[FunkyBassMan]

What amplifiers work well with this headphone?

I run it straight out of my Chord Dave without any problem and it sounds phenomenal imho (some people complain about the Dave headphone amp as underpowered).

 

[bodiebill2]

Yesterday I tried to drive my Heddphone One from the balanced XLR outputs of my DAC (Leaf Audio CMD27 with Staccato opamps), which has a volume control. I am using a balanced converter cable going from two 3-pin XLR's to one 4-pin XLR.
It sounds great!

I know that the DAC outputs 4.2V, but I do not know its impedance. The Heddphone One is listed to have 42 Ohm impedance. Is the way I do it good practice?

 

[ThanatosVI]

Yesterday I could audition the HEDDphone ONE and TWO.

I preferred the TWO in all aspects, sounded better, was way more comfortable, adjustable and also looks better.

@freddyknop (I think it was him, hopefully I don't confuse him with someone else now) showed me how to adjust the headband. Even with my small head it fits perfectly and I didn't even have to use the lowest setting.
Adjustable clamping force is something I'm missing on other headphones. It really helps with the seal if you have a magnificent beard.

Soundwise, they were too neutral for my taste. Which is intended for Pro use. However my feedback was gladly received and I'm really looking forward to HEDD expanding their HEDDphone lineup in the future.

 

[TheMiddleSky]

What amplifiers work well with this headphone?

While I believe majority of answer pointed out at SS amps, actually there is one tube amp that I like with Heddphone Two: Cayin HA-6A

This Cayin amp (depend on tube) could be considered as the most "SS" sounding among other Cayin Tube amps though, with its solid attack notes, closer to neutral response, less sweet notes, and tighter decay.

 

[Christer]

Yesterday I could audition the HEDDphone ONE and TWO.

I preferred the TWO in all aspects, sounded better, was way more comfortable, adjustable and also looks better.

@freddyknop (I think it was him, hopefully I don't confuse him with someone else now) showed me how to adjust the headband. Even with my small head it fits perfectly and I didn't even have to use the lowest setting.
Adjustable clamping force is something I'm missing on other headphones. It really helps with the seal if you have a magnificent beard.

Soundwise, they were too neutral for my taste. Which is intended for Pro use. However my feedback was gladly received and I'm really looking forward to HEDD expanding their HEDDphone lineup in the future.

Hmm, I rarely reply on these forums nowadays but since I am curious to hear how much more neutral the new HEDDphone V2 is compared to V1. I could not resist replying .For me NO REAL HIFI product can be too neutral.For me HIFI is all about bringing out what is actually on a well made recording of unamplified acoustic music as neutral undistorted and uncoloured as technically possible. That is what HIFI is. HIGH FIDELITY What else can there be to aim for if a headphone is supposed to be a HIFI product?
More colouration more distortion?
Cheers CC

 

[Reputator]

Hmm, I rarely reply on these forums nowadays but since I am curious to hear how much more neutral the new HEDDphone V2 is compared to V1. I could not resist replying .For me NO REAL HIFI product can be too neutral.For me HIFI is all about bringing out what is actually on a well made recording of unamplified acoustic music as neutral undistorted and uncoloured as technically possible. That is what HIFI is. HIGH FIDELITY What else can there be to aim for if a headphone is supposed to be a HIFI product?
More colouration more distortion?
Cheers CC

Well sure, if it's enjoyable.

 

[bodiebill2]

Actually I am offering my Heddphone ONE from 2022 for sale for the simple reason that I now have a dedicated audio room (and no neighbors). This means that I no longer (or hardly) listen to headphones anymore. Just send me a PM when interested. I am in Europe.

