you are a lucky owner of a high end cell phone, a decent media player or a good sound card, it'll sound amazing. But if you use recent iPods, don't bother giving IE 8 a try, they'll sound only a little better than usual and cheaper earphones.

For some recordings, the highs seem to be brighter than the expected, but never annoying. The highs definition is incredible and even the specifications saying it reproduces until 20kHz, IE 8 could reproduce a 22kHz sine wave. I didn't try higher frequencies, but since I only listen to 44.1kHz FLACs on my mobile devices, there was no need to try it.

Soundstage is good, nothing more. I heard people saying it's fantastic, but that's not what I could feel. Not fantastic, but good… sufficient and not congested. It's fantastic for a pair of in-ear, anyway.

Audio sources used (DAC) for my conclusions

Wolfson WM8903 (Motorola Atrix 4G)

Texas Instruments TWL6040 (Samsung Galaxy Nexus)

nVidia MCP89 (Apple Mac Mini, 2011 model)

A bad one I don't know (Apple iPod Shuffle 3G)

Intel High Definition Audio (the worst ever)