Me x3
Member of the Trade: FiiO Store Argentina
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- Nov 22, 2012
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I'm on a similar boat.
Recordings play a big role for sure, but many times the T1 (while less correct than the HD800 in terms of macrodynamics) results more real sounding overall.
It might not be straight forward to explain but it's quite easy to spot what's less than perfect on the T1. The bass and lower mids are slightly raised over neutral, the midrange lacks ultimate clarity, sharpness caused by raised 8kHz is a bit too much and treble extension is a tiny step behind HD800 or DT880 Pro. But that said, most of the times, the T1 sounds very realistic.
The Piano sounds like a Piano, sometimes warmer than it should, yes. But it sounds like a warmer real piano. Guitars sound like guitars, probably sharper, but sharper in a realistic, believable fashion.
On the other hand the HD800 is a perfectionist headphone. It has the bestest cups of all which simply dissapear when the driver hits, the bass never overpowers but extends forever with little to no distortion at all, even at loud levels. It soundstages like no other headphone in production. There's plenty of room for vocals and there's impressive clarity across the whole spectrum.
But the thing is, it sometimes sounds unrealistic (some people would prefer to blame 95% of the properly engineered DACs and Amps ever built, but that's not me). You might be listening to a moderately good recording and start wondering what the hell is that perfectly delineated piano-like instrument on the right, only to find out it happens to be an ordinary piano. You can almost read the brand name of the piano with the HD800 but sometimes it won't sound like a believable piano.
The 'window to landscape' analogy is often useful for these kind of subjective, tricky, read-carefully sort of comparisons.
(Or how to say the same using other words, for better or worse)
The T1 is a relatively transparent window, especially next to lower tier (but still great sounding) headphones like DT880/K702/HD650... But not perfectly transparent. The glass lacks the ultimate finesse so you might not be able to resolve what's far far away, it might even resize the images a little bit so you might end up thinking a tree is taller than it really is, or the clouds are closer than they really are, but the tree is a tree and the clouds are clouds. Even those trees and clouds way back where the landscape becomes slightly more diffuse, look like real stuff.
(Even out of no dedicated headphone amp at all)
The HD800 on the other hand is a perfectly transparent window into a perfectly layered landscape, you get an almost perfect and measurable representation of the trees and the clouds, you find out that the grey background is actually full of little rain drops (it was a suspicion with the T1 but it becomes obvious with HD800), and you can now easily count the number of leaves on the trees. But sometimes, some trees doesn't look like real trees but fancy/spacey representations instead. Calling it a pixar made landscape is going far off the chart, but if you can sum up (5% pixar) and (95% reality) that's surely closer to what I mean.
Again, recordings play a huge role + important part of the differences noted here are results of differences in frequency response between T1 and HD800.
But that said, you can not make one sound exaclty like the other, so while I'm leaving the EQing topic aside for the sake of simplicity, some substantial differences should remain even after enthusiast equalization.
Unlike my style I've digged deep into subjective territory this time.
Since 'timbre' is a quite complex term, I often take the simplificated problem of judging if instruments sound as if they are made from their actual materials.
It sounds almost silly, but many recordings + headphones / speakers combinations rank very low in this regard.
We might not store the sound of each Steinway or Stradivarius in our brain, but most of us know how wooden/metal/plastic instruments normally sound, and we know how clappings sound.
Hands are not made of plastic (HD700 hides for some reason). While HD800 is great enough normally, and even superlative from time to time, the T1 ranks high almost always here.
These are two great sounding headphones and I normally enjoy both pretty much the same.
I think the HD800 is the superior headphone technically speaking, but if I had to choose only one headphone, then the T1 could be the one. It's soulful and still full of technical (wow-ing) capabilities.
tl;dr
HD800 > T1
T1 > HD800
HD800 =/= T1
