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Caesar2010, I attend one or two live events each week. I also played in various bands and orchestras from third grade through undergrad. And I don't find the HD-800 boring in the least - I use it more than any of the other headphones. I wasn't crazy about the T1; it's not as transparent as the HD-800 and it sounds like they thickened up the bass as a crowd-pleaser. Not a terrible headphone - I enjoyed hearing it - but I'm not going to buy one.
If you read the Playback review, it comes to the same conclusion as me, but he is more politically correct:
"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"
I always listen to the musical whole. I don't dissect the sound into audiophile terms. I judge the equipment by how it gets out of the way. I just had the $20K Ayre monoblock amplifiers in my 2 channel system. Very good amps. And they were very transparent. However, they threw all this detail at me. I was distracted by it at times, and could not focus on the music.
But hey, we all hear differently and have different realism triggers. And this is a hobby. Enjoy!