 

[dmagnan]

Hmm, I rarely reply on these forums nowadays but since I am curious to hear how much more neutral the new HEDDphone V2 is compared to V1. I could not resist replying .For me NO REAL HIFI product can be too neutral.For me HIFI is all about bringing out what is actually on a well made recording of unamplified acoustic music as neutral undistorted and uncoloured as technically possible. That is what HIFI is. HIGH FIDELITY What else can there be to aim for if a headphone is supposed to be a HIFI product?
More colouration more distortion?
Cheers CC

I would agree except for one major caviat: headphones, music sources, DACs, headphone amplifiers and cables however expensive, aren't perfect. Typical colorations in these equipment are slight digital edginess or rounded-off lack of precise transient reproduction, or slight boosts in the upper midrange and lower treble creating a slightly harsh bright sound, lack of full enough bass, too full "flabby uncontrolled" bass, it goes on. All of these defects are relative to the particular audiophile's preferred type of sound which he probably classifies as neutral, but is in reality relative to his personal likes and dislikes perhaps molded by irregularities in his own hearing, so are at least 50% subjective. This audiophile self confidence is in direct opposition to the truth that his impressions are likely to be to a large part subjective and ideosyncratic to him rather than being unbiased evaluations of absolute sound reproduction quality.

The result of this is a wide variance between various audiophiles in the percieved quality of various headphones and associated equipment, with nearly everyone having the personal subjective impression that his knowledgeable audiophile preferred sound is objectively the most neutral and realistic. Unfortunately that is far from the actual case.

And most unfortunately, professional reviewers tend to have the same subjective biases, plus more, which are dictated by commercial considerations, but audiophiles really want to believe that their professional equipment evaluations are neutral and unbiased - "nothing but the truth, man". So when they make purchases influenced by these supposedly sophisticated pro reviews they are often disappointed and misled and unsatisfied with the purchases.

I have to my displeasure and considerable financial loss been much subject to these factors over the years, especially in the purchase of headphones. In this area I have encountered the most variance in how poorly many supposedly superb new SOA TOTL headphones actually seem to me personally to fulfill the grand pronouncements of the reviewers, and even of many of the audiophile users in these kind of blogs.

I don't have any overall solution to these built-in negative factors in the purchase process for audiophiles, other than to absolutely always have a 30-day return policy, and keep the boxes and packing material.

 

[HuoYuanJia]

Yesterday I could audition the HEDDphone ONE and TWO.

I preferred the TWO in all aspects, sounded better, was way more comfortable, adjustable and also looks better.

@freddyknop (I think it was him, hopefully I don't confuse him with someone else now)

If you were at the World of Headphones Heidelberg show, then it was probably me.

Hmm, I rarely reply on these forums nowadays but since I am curious to hear how much more neutral the new HEDDphone V2 is compared to V1. I could not resist replying .For me NO REAL HIFI product can be too neutral.For me HIFI is all about bringing out what is actually on a well made recording of unamplified acoustic music as neutral undistorted and uncoloured as technically possible. That is what HIFI is. HIGH FIDELITY What else can there be to aim for if a headphone is supposed to be a HIFI product?
More colouration more distortion?
Cheers CC

I want to agree, but I also have to stay open-minded. There are different ways of sounding neutral. You can have neutral-measuring speakers, but you will never listen to them in a neutral space. So even if you use very direct-sounding near-fields (which most professionals do), there will be variations and some room for error/preference. The variation gets immensely bigger in home/personal/consumer audio.
If you want to get rid of every influence of the room in a headphone, you would be ending up with a very bright sound that nobody would agree with as natural-sounding, as that‘s not how we experience it at home, in a studio or on a concert.

Now assuming you have perfectly recorded tracks, mix them just right, and then pass the final mix on to two different mastering engineers, for sure both masters will sound different. Would it be possible to say one master sounds more neutral over the other? Even when using speakers? The variables are too many. It‘s not always possible to say which is more „neutral“ or how exactly it was intended to sound like. We have to use our experience to make estimations to narrow it down. (Or, in our case, we have close contact to producers, mixing and mastering engineers and can take their feedback.)

