The CD3000s are definitely on the bright side. Think a more refined V6 literally. The CD1700s on the other hand are on the dark side.

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This is true until you mod them.
Then they are far from dark but I would not call them bright.
Those Beyerdynamics at the show were bright.
Are the 3Ks brighter then a 831 or 931?

Could it be that to some a phone might be perceived as "brighter" than another phone with the same treble response if the mids and/or bass are recessed on one but not the other?

To add confusion, the CD3000 sounded bright to me coming out of the MOH at the Dallas stop of the HeadRoom tour.

I really thought it was as Jude described--bright, reverby.

Well, at least that appears to have resolved that argument

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If the CD3000 was being fed a signal it didn't like, it can go overboard with brightness...and that overbright signal can echo unnaturally in the chamber. It's also possible to hear a sucked-out midrange in this type of situation. A correction of the amp/source/interconnects fixes this. What you're reporting is a normal bad setup of the CD3000. "Dark" and "muffled" is something else.

Hirsch

I do understand what you're talking about when you do this whole synergy thing. What confuses me a bit though, is why Sony would make a headphone like this when (as far as I know) none of the associated equipment Sony makes would drive the headphone properly. Since it's a low impedance headphone, I think it's reasonable to think most of Sony's customers use the headphone without a headphone amp and probably with other Sony products such as a Sony ES CD player. Just seems like if you had a big company, you'd at least make sure your products sounded good together--even if they didn't with your competitor's products.

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Kelly does have a point.

Audio Technica does make a headphone amp for their top of the line cans.
Does Sony really think someone will just take the R10 and hook it up to the headphone jack of an ES CD player?

the r10 couldn't have been designed with headphone-amp use in mind if it came out in 1989, right?

i don't think even headroom was around then.

Well, to be fair to Sony

Sony did release a headphone amp for the R10 when it was 1st released, but they have stop producing it long ago.

Of course, this might be just heresy, I will try to find info on this amp.

I was actually thinking more about the CD3000 than the R10. It's the CD3000 that Hirsch says doesn't sound good on what I'm thinking he's calling "flat" output systems--ie, it needs something a little on the dark side to not sound bad because of its brightness. Sony's equipment doesn't really fit this bill, typically speaking.

The R10 reportedly sounds good out of a standard headphone jack on Sony equipment. I mean, I think that guy who bought an R10 and wouldn't even consider a headphone amp was a little... lacking upstairs, but I can certainly imagine that a lot of people buy the R10 and plug it into something like an SCD-1 directly.

The CD3000, though? It's a $600 headphone. If you plug it into any of the Sony ES players--they're likely largest audience, from what Hirsch says, it probably wouldn't sound right. I'm just trying to figure out what they were thinking here.

The CD3000 that I once had sounded much better out of the headphone jack on my ES player than it did through the headmaster. The headmaster is really revealing and helped in broadening out the soundstage but made things a bit too revealing, really fatiguing to listen to. I would get a headache after around an hr of listening to the CD3000 w/ the amp... The pair of CD3000s I had (chych's old pair) isn't bright at all, and it also isn't muffled.

Hi all,

The R10 doesn't have an accompanying headphone amp as such.

It does have an adaptor which connects to the speaker outputs of a normal amplifier. This is the Sony DRC-R10 - priced at Y50000 the last time I checked.

--Jatinder

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That is most likely what I read about on these boards, since I didn't find any info on a Sony Headphone Amp.

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I'm not entirely certain you do. I was dragged into it kicking and screaming by the CD3000 and the ART DI/O. You remember I said that the CD3000 could have a sucked out midrange. Well, that was cured by replacing the op amp on the DI/O...but that didn't affect any of my other headphones. Same amp, same interconnects, Sony midrange fills in, Senn and Grado are untouched. What is going on here? Any pretense that I could predict performance based on a single component goes away. Why would a source improvement affect only one out of three headphones? The only single component answer I can come up with is that the CD3000 is more revealing than the SR-200 or the HD-600, and that the flaw was present in all of them, but only detected by the Sony's increased resolution. I'm not ready to buy that line of argument yet.

CD3000 works beautifully with X-Can and ZOTL. Sucks with Melos and RA-1. I'm completely unwilling to generalize the sound to anything I haven't personally heard. The X-Can is far from dark, but sounds great with the CD3000, so it's not necessary to use a dark system to get it to sound good. It's a puzzle.

Hirsch

Maybe it's more of a matter of matching peaks and valleys than overall characters. Ie, if the CD3000 had a peak at 10khz and the X-Cans dipped at 10k--whatever, just a thought.