Shure SRH440 Impression - Page 7

My new impression is up. Enjoy the reading!

Ordered a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi USB for two reasons: I would like even better sound, and Creative is one of the best names in the industry of sound cards, and two, I'm tired of listening to music through my laptop's sound card. Ever since I built my desktop, it's no longer enjoyable to listen to music through my laptop. I'll post my impression of the XB700 sometime during this weekend (the card should come in on Thursday).

Haven't heard either headphones, but I read on a review site that the MDR-V6's bass is more present but not as clear as the SRH440. As for the Pioneer, I have no idea...

Edit:
Here's the review site, with two other headphones:
Right Between Your Ears » A Review of Four ~$100 Sealed Headphones: Denon AH-D1001, Sennheiser HD 448, Shure SRH440, and Sony MDR-V6 – Part 2.

We all have different tastes, and comparing them to all the headphones I've heard, they sound pretty lean on bass to me. We all have different tastes in sound; for example, one person on this thread commented that the bass from the SRH440 was too much for his liking. That's a statement I could never agree with, but whether I agree doesn't matter. The good thing about having a thread that's like this is that you get to have impressions from a basshead (me), many people with neutral tastes, people who like "light" sounding headphones, and all the other shades of people I missed in between.

One thing about both the XB700 and the SRH440 is that they do both sound like closed headphones. By that I mean that the overall fidelity and vibrancy of some instruments just aren't there and it sometimes feels like you're listening to music through a pinhole (a rather big pinhole though, as the headphones sound very good despite being closed). I remember going to see the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and just be astounded by the sound of the instruments and how powerful each sound spectrum was. The bass was strong, present, and encompassing (but you can never have enough), and it would be pointless of me to talk about the awe-inspiring treble and alto instrument sounds. Thinking about it now, it reminds me of both of my headphones short-comings in that they can't reproduce the experience of that symphony hall (if you want headphones that can, you'll probably end up paying the same price as a balcony seat in the costs of amps/dacs, sources, and headphones).

They cost ~$80 whereas a company could easily manufacture the same headphone driver (after re-engineering it a bit) and stick it in an open headphone for the same price and it will sound "better" than the closed version. So, it's not really fair to compare closed and open headphones of the same price level since more work and thus more money would have to go into the closed headphones to make them sound as good open headphones.

It's a given that headphones are compared to headphones of similar type. This is why I did not really compare the SRH440 to the XB700 as much as I could have since they are significantly different. I said that I prefer the XB700 over the SRH440 because of my taste in sound. Similarly, you wouldn't compare headphones to earphones (unless they are amazing earphones, in which case they would most likely cost a good bit of money and would still make an unjust comparison), you wouldn't compare speakers to headphones (that's a bit of an extreme example), and you wouldn't even compare supra-aural to circum-aural (that's dependent on the price range though. Some supra-aural headphones that I've heard sound as good as circum-aural for around the same price, but of course, they don't isolate as well as circum-aural). I prefer closed headphones simply because of the isolating factor (which is why I'm looking for a way to cover the holes on the XB700 without significantly degrading sound quality, some degradation is to be expected though) so I have nothing against open headphones except for the fact that they just don't isolate.