Having that said, the HEDDphone TWO tries to remove every form of coloration and thus also sounds more direct than the previous version. It is even closer to the experience of working on near-field monitors. This does help to pick up more details and I think the HP2 is one of the highest-resolution headphones yet, which makes it extremely easy to hear doubled vocals, reverb, auto-tune and every „mess“ that is happening during production, mixing and mastering. More so than the HEDDphone ONE. On a good master, you can hear even better details, small cues and artistic choices. Yet I can also understand if people say the tuning of the first version is closer to their preference.

 

[ThanatosVI]

If you were at the World of Headphones Heidelberg show, then it was probably me.


I want to agree, but I also have to stay open-minded. There are different ways of sounding neutral. You can have neutral-measuring speakers, but you will never listen to them in a neutral space. So even if you use very direct-sounding near-fields (which most professionals do), there will be variations and some room for error/preference. The variation gets immensely bigger in home/personal/consumer audio.
If you want to get rid of every influence of the room in a headphone, you would be ending up with a very bright sound that nobody would agree with as natural-sounding, as that‘s not how we experience it at home, in a studio or on a concert.

Now assuming you have perfectly recorded tracks, mix them just right, and then pass the final mix on to two different mastering engineers, for sure both masters will sound different. Would it be possible to say one master sounds more neutral over the other? Even when using speakers? The variables are too many. It‘s not always possible to say which is more „neutral“ or how exactly it was intended to sound like. We have to use our experience to make estimations to narrow it down. (Or, in our case, we have close contact to producers, mixing and mastering engineers and can take their feedback.)

Having that said, the HEDDphone TWO tries to remove every form of coloration and thus also sounds more direct than the previous version. It is even closer to the experience of working on near-field monitors. This does help to pick up more details and I think the HP2 is one of the highest-resolution headphones yet, which makes it extremely easy to hear doubled vocals, reverb, auto-tune and every „mess“ that is happening during production, mixing and mastering. More so than the HEDDphone ONE. On a good master, you can hear even better details, small cues and artistic choices. Yet I can also understand if people say the tuning of the first version is closer to their preference.

Well then, It was nice to meet you

 

[Christer]

If you were at the World of Headphones Heidelberg show, then it was probably me.


I want to agree, but I also have to stay open-minded. There are different ways of sounding neutral. You can have neutral-measuring speakers, but you will never listen to them in a neutral space. So even if you use very direct-sounding near-fields (which most professionals do), there will be variations and some room for error/preference. The variation gets immensely bigger in home/personal/consumer audio.
If you want to get rid of every influence of the room in a headphone, you would be ending up with a very bright sound that nobody would agree with as natural-sounding, as that‘s not how we experience it at home, in a studio or on a concert.

Now assuming you have perfectly recorded tracks, mix them just right, and then pass the final mix on to two different mastering engineers, for sure both masters will sound different. Would it be possible to say one master sounds more neutral over the other? Even when using speakers? The variables are too many. It‘s not always possible to say which is more „neutral“ or how exactly it was intended to sound like. We have to use our experience to make estimations to narrow it down. (Or, in our case, we have close contact to producers, mixing and mastering engineers and can take their feedback.)

Having that said, the HEDDphone TWO tries to remove every form of coloration and thus also sounds more direct than the previous version. It is even closer to the experience of working on near-field monitors. This does help to pick up more details and I think the HP2 is one of the highest-resolution headphones yet, which makes it extremely easy to hear doubled vocals, reverb, auto-tune and every „mess“ that is happening during production, mixing and mastering. More so than the HEDDphone ONE. On a good master, you can hear even better details, small cues and artistic choices. Yet I can also understand if people say the tuning of the first version is closer to their preference.

