[Beagle]

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The P5's simply do not play all the music that is coming out of the port that it is attached to. Bottom line.

Really? That's odd. What music is missing?
 

 

[productred]

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Really? That's odd. What music is missing?
 

yeah i wanna know too.......i listen to orchestral music often and that pretty much cover the whole frequency spectrum from the very lowest to the very highest and despite the extreme extentions, which admittedly it is a bit lacking (and so are its main competitors), i dun see much missing. Every instrument sounds natural and quite life-like.

 

[immtbiker]

When someone starts a sentence with, "umm', Or "really, that's odd" it puts the person who said it in a defensive position and makes an open dialog nearly impossible.
I have been a defender of the P5's since inception. But in reality, when you you compare them to other headphones in the same price range, you hear that the soundstage is chocked or restricted. The highs are muffled and the the lows are rolled off. Yes, all of the sounds are there, but it is as if there is a blanket placed over the headphones, and the soundstage is is limited or constricted. They are a beautiful piece of art and you can tell that they are a class act, but when comparing them to the ESW-9's or 10's, they sound downright muffled.
Everything is relative, and when you don't compare them to any other headphones, they are the cat's meow. But when you put then head to head against other cans in the same genre, they don't measure up. It's like Bose systems, they sound great when you hear them alone, but take other systems in the same price range, they put the Bose to shame. 
I love my P-5's but there are so many other offerings out there in the $300 range, they don't sound like the God's gift to the world anymore. 
That's all I'm saying.

 

[Beagle]

Fair enough, but should we not be comparing to top-of-the-line loudspeakers or, better still, live sounds? Most headphones are too bright to my ears.
 
 
Quote:

I have been a defender of the P5's since inception. But in reality, when you you compare them to other headphones in the same price range, you hear that the soundstage is chocked or restricted. The highs are muffled and the the lows are rolled off. Yes, all of the sounds are there, but it is as if there is a blanket placed over the headphones, and the soundstage is is limited or constricted. They are a beautiful piece of art and you can tell that they are a class act, but when comparing them to the ESW-9's or 10's, they sound downright muffled.
Everything is relative, and when you don't compare them to any other headphones, they are the cat's meow. But when you put then head to head against other cans in the same genre, they don't measure up.

 

[Skylab]

That may be, but the P5's have much less treble energy than either the B&W Nautilus 805 or 800 Sugnatures, both of which I own.

 

[3602]

For some reason, when auditioned this P5 alongside an AKG K271 on a Marantz CD5003, the P5 is less muffled than the AKG.

 

[casioa5302ca]

Yesterday evening I tried P5 at slovak national "hifi/audio jam"- High End Slovakia 2010 (http://www.highendslovakia.sk/category/exh/) and they are definitely no good, IMHO of course. Every line for me was like above than naturally and they were overbassed, also. Product for the masses (like DrDre´s phones, Skullcandy´s, Bose´s etc etc) It wast really like- that I couldn´t blame sound signature of P5-they were just too recesed. I was comparing them with my HD25-CII side by side, and P5 were destroyed in all terms, they just loose this match. But, to by honest...they seems to be nice to me, and they were also comfortable.

 

[WalkmanMan]

I could see a doctor or dentist wearing it lol, maybe its just me..

 

[Dyn4m1c95]

is there any sibilance in these headphones? and do these sound better than the vmoda crossfades in terms of bass and sibilance.

 

[Dexdexter]

Quote:

is there any sibilance in these headphones? and do these sound better than the vmoda crossfades in terms of bass and sibilance.

I just got a pair and as of 76 hours burn-in (headphone-out from an iPhone 4), I'm not detecting any discernible sibilance.

 

[rhythmdevils]

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Fair enough, but should we not be comparing to top-of-the-line loudspeakers or, better still, live sounds? Most headphones are too bright to my ears.
 
 

I think it might be better to make the case that most headphones are too bright with something better than the P5...

 

[wanger]

Quote:

is there any sibilance in these headphones? and do these sound better than the vmoda crossfades in terms of bass and sibilance.

 
 
I tried these on at an apple store the other day, I was not very impressed.  Of course the store was packed and loud as all hell but to me they  are not worth the money in terms of sound.  The mids were very recessed and the highs didn't do much for me either.  The cans are physically quite beautiful though, although the superthin cables don't really seem to be very durable to me.   The Crossfades (which I also tried out) had much nicer bass, I didn't get any sibilance from either set.  I just ordered a set of Crossfades myself, will post more thorough impressions on them when they get here, if you're interested.
 

 

[joyride]

I almost agreed with OP on everything he said about SQ
 
I have one weird thing to say,  I like to listen to Poets of the Fall on my iPhone 3Gs, a band from Finland. they have one song named "Everything fades". the first several sentences have echoes from the right ear. with TF10 or even Klipsch S4i you can hear these echoes clearly. but they are missing when you plug P5 into the IPhone. I had P5 burn in for almost 60 hours. Still no improvement. I guess that was because those echoes are high freqs thus get lost

 

[owen27]

Wow...a pair of headphones that caused a 24 page controversy! Woot...

 

[immtbiker]

Quote:

Wow...a pair of headphones that caused a 24 page controversy! Woot...

 
Every headphone on Head-Fi causes a 2 or 3-digit page controversy. That's the nature of the beast of an audio forum.


 
Quote:

Fair enough, but should we not be comparing to top-of-the-line loudspeakers or, better still, live sounds? Most headphones are too bright to my ears.

Why would we want to compare a headphone, especially a $300 one thats worth $180 to top-of-the-line loudspeakers? Do we compare mountain bikes or motorcycles to cars?
 
I have owned many headphones in 37 years of being an audio hobbyist, and very few have been too bright to my ears. Maybe headphones in the last 5 years, just like engineers over compressing recordings, have been tilted upwards, but audio goes back a long way before solid state.
And.. one has to think...is it the headphones or the recordings?
 
On another note, when I bought my P5's it was stated by B&W that they rolled off the highs and lows to allow the listener to enjoy the mids without distortion getting in the way. So, right there, it goes back to backing up my statement about some of the sounds being missing in the presentation of the P5's. Remove frequencies, remove sounds. Like a 128 kbps .mp3.