[knightpitt]

Hey Guys,
 
I've lurked around for a while but never posted; I usually could just read everything that I needed to know, but I couldn't find a good reference for this, even through search.
 
I got a new pair of ATH-M50s's and they sound fantastic most of the time.  However, with certain specific songs I get a very distinct "flop" sound from the bass on some hard hits, for example, the big hits every other beat on Dr. Dre's "Still D.R.E." sound terrible... almost like a blown speaker.  It doesn't matter how loud or how soft it's played, they're just bad.  The same thing happens with some of the dubstep music that I'll listen to.  Big hits just sound like they make a "flop" or "flunk" sound.  It only happens on certain songs, when it's especially deep bass and just on those hit notes. Otherwise, I love the cans... they perform really well on just about anything else that I listen to.
 
My source is my Droid Razr Maxx, with no outside amplification.  The source is 128k mp3's (I know).  I just wouldn't expect the sound to be so unbelievably and consistently poor for songs like this.
 
Is this normal?  Would an amp really help?  Shouldn't the Razr be able to drive these cans effectively otherwise?  Everything else sounds really good, just those big hits drive me crazy.
 
Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[stellar]

M50s shouldn't need to be driven by an amp--it's definitely the horribly poor quality of music you're listening to (can I ask why?).
 
An amp won't help, but a digizoid zo 2.3 might "bend" the sound into something more enjoyable for you.

 

[RPGWiZaRD]

Well the ATH-M50 I tried sounded faulty from the first source I tried, left driver distorted horrible with bass but sounded OK from another source, weird enough, I'm suspecting something similar here.

 

[knightpitt]

The source material that it was most prevalent with was actually Pandora (used for convenience)... it just seems exceedingly odd for material to sound so poor on the ATH-M50's, where it did not exhibit the "flop" sound on my Sennheiser HD202's or my friend's AT ANC-7b's.  However, it does produce a similar sound on my Klipsch x10's. 
 
I'm wondering if there's some poor filtering in the source possibly?  Or poor filtering by the Razr?  Is it possible than an amp would fix the problem?

 

[Alkoholik Ivan]

I'll bet my fresh new M50's it's the crappy Razr. You can't expect good sound quality from a phone. I found that out the hard way - I bought Samsung Galaxy SII and was looking forward to using it as a versatile device, including playing music. However I was soon heartbreakingly disappointed. It all sounded real nice until a song with strong bass came in. Then it just sounded like farting.
 
And I did a check just to be sure - Still D.R.E. with ATH-M50s (not yet burned in) sounds fine at 192kbps (which is fairly low quality too).

 

[jerg]

@OP,
 
Here's my take on the issue: the songs you are experiencing problems with have very extreme dynamic range compression, so very loud bass just gets clipped off, hence what you are hearing.
 
Easy way to diagnose would be to get some high dynamic range songs with emphasis on bass, and see if those distort.