callanish
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 24, 2003
- Posts
- 467
- Likes
- 13
I've been contemplating a situation and don't really have a convincing answer yet. I've been using various headphones ( Senn PX-200, Sony V6's, KSC-35's, etc. and a pair of Senn PX-100's ) with various portable players ( Karma, Zen nx, 2nd Gen IPOD, Ipod mini ) with my recent purchase being the PX-100's. When I got them I found them to be tinny and not Bass strong as a lot of users made them out to be. After a few months of break in, I started to see the bass come through, but then into the third month the bass went from acceptable to minor distortion ( Not really obvious, but still there. Mp3 bitrates with some songs made it hard to notice). So, after trying different headphones with the same music on the same player as well as using a pretty good Sony CD player for direct CD quality, I came to the conclusion that something was wrong with the PX-100's, so I sent them back to Sennheiser for repair. Sennheiser recently sent me a replacement pair, therefore either something was wrong or they couldn't be bothered doing the testing and just sent out a new pair since they were still under warranty. I decided to open up the packaging today thinking immediate Tinny sound, a few weeks of breaking them in and hopefully no more problems. Except, this time they had strong bass right out of the package and fortunately no distortion with the same music which the other ones had shown to have.
Where the whole question mark comes into the equation is I would have written these headphones off as just another disappointment if I didn't go to the hassle of comparing them to my other headphones and really paid attention to the sound quality to find out that there actually was a problem because the problem wasn't obvious without really paying attention. Now, what I'm wondering is how many listeners out there have returned a pair of headphones, earbuds, canal phones for a refund and they never got to enjoy their purchase at its full potential. This also makes me wonder what is the ratio of defects that come off the assembly line of a manufacturer. Not the obvious defects where you can clearly see the problem; I'm talking about small variances that don't provide the full experience because I swear the original sound that I got out of the PX-100's that were returned to Sennheiser didn't come close to these new replacements. I would have either just thrown the PX-100's on the shelf to gather dust and scratched my head at all the head-fi posts praising them if I didn't really spend some quality time in realizing I had a problem with the original ones. So, bottom line is how do we know what we are listening to is close to the 100% tolerance level of the manufacturer, because unless the fault is really obvious we all might be disregarding or taking back to the store a pair of really good phones that we've written off and it turns out the problem was imperfections in the assembly process. Am I blowing this out of proportion or do I have any merit in my query?
Where the whole question mark comes into the equation is I would have written these headphones off as just another disappointment if I didn't go to the hassle of comparing them to my other headphones and really paid attention to the sound quality to find out that there actually was a problem because the problem wasn't obvious without really paying attention. Now, what I'm wondering is how many listeners out there have returned a pair of headphones, earbuds, canal phones for a refund and they never got to enjoy their purchase at its full potential. This also makes me wonder what is the ratio of defects that come off the assembly line of a manufacturer. Not the obvious defects where you can clearly see the problem; I'm talking about small variances that don't provide the full experience because I swear the original sound that I got out of the PX-100's that were returned to Sennheiser didn't come close to these new replacements. I would have either just thrown the PX-100's on the shelf to gather dust and scratched my head at all the head-fi posts praising them if I didn't really spend some quality time in realizing I had a problem with the original ones. So, bottom line is how do we know what we are listening to is close to the 100% tolerance level of the manufacturer, because unless the fault is really obvious we all might be disregarding or taking back to the store a pair of really good phones that we've written off and it turns out the problem was imperfections in the assembly process. Am I blowing this out of proportion or do I have any merit in my query?
