REVIEW: Sennheiser HD 800 - Page 7

The HD800 are much better 100 hrs burn-in ... before that, it's too new and highs are metallic and too crystal clear. After 100 hrs, this calm down a lot.

I have now 200+ hrs ... and not notice much improvement over 100 hrs.

Thanks again for your response its nice to get a proper review on these phones.

Yes I have read your review of the SRG and noted that you describe the bass as 'light'. To be honest it is not an opinion I share but I come from a SS background and you favour tubes so I think a big bass is your flavour where as I prefer a fast, punchy, controlled bass. I actually prefer the clarity, speed and control of the ALO-780 & K701's bass to the HD650 most of the time (except on bass light material).

Short answer, no. If it is "true" transparency and detail, the more the better. To me, the live concert experience has to be the ultimate arbiter. In the concert hall, there is just "is-ness", you can choose to focus on a particular instrumental choir or lay back for the wash of sound, listen intellectually or emotionally as your mode and the composer, conductor and musicians intentions direct. The closer we come to this "is-ness" in our stereos, the closer to that state we get.

And modern technology has surprisingly little to do with it except as servant. The Quad ESL-57 and, say, Marantz 8b would have gotten you suprisingly close to this "is-ness" back in the early 1960's (and actually still will today).

As far as lawnmowers go, I may not have a golden ear, but I definitely don't have a green thumb.

Thanks for the very detailed and unbiased review

I agree with greggf.

Using a concert as a baseline is exactly why detailed and transparent headphone can sound unmusical. In a concert hall we don't hear pages turning, chairs shifting, groans, emptying spit, and heaven knows what else. A lot of this stuff is on recordings and some headphones bring this stuff out more than others. Hearing these sounds is interesting when you first hear them on a recording, but some people (me included) get tired of them. I've never noticed the strings of a string instrument vibrating in a concert, but it seems even that can be recorded and presented on a really transparent pair of headphones. Do I want to hear that much detail?

I'll take for examples some of the recordings of Glenn Gould. Glenn Gould, while a brilliant pianist, made a number of whack, groans, hums, and who knows what else as he played. This stuff is audible on a lot of eqiupment, even the really inexpensive stuff. A lot of people found all this stuff distracting in the recordings. In a large hall you probably would not have heard all his noises over the volume of the Piano.

For one headphone to make them more obvious while another does not indicates one or both (probably both) of the headphones are colored in some way. If this coloration doesn't suit you you'll find the experience of that headphone to be very unmusical. If you combine that coloration with always hearing some guy moaning "ughhh ugghh" you might find the experience terribly irritating.

**edit**

Let's not forget, it would be warm and magical world if every album recorded/mastered/produced was made perfectly. But even some of the good stuff can have problems. I'm not a professional recording engineer. Do I want to hear these problem?

Of course, you also have stuff at the opposite end. A Headphone can forgive so many details it ends up sounding muffled and dull.

Great review Skylab. Thanks!

To my ears absolutely.

I was listening to the HD-800s last night. I was struck by the incredible low level resolution and sense of subtle texture on vocals. I was also struck by their lack of lower midrange body and weight. These are, to my way of thinking, very "audiophile" headphones. They reveal lots of information and the bass and lower midrange are a bit threadbare. It's as though they were voiced that way intentionally to heighten the level of detail retrieval. After an hour of "looking at the sound" for details sake I grew pretty bored and switched to the PS1000s. Voices suddenly had proper weight and body. Images were smaller and the absolute detail level is slightly lower, but the Grados sound like what I hear when I hear live music. The Senns sound like what I hear from a good high end audio system that has been assembled to maximize transparency and imaging at the expense of other attributes.

Also the description that has been offered of the presentation being forward deserves some amplification. I haven't heard a headphone that pushes lead vocalists so far forward with such size before. To the point that if you crank them to lifelike levels they can literally become overbearing. I was listening to Rickie Lee Jones Naked Songs disc the other night. I turned up the wick a bit and quickly found myself feeling as though my head was the microphone and a gaint 5 foot diameter mouth was singing into my face at a distance of 6 inches. Bizarre. I think the whole image size issue must have something to do with the giant ring driver. It seems to make everything "big".

And to be clear, I'm not a "row 30" guy. I have always set up my main speaker rig for near-field listening to maxiamize immediacy and drama. This is something else all together.

Joe

Skylab, well written review!

When you speak of perpective from different rows in a concert hall, is it the specifically the frequency balance you are talking about? I ask because I have also attribute soundstage to the concert hall perspective. For example, Grado headphones have always been described as a "front row center" headphone due to their small soundstage just as much as their aggressive frequency balance. On the other hand, the R10 in my experience is "back of hall" due to the massive soundstage yet there is no lack of treble energy. Does the soundstage of the HD800 have any effect on the concert hall perspective in your opinion?

Excellent review! Now I definitely need to try these out

Thank you Skylab for such an informative review!!!!

Yes, very true. I addressed this in a previous post in another thread, but let me just say here that there is a range of possible balances that correspond to different seating in the hall. I say any of these perspectives are fair game as to preference.

The "row A" sound of some Grado's, the "row G" sound of the HD-800's, the "row S" sound of the HD-650 and the "row Y" sound of the DT-48S are all valid choices (I hesitate to use the word "colors" only because of the negative connotation that word has). Personal preference prevails here just as it would if you were picking a seat for a concert. But I would argue any of these balances can constitute "concert hall reality" (if the rest of the phones characteristics are up to snuff).

Which is why the whole issue of treble balance is so problimatical and controversial, both in phones and speakers. Personally, I take them for what they are. I like the HD-800 front half the the hall sound, but also like the DT-48 and its decidedly rear hall sound. They are different perspectives on the same reality to me since the phones are so good otherwise.

wow, excellent review. You are truly one of the head-fi greats, skylab.

LOL, I half expect a bit of an increase in DX1000 sales after this review

The soundstage heard at a concert as a function of seating distance is dominated by basically two things:

A) Basic geometry. The included angle for a closer listener will be wider than a more distant listener, so will seem wider.

B) Ratio of direct sound to reflected sound. A closer seat will have a higher percentage of direct sound leading to more "precision" in terms of location (and more treble), a more distant seat has a higher percentage of reflected sound causing a deeper soundstage effect but a more diffuse sense of location.

Unfortunately, headphone soundstaging is inherently wrong, coming from basically "inside your head" and ear to ear (leaving binaural recordings aside). Phones like the HD-800, Ultrasone, K-1000 and Sony MDR-F1 and PFR-V1 (an interesting headphone) take a stab at improving on this to varying degrees of success, but still, soundstage is really the realm of speakers, I think.