Thanks for your response, I hope I made it clear in my post that I am only interested in getting as close as possible to how in many cases I KNOW LIVE IN THE HALL during actual hi-res recording sessions of UNAMPLIFIED Acoustic instruments and the human voice actually sounded both live and with simply mic'd takes. As little mastering and mixing as possible applied, Danke. Put a few high quality mics in optimal positions and let the Conductor and musicians handle things. Get it right from the beginning and mixing desks and mastering engineers will not be needed . I have quite a few direct hi-res sessions raw masters where I was present at the recording sessions to judge actual SQ with.

I want no more and no less than as transparent and highly resolved and again neutral and uncoloured reproduction of a live well recorded event in a real acoustic venue, without all the distorted subjectivity of the Synthetic World of Popular mass genres music and amplified instruments electric guitars and such, before "mastering engineers" and Audiophiles' subjective tastes messed with what used to be called HIFI. I want a headphone that sounds as close as possible to Live Music, not near field monitors.
Heddphone 1 had some potential with simply scored smaller scale music up to say a Mozart Piano Concerto and reproduced Piano up to about forte level quite realistically . Yes I have a piano in my listening room to compare with as reference point.
But V1 sounded too congested and distorted with large scale symphonic music at louder levels. Nicht Wagnertauglich was my take on it after having had it on home loan for about a month, and comparing it to my other 2 headphones HFM HEKV2 and Sennheiser HD 800.
I hope Heddphone 2 is more "Wagnertauglich" ie undistorted,very resolving and transparent and uncoloured and neutral at louder levels than V1 was imo.
Cheers CC

 

[FunkyBassMan]

I want no more and no less than as transparent and highly resolved and again neutral and uncoloured reproduction of a live well recorded event in a real acoustic venue, without all the distorted subjectivity of the Synthetic World of Popular mass genres music and amplified instruments electric guitars and such, before "mastering engineers" and Audiophiles' subjective tastes messed with what used to be called HIFI. I want a headphone that sounds as close as possible to Live Music, not near field monitors.
Heddphone 1 had some potential with simply scored smaller scale music up to say a Mozart Piano Concerto and reproduced Piano up to about forte level quite realistically . Yes I have a piano in my listening room to compare with as reference point.
But V1 sounded too congested and distorted with large scale symphonic music at louder levels. Nicht Wagnertauglich was my take on it after having had it on home loan for about a month, and comparing it to my other 2 headphones HFM HEKV2 and Sennheiser HD 800.
I hope Heddphone 2 is more "Wagnertauglich" ie undistorted,very resolving and transparent and uncoloured and neutral at louder levels than V1 was imo.
Cheers CC

If it helps you at all, one of the remarkable things about the H2 to me is that unlike with every other headphone I have/have had, I find it nearly impossible to say "the treble" sounds like this or "the bass" like that. Just like if you were listening to a cello or a piano or drums or any other full bandwidth source, you would find it hard to pick out the highs/lows whatever, they'd just sound like different components of one source, all connected. The H2 sounds that way to me, like the high harmonics just flow right out of the mids, which connect to the bass, so you just get instruments and it's hard to hear "highs"/"lows" etc.

Not sure if that makes any sense.

But I personally love this because I'm a recording engineer (and this headphone is meant to be a studio monitor).

That said, it won't boom your brain in the sub-bass, or flood you with high harmonics so that you hear every little screech of every bowscrape, the drama of which one might enjoy with Wagner.

 

[dmagnan]

If it helps you at all, one of the remarkable things about the H2 to me is that unlike with every other headphone I have/have had, I find it nearly impossible to say "the treble" sounds like this or "the bass" like that. Just like if you were listening to a cello or a piano or drums or any other full bandwidth source, you would find it hard to pick out the highs/lows whatever, they'd just sound like different components of one source, all connected. The H2 sounds that way to me, like the high harmonics just flow right out of the mids, which connect to the bass, so you just get instruments and it's hard to hear "highs"/"lows" etc.

Not sure if that makes any sense.

But I personally love this because I'm a recording engineer (and this headphone is meant to be a studio monitor).

