I'm just going to cut and paste my forum writeup. Has one media link that hopefully carries over.
So this headphone went through a slew of sales recently and I snagged the verdant blue up for $169. I have a few head phones under my belt now, mostly good ones but my last one, the sennheiser 4.40bt, was just all over the place and hard to enjoy. I am happy to say the mdr100abn has been a very enjoyable headphone. They are quite simular to my ostry kc06a with its solid but not over blown bass and crisp highs. Let it be known that I love my bass, but you will never mistake me for a basshead. The 4.40bt offered up quite a bit of the sub frequencies (it was essentially a crusher without the headphone shake gimmick) but I actually found it very fatiguing on the ears. The mdr100abn is a headphone that I can listen for an hour.. take em off and still feel like I could put them back on and keep listening. The sound signature is pretty much what I have read, a warm "listeners" sound in which I needed to boost the low and high end only slightly (poweramps 10 band eq, ) to suit my taste, I really like a good thump with crisp highs. With that I was able to set it and forget it, the sony's sounded great on all music genres without needing further eq touching.
It is also so far the best sounding wireless connection I have come across, the quality hit was very low. I don't spend a lot of money on my headphones but I like to make sure my other areas are strong, phone DACs, AptX support, and high quality versions of songs (I currently run around with my best stuff high bitrate AAC files made from my own FLAC libraries). So with AptX, honestly I only find one song that I can notice a definite fail point, the high end of when the chorus starts up at 1:17, it is so busy it turns to mush on re-compression. On the 4.40bt there was a definite quality difference between wireless and wired (which was unpowered to boot) but these sonys do such a good job I don't feel like I need to reach for the wire now. I also tried out a plain old SBC connection to my laptop and was yet impressed again when I actually found the sound to still be very enjoyable. I didn't notice the breakdown in the high and low end I usually do with SBC, instead the over all sound just sounded a little softer, usually I noticed it in vocals. I really wish I could play with the Ldac protocol on it but sadly I have no other sony devices around to use it. I should see android 0 not so long after release (galaxy s8) but that is still so many months away. For kicks and giggles I tried a wired connection with the amp turn down. Despite what everyone said I actually got a LOUDER sound with the amp turned off using my phones headphone jack. However I needed to use a bit more eqlizer work and I still couldn't get the mid range restored to "normal". So yea, funny things happen when you bypass the amp.
As for its noise canceling, I can't find much to complain about. It works quite well as long as you don't ask for impossible feats, but alas I am one of those people who get horribly nauseated because of the high pressure effect NC produces so I always have it off.
if I had to rate which music types I found this performed best with it would be electric, drum and bass, trap. Some of my rock albums sounded real good while some suffered, but that could be just me not liking how they are mixed. It is amazing how many songs I prefer a live show version over the cd version because of the mixing.
So this headphone went through a slew of sales recently and I snagged the verdant blue up for $169. I have a few head phones under my belt now, mostly good ones but my last one, the sennheiser 4.40bt, was just all over the place and hard to enjoy. I am happy to say the mdr100abn has been a very enjoyable headphone. They are quite simular to my ostry kc06a with its solid but not over blown bass and crisp highs. Let it be known that I love my bass, but you will never mistake me for a basshead. The 4.40bt offered up quite a bit of the sub frequencies (it was essentially a crusher without the headphone shake gimmick) but I actually found it very fatiguing on the ears. The mdr100abn is a headphone that I can listen for an hour.. take em off and still feel like I could put them back on and keep listening. The sound signature is pretty much what I have read, a warm "listeners" sound in which I needed to boost the low and high end only slightly (poweramps 10 band eq, ) to suit my taste, I really like a good thump with crisp highs. With that I was able to set it and forget it, the sony's sounded great on all music genres without needing further eq touching.
It is also so far the best sounding wireless connection I have come across, the quality hit was very low. I don't spend a lot of money on my headphones but I like to make sure my other areas are strong, phone DACs, AptX support, and high quality versions of songs (I currently run around with my best stuff high bitrate AAC files made from my own FLAC libraries). So with AptX, honestly I only find one song that I can notice a definite fail point, the high end of when the chorus starts up at 1:17, it is so busy it turns to mush on re-compression. On the 4.40bt there was a definite quality difference between wireless and wired (which was unpowered to boot) but these sonys do such a good job I don't feel like I need to reach for the wire now. I also tried out a plain old SBC connection to my laptop and was yet impressed again when I actually found the sound to still be very enjoyable. I didn't notice the breakdown in the high and low end I usually do with SBC, instead the over all sound just sounded a little softer, usually I noticed it in vocals. I really wish I could play with the Ldac protocol on it but sadly I have no other sony devices around to use it. I should see android 0 not so long after release (galaxy s8) but that is still so many months away. For kicks and giggles I tried a wired connection with the amp turn down. Despite what everyone said I actually got a LOUDER sound with the amp turned off using my phones headphone jack. However I needed to use a bit more eqlizer work and I still couldn't get the mid range restored to "normal". So yea, funny things happen when you bypass the amp.
As for its noise canceling, I can't find much to complain about. It works quite well as long as you don't ask for impossible feats, but alas I am one of those people who get horribly nauseated because of the high pressure effect NC produces so I always have it off.
if I had to rate which music types I found this performed best with it would be electric, drum and bass, trap. Some of my rock albums sounded real good while some suffered, but that could be just me not liking how they are mixed. It is amazing how many songs I prefer a live show version over the cd version because of the mixing.