I've had these for a week now and here are the things I like and dislike about them:
NOTE: used with iPhone 4S with lossless and 320kbps files, and with a Musical Fidelity M1HPAP+M1DAC combo:
Also note that I had the AH-D340's as well.
Like:
- Very comfortable, although they take time to adjust to their size, they feel quite bulky at first.
- Really nice cable quality, one of the best I've seen in any headphone.
- Easy to run, get's overly loud even straight out of an iPhone, but they do sound maybe 20% better out of the MF hp+dac combo.
- Relatively good sound isolation and they don't leak too much.
- They have decent sound resolution and refinement for a headphone at 250$, comparable to Beyerdynamic DT770Pro 80 or AKG K550.
- Great bass extension and good highs extension, and a very good amount of detail, definitely more detailed than DT770's and I'd dare to say very close to my T1's. For example, during Eric Clapton - Unplugged version of Layla, during the guitar solo, the finger nails hitting the guitars and the subtle details like that come out very clearly trough D600's, even more so than trough the T1's. However, trough the entire frequency range T1's are still more detailed.
- Tight bass without boomy resonance or too much emphasis on a particular part of the low frequencies, to me they sound flat from about 300 hz down to 30 hz.
- Good sense of clarity without being overly fatiguing or having a bright sound.
Dislike:
- Horribly wrong tonality in the mids - they basically sound sub-par with any vocal music if you care about naturalness and timbre of sound. Sennheiser HD202's which cost 25 dollars can give them a lesson or two on the tonality in the mids, and I'm not even exaggerating. The mids on these are very colored, they seem to put a veil of some sorts over any music I play trough them. Not a veil in the sense of making the music sound muddy, but making it sound plasticky, thin, and sort of like listening trough a cardboard box rather than headphones. It's not a HUGE problem and it doesn't mean headphones are not listenable for everyone, but to me, they definitely fail hard enough in the mids to ruin the entire headphone. Just thinking that Denon tried to sell these at $500 MSRP when they came out makes me giggle, because compared to any other 500 dollar headphones, like the HD650 for example, D600's mids are literally laughable. On mids alone, they sound like a 50-100 dollar headphones.
- On top of bad tonality in the mids, they also sound thin and recessed.
- Soundstage is very flat. It's wide for a closed back headphone, but it's flat, there's no depth to it in front and back direction, it's like a thin wall of sound that goes trough my head, and the worst thing is, the wall seems to be BEHIND my ears. I don't know how they managed to do that, but it feels like the sound is coming from sides and from behind (no, I'm not wearing them backwards...
). There's also no strong sense of central image, because in order for that to happen, the sound has to be projected in front of you, and sadly that just doesn't happen here.
- They don't have a lot of bass. I know these are supposed to be bassy headphones, but they're really not. T1's have more bass presence and sound more sonorous, or deep and bassy if you will. So do the HD650's, DT990's and DT770, while at the same time having much fuller mids. They can punch hard and the bass can go deep, but to me there's nothing about the D600's that would make me brand them as basshead headphones, not even close. Not that that's a bad thing if the rest of the headphone is as neutral, and to be fair, it does say on the box that they're tuned for a flat EQ, but in this case it's not, so this is a bad point, because the only thing that might have saved the headphone overall by making it bass heavy and fun in that sense, failed to do so.
- Now we come to the biggest flaw of all: the lack of coherence and direction in the sound signature. I just can't put a finger on it, but these headphones sound wrong to me. I can keep describing how crisp and detailed the highs are, how deep the bass can extend and how flat it sounds, or how bad the mids are, but the fact is, these headphones just sound...wrong. It's the typical example of where majority of each aspects is good, but the end result after combining all aspects is not at all good. The worst part is the fact that to me, from memory of the D340's, sound pretty much identical. I had exactly the same impressions of the D340's, I thought they had the same positive and negative points about them, plus the fact that D340's had a horrible fit and were uncomfortable, and I guess they had a more closed in soundstage. In terms of resolution, they might be some 10% lower, but regardless, D600's are not a big enough step up, at least from my memory, take it with a big grain of salt.
- The Denon application for mobile devices is not free, well, it's free to download, but all features are locked. I want it to be free, I payed for the headphones, I won't pay more for an app that's advertised as free on the box of a product that I've bought.
To conclude, these headphones to me sound like they can't decide between being V-shaped, being bass light, being neutral, having a big soundstage, or a small cozy sound, they don't sound warm and full, but they don't sound bright and thin either...BUT, they're not neutral and flat. This all sounds like rubbish, I can't explain it with words anyway. It's sort of like that saying: the jack of all trades, but master none. Except that they're not a jack of all trades...The point is, they don't have that nice "hi-fi" sound that you'd expect from headphones at this price, but then again they're not neutral and flat either. To best describe it, they're colored, but in a bad way. They sound thin and boring, lacking dynamics and the sense of grand scale in the sound that you'd expect from a headphone at this price and from a headphone that's as big as this, and with 50 mm drivers.
I give them 6/10 on overall sound impression and listening experience considering their price of under 250 dollars. For 500 dollars MSRP...just no...
Another thing I forgot to mention is that there's a general sense of....lack of seriousness about these headphones. They seem somewhat kitschy and chincy to me, the headphones as well as the entire packaging. The red box, the brown fake silk lining inside the box..carrying pouch with blue details on it...I mean, come on, decide on a freaking color theme and stick with it. I'm not saying they feel cheap or anything...they just seem flashy and like they've been designed for 15 year olds, to put it nicely, I'd be ashamed to put these on my head and be seen in public. They don't give me that vibe of a high precision, high quality tool or a device that Beyerdynamics or Sennheisers give for example. I much preferred the styling of the old Dx000 series.