I agree about the natural quality of the treble performance of the HEDDphone 2. But as an audiophile I find it subjectively lacks some of the treble definition or resolution apparently offered by some other headphones such as the HD800S and HE1000se. On further analysis it turns out that this effect with the other type driver headphones is actually somewhat artificial, but it's complicated. I think this enhanced treble effect intentionally or not compensates for resolution losses in the recording and reproduction chain and by boosting the treble resolution of details through an ultimately artificial effect it still makes the overall musical experience better. Of course I'm not a recording engineer and this is something that audiophiles will always argue about; every person has their individual likes and dislikes.

With the HEDDphone 2 I have another complaint - the soundstage is noticeably smaller than the other major air motion transformer headphone, the superb Monoprice AMT. This headphone is an incredible bargain at around $700 and has a considerably expanded soundstage compared to the relatively compressed smaller sounding HEDDphone 2. To the point that I somewhat prefer the AMT overall even though there are some real tradeoffs going on, such as the noticeably better resolution of the HEDDphone. The AMT is more relaxed and expanded and immersive.

 

[FunkyBassMan]

I agree about the natural quality of the treble performance of the HEDDphone 2. But as an audiophile I find it subjectively lacks some of the treble definition or resolution apparently offered by some other headphones such as the HD800S and HE1000se. On further analysis it turns out that this effect with the other type driver headphones is actually somewhat artificial, but it's complicated. I think this enhanced treble effect intentionally or not compensates for resolution losses in the recording and reproduction chain and by boosting the treble resolution of details through an ultimately artificial effect it still makes the overall musical experience better. Of course I'm not a recording engineer and this is something that audiophiles will always argue about; every person has their individual likes and dislikes.

Very interesting observations. You make me think a moment about what the difference is between a recording engineer need and an audiophile need and why they're so different. I think audiophiles often love it when they hear clarity they haven't heard before, like when an acoustic guitar really stands out and sounds like it's super clear and present (like on my Dan Clark Stealths), or when the bass is undeniable and punches you in the gut (my H1 actually does a better job at that particular task).

Whereas when I have my engineer hat on, all I think about is "why don't I like this musical moment as much as I could?" In that sense, the LAST thing I would ever want to do is call attention to a particular instrument, because the whole point of producing/mixing well is to provide a musical experience as a whole, where every element has a role contributing to the power of the total moment. You'd be amazed if you heard how lousy individual tracks can sometimes sound on their own after we're done with them, because the idea is that the element do what it's supposed to do to support the whole. And the more complex the production, the more this is true.

So a headphone that just presents the music smoothly without any particular emphasis is exactly what we (at least I) want. But I bet many audiophiles who like excitement would find that sound boring.

With the HEDDphone 2 I have another complaint - the soundstage is noticeably smaller than the other major air motion transformer headphone, the superb Monoprice AMT. This headphone is an incredible bargain at around $700 and has a considerably expanded soundstage compared to the relatively compressed smaller sounding HEDDphone 2.

Hmm, haven't heard that Monoprice one. I agree about the H2 soundstage not being a "strong point". Soundstage has to do with the very small signals, and I wonder if moving that big (relatively) heavy amt driver makes it impossible to get the resolution to pick up those super tiny signals, like distant reverb tails, etc.

Putting my audiophile hat on, that issue is counterbalanced though by one huge positive the H2 has that I've never heard in any other headphone: it really sounds like it's moving air. Like when a kick drum hits and you feel it in your bones, or the vibrating resonance of a guitar amp cabinet, or that "woof" of a plucked double bass on a jazz trio record, say. It's very tactile, physical, and I love that.

 

[Reputator]

Interesting about the soundstage. I haven't heard a lot of people comment on the soundstage of the H2. The H1 has a pretty wide stage and can throw things out decently far on the left & right, and front left & right "corners", but center forward image doesn't go very far, and the image size of each element is fairly small especially in height.