So I had built some expectations for the ATH-M50s from research and testing other headphones. At this point, I am still burning them in with about five to ten hours of burn in time now.
I tried out a couple studio monitors at some shops with the song Genesis - Man On The Corner on my iPhone 3G. The song is used as my test song because it has isolated moments of trebble, isolated moments of bass, and blended moments of trebble, bass, and midtones. The cans were the Shure 840, Beyerdynamic DT-770 to get an idea of what I might be getting in to in studio headphones. I tried them out about a month between each other.
The Beyers were good, I seem to remember they took a fair amount of power to drive, and I found the construction seemed kind of cheap for the price point, and the look wasn't the greatest. The Shure I fell in love with instantly, but it had the exposed wires around the ears which I was willing to wait for something better to avoid that nuisance and fear of damage.
I really had my heart set on the Sennheiser 380 or the Shure 940, sight unseen, but couldn't find enough retailers out there that have it, or enough credible and consistent reviews out there. So I figured, sight unseen, I would just order the Audio Technica ATH M50s because it had all the convenience features I wanted, enormous amount of good reviews, good brand awareness, good appearance and construction, and a great price.
I wasn't nervous about how they would sound after doing the research and driving to the U.S. to pick them up. When I brought them to the hotel I plugged them in and tried them out... they were really quite amazing. It has been a couple months since I tried the Shure 840 but I think the sound was very similar. Both the Shure and AT have great passive sound isolation and leaking protection. In fact, I think they have the same amount of isolation that my active Bose QC15 has.
A real test of the range of the monitors was listening to songs that I have heard a million times and know them in and out like the back of my hand. When playing them you hear all sorts of subtleties that you would never know were there before from listening to on decent head phones, or even good speakers. Examples of subtleties would be things like hearing the singer breathing between words, or a guitar chord sounds like it is in a different key, or an extra instrument, or extra vocal layer is there that you never heard before. Almost every song has some extra layer you can hear that you never heard before.
Some people say that studio monitors lack bass. To challenge that, I feel that for the ones I have tried, the bass becomes as full as you would want it to go if you just crank the volume and drive them the way they are meant to be driven.
Some people say that studio monitors are distracting because they bring recording defects to the forefront, whereas consumer grade cans would smooth the sounds over. To be perfectly honest, I don't feel distracted by the extra definition. It doesn't affect the enjoyment. At the same time, you can rely on them for recording playback purposes knowing you are hearing everything you need to hear.
Another thing I feel I should comment on is how some people have said low quality MP3 songs sound great on good headphones. I have to say, at first reading comments like that, I kind of laugh since it doesn't make sense to even bring that up in a high end product discussion. You would think it would just amplifying the compression artifacts, raise the hiss, etc. Trying it myself, surprisingly the studio monitors do actually unlock a lot of layers that you would just assume would have disappeared in the lossy digital encoding. Some examples are bootleg demo reels that you have in MP3 that you know inside and out from listening to on other headphones or speakers to compare it with the ATH-M50s. If you have a reference point from what you know, you can make that distinction. I was really quite surprised and happy to be proven wrong on that prejudiced view I had.
So for the choice of just going out and buying easy to find Dr. Dre Beats marketing cans, or "audiophile" grade headphones that are sold in every Best Buy, I feel that studio monitors were a great way to go for business and for pleasure.
