I was going to do a full review on these headphones, including a head-to-head comparison with the DT 880 but I'm not sure there's any point.
Immediately after putting music through this headphone, I could hear something was off. The midrange on this headphone can only be described as "boxy", meaning an overemphasis in the 250-500Hz band.
My first thought was that I just needed to get used to the sound of a new headphone, having been using the DT 880 almost exclusively for over a year. Unfortunately, my impression of the headphone didn't improve with time; in fact it got worse. While the boxy midrange was apparent with just about any kind of musical program, it was shockingly apparent when listening to solo piano or cello, both of which have a lot of tonal character in the lower mid-range. These instruments sound nasally and closed-in from the T1.
What I am hearing is so strikingly awful, it's as if the T1 was made from two headphones, shoved together into a single perplexing mess. The upper mid-range is exceptionally sweet and clear, with an airy treble and expansive, layered soundstage. The bass digs deep and hits hard without losing control. Then in the middle you've got this ****ty low mid-range showing it's lumbering ass, completely ruining the otherwise exceptional sonic presentation.
Now, you're probably thinking that I didn't have a good enough amplifier or needed to burn in the headphones with brown noise for like 200 hours (the ding dongs on head-fi certainly thought so). Well, as an experiment, I swapped the stock T1 pads with my DT 880 pads. The sickening, bloated midrange was completely gone. Of course, so was a lot of the bass, and the treble was now rather painful. But the point is that what I heard from these headphones out of the box is just how they were designed. In an attempt to rectify the lean bass of the original T1, beyerdynamic went and totally dicked up the mid-range. Apparently the people who knew what they were doing when they designed the DT 880 left and were replaced by a bunch of hacks who've never heard real music.
I guess the conclusion is that I should take my own advice and not buy expensive headphones without hearing them first. Also, I have to seriously wonder about beyerdynamic; this was their second official attempt to get the T1 right after a whole slew of issues, and this was the result? And why has no one else noticed this? I have to wonder if this isn't a case of "the emperor has no clothes". No one wants to admit that a $1k+ flagship headphone sounds like a piece of crap that was designed in an afternoon before being rushed out the door so idiots could throw money at it.
Maybe I'm being unfair here. Maybe I just got a lemon and should go through the process of exchanging it through Amazon in the hopes that this was just a weird manufacturing fluke with the pads or the driver or something. I'll explain why I'm not going to do that, and instead will be returning them and writing this nasty, negative review.
First, this is a flagship headphone positioned at $1100. At that price point, no headphone with such an obvious and glaring flaw should get out of the factory. All it would take is for some chump to put these on their head for like a minute to detect the problem. Second, I was assured by the beyerdynamic T1 product manager on head-fi that every T1 actually does go through a "100% quality control incl. extensive quality assurance of electrical and acoustic properties." So again, a very obvious flaw like this should have been caught in testing. Third, beyerdynamic has not had a great track record for designing amazing headphones in the past 10 years. The current DT line of headphones came out way back in 2005. Since then, beyerdynamic has treated us to a series of turds, in the form of the T70 and T90 (both ear-destroying treble-cannons), T5p (described by Tyll Hertsens of innerfideltiy.com as "an abomination of harshness") and the original T1, which suffered from insane levels of quality control problems - mismatched drivers, wildly varying frequency response from unit to unit, and multiple silent revisions. At this point I feel like I already gave beyerdynamic enough of a chance, just by buying their overpriced "flagship". I've wasted even more time writing this stupid review.
So if anyone's still wondering, I don't recommend these headphones, despite their obvious technical prowess and superiority to the DT 880 in numerous other areas. I guess if anyone wants to try them and contradict what I've laid out here, and do it in a constructive manner, they can go ahead. Otherwise, avoid the T1 "2. Generation". Thanks for reading.
