The Sennheiser IE800
What hasn't been said about these flagship earphones from Sennheiser?
My first wow moment for these was at a headfi meet sponsored by Sennheiser at the Great Russell Hotel all the way back in April 2014. This was around the launch time of the IE800s and was also the first time I was introduced to the Astell and Kern AK100. Club Orpheus were there in droves and one of the reps handed me an IE800 and AK100 and I was stunned.
I subsequently bought both. Not there and then , but the need to acquire weighed heavily on me until the feeling was too much to resist anymore.
The IE800 is still the flagship IEM for Sennheiser and is still a single driver. This in the age of more and more drivers marked a real risk for Sennheiser to convince the Audio buying public that 1 was as good as 12.
But remarkably , it is.
Where other companies have the inherent headache of crossover distortions , Sennheiser don't. Where other companies are buying in from the driver factories of the World and trying to fit their sound signature into their own designs , Sennheiser made their own.
And what a driver they have produced.
The reproduction of these IEMs still amazes to this day. Whilst there is undoubtedly strong competition out there, at £599 the IE800s no longer look exorbitantly expensive as an endgame portable solution for a smart phone or maybe as I shall show you later on , through a pretty nifty sounding DAP/Mojo/Speaker amp setup.
My belief is this ; if you have the time and the daftness to do it , be over the top. I shall not be giving a review based on my learnt experiences - although clearly you can't unlearn something. I shall be giving you a taste of what the IE800 can do against some competitors on a system comprising of
@dill3000's unbelievable DIY built First Watt F5 power amp coupled to a Chord Mojo , coupled to a beauty of a cable my brother made for me using some Van den Hul cabling and neutrik connectors all going out to a speaker terminal to balanced cable custom built by
@dill3000
For the review I have used a custom made balanced to single ended adapter , again by
@dill3000 which I've plugged a 3.5 into . Simple!
What we have here is an ultra powerful but also ultra revealing system which will put the IE800s to an extreme test.
Needless to say , if you are trying this at home - keep the volume down very low indeed. The IE800s go loud through a smartphone , let a 50 Watt Per Channel Speaker Amp have it's way with them and they will be ravaged in a Medieval Crusades way that they may never come back from!
The method in this madness is the opportunity I have to show you fine headfiers how a top tier IEM performs when put into a high end setup as opposed to a smartphone. The IE800s will perform under these less stringent conditions but something this special needs pushing.
With a slightly sweating nervousness (the temperature of the Mini Beast can reach towards 50 degrees) I carefully switched things on. The results are impressive. So much so I treated myself to an extended listen to these before testing them against rival factions.
I shall divide my sound impressions into the following categories and try and explain the almost inexplicable and certainly subjective, hearing experience in as simple terms as I can , avoiding as much jargon as I can. There will be no cream mentioned in my findings or any other kind of dairy products. I am trying to be disciplined in my descriptions without becoming scientific. Or boring.
The categories are
Bass, Mids and Highs, Clarity and Soundstage.
I shall use this as a basis for my reviews because this is how I listen critically to my kit, the other stuff for me causes confusion.
Bass
The bass of the IE800s. Bear in mind this is from one tiny driver. I think sennheiser got the bass just right in the mix. Axell Grell , at a headfi meet in 2013 in London , said that he had boosted the low frequency response to allow for the music to come through past the sounds of commuting of walking of travelling and off the road. So there is a deliberate bass hump. The impact in a quiet listening environment is fantastic. It's enough to make you sit up but not enough to drown out the rest of the mix or cause a mini war between the frequency range. The bass is accurate and has no boom but has punch.
Mids and Highs
The natural reproduction of strings being played the clarity of vocals and the hitting of cymbals is often how my ears are drawn to the quality of the kit I have. Guitar drums singer and keyboards all joing together when a song peaks is a good place to look for harshness.
There are no IEMs I have heard that do these finer than the IE800s. There is a natural effortless sound through the mids into the highs and yet there is an extension to the highs that adds a level of detail to the overall signature that is seldom noticed in other In Ears.
Soundstage
The space in between the instruments and the size of the picture in my head that I have of the recording is how I work out the soundstage. The IE800s excel at this , there is so much detail in the highs and mids the sound stage is fit for a flagship model.
Comparisons
And talking of flagship models I checked the Sennheiser IE800s against 2 similarly priced IEMs I happen to own.
The ACS Encore Studio Custom IEMs have 5 drivers. The bass on these are superb , better than the IE800s even and they as customs have far more isolation and need far less volume. The mids and highs are not as impressive as the bass and are slightly rolled off , in my opinion making the soundstage more intimate. I can of course wear the customs without problems whilst I'm running whereas this is not an option for my IE800s.
The
oBravo Erib 2a is a dual hybrid diver IEM it is the world's first neodymium driver combined with a planar magnetic tweeter in an earphone. The low bass frequency has no punch but the mid and high bass has lots of impact as do the mids on these. They have not as good a low bass impact as the IE800s but more impact in the higher bass and mids. The treble , as good as it is , (and it is great) still does not outshine the IE800s. Obravo have done well to come so close to Sennheiser at a similar price (these retail at £579.99) but they are not the IE800 beaters I thought they were in the first month I had them. The soundstage of the Erib 2a is a similar size to that of the IE800s.
The Fit
Herein lies the problem, or if like me you love these enough , the challenge. Whole reams of threads have been devoted to answering the question as to what can be done to make the IE800s stop falling out of the ears.
The 4 problems with the Senns are :
the weight of the Kevlar cables
their stiffness
the lack of length between the driver attachment and the clip on cable attachment
the tips supplied are a patented design so no others will fit
the cable is not detachable from the drivers
The solutions are possible:
Get them recabled - but who would do this given their initial price?
Get custom ear sleeves made - I did this , through Snugs, but the Snugs after months of hard work and research done by me were not as good sounding as the Senn tips
New innovations - there are silicon wings which were sent with the oBravos which help to keep these and other large IEMs in place. Maybe some such customisation might do the trick?
Put up with them - that has it's level of wisdom too , but it does mean the IE800s are likely to be only used when sat down, and how many of us do that for too long?
Conclusion
Perfection is a very hard thing to achieve . The Sound Quality of these IEMs , for an IEM , is close to perfection. The bass mids and highs and soundstage are wonderful, no question in my mind. But an IEM has to fulfil a specific purpose and that is to be used out and about. The IE800s are not versatile enough to be put in the perfect bracket. But if anyone gets them modified to enable that, they have a world beater on their hands
