Quote:
Originally Posted by
Uncle Erik 
The HD-800 is boring? Then again, I didn't think much of the T1. The bass is exaggerated for people who expect bass to be exaggerated.
How do you like your ZD? What else did you hear before picking it up?
I go hear live music a lot. Hd-800 doesn't sound like live music to my ears. It presents details for the sake of details. Here's a quote from the Playback review, which is a bit more politically correct than my blunt statement, but says the same thing:
"I’m more in the camp that likes, but doesn’t love, the HD 800. I believe that has less to do with outright flaws in the HD 800, and much to do with what I want a headphone to do. I want a headphone to provide an alternative listening experience. I want to hear things on recordings that I don’t hear as well via speakers. This partially comes from my sense that headphones just can’t do the virtual reality thing that traditional speaker-based audio can. At the same time, I need a certain vividness in my headphone listening that makes up for the things headphones inevitably take away.
From some perspectives this vividness is called coloration. Maybe. But the declaration of coloration refers to reasonable though arbitrary notions of “correct”. All I know is this: live music is vivid. The HD 800s, at least with the amps I used initially (primarily the Luxman P200 and PS Audio GCHA), are not vivid, which is what keeps me on the “like” side of the line. I have since tried the prototype Woo Audio WA 22 amp (which is tube rather than solid state and has variable output impedance). The WA 22 takes the sense of vividness up a notch, mostly by making the midrange contrast level higher, while introducing minimal if any deleterioius side effects. The mostly subtractive errors noted above are still there, but they are diminished in the overall presentation"
