PacificRim
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2016
- Posts
- 8
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- 13
Just received a used pair of AKG K501s yesterday and liking them so far
Listening to "Thick as a Brick" remastered 96/24 from HDTracks through my vintage amp and it sounds amazing. I keep forgetting I'm listening to headphones. The soundstage is completely outside my head. Also, the imaging on Ian Anderson's voice is really sharp. In my closed cans, there are parts where I can hear the voice coming distinctly from left and right channels in a slightly weird way, but with these the left-right voicing merges together much better, giving a kind of auto-duet feel. The drums don't hit quite as hard as my HD650s, and the bass isn't quite as heavy, but the overall musicality and spacing is just amazing... These are really fast, and do great with complex progressive rock... make's it hard to keep my head still enough to type.
I'm using an Onkyo tx-330, which seems very high gain and it's not a zero-distortion amp, like my Lehmann Linear. The soundstage is very big, even relative to the usually big soundstage these cans have, and the mids have a lot of meat, which makes it better for rock and vocal music.
The source is a audio-gd R2R dac, Dac-19 10th anniversary, which is coming from my computer using Jplay in hibernate mode. I find it to sound completely un-digital and smooth, with good tonal balance.
Still, I think depending on whether you can find a good match for these cans, you could end up spending very little and getting a lot. Especially if you have vinyl and can find a half-decent record player...
I find the K501 to be better than the HD650 when amped properly.