[3lusiv3]

Does someone have a graph of the frequency response from a Sennheiser HD 590?

I'm sure I saw one a few days ago but I can't find it. I think there was a thread with both the 590 and 595 graphs recently.

 

[LargeSock]

HeadRoom has measured the HD590:

http://www.headphone.com/layout.php?topicID=10

 

[pp312]

Actually the three Senn phones (580,590,600) show a surprising uniformity of response--surprising given some of the intemperate comments made here about the 590s brightness. I'm listening to a pair right now (not fully burned in yet) and I hear no brightness at all; what I do hear is a walloping bass. Actually I've always been confused about the general (but not uniform) hostility to the 590 in this forum compared to extremely favourable comment on Audio Review and other sites. I wish someone would explain that to me before discussion on the 590 ceases altogether in favour of the new Senn phones.

 

[3lusiv3]

Quote:

Originally posted by LargeSock HeadRoom has measured the HD590: http://www.headphone.com/layout.php?topicID=10

Thanks for that. Here it is

 

[3lusiv3]

Quote:

Originally posted by pp312 Actually the three Senn phones (580,590,600) show a surprising uniformity of response--surprising given some of the intemperate comments made here about the 590s brightness. I'm listening to a pair right now (not fully burned in yet) and I hear no brightness at all; what I do hear is a walloping bass. Actually I've always been confused about the general (but not uniform) hostility to the 590 in this forum compared to extremely favourable comment on Audio Review and other sites. I wish someone would explain that to me before discussion on the 590 ceases altogether in favour of the new Senn phones.

Another Aussie. I'm very happy with my HD 590's but I find the midrange a bit recessed for the music I listen too so I'm experimenting with the equaliser in iTunes. See my other current post " Why use amps & cables when you can equalise?"

HD 590's rock and I don't know of any other headphone that could do the same for a similar price.

 

[pedxing]

I don't think the frequency response charts really tell the entire story. Be careful when you see frequency response charts. I just take them as a grain of salt.

If you listen to the HD590 and HD600, they both sound very different from each other. The charts also don't represent many other characteristics about the headphones.

Unless you know which sound frequency really sounds like, its hard for anyone to correlate the frequency response with their heapdhones with the chart. You also have to remember that the chart is logarithmic in both directions. On the db scale, a difference of 10 db is like 10 times louder or quieter. As a rule of thumb, a difference of 3 db is twice as loud or twice as quiet. As for the x axis, the treble frequencies are squished and the ups and downs look much more volatile or exagerrated.

Also, the charts are normalized and smoothed. The normalized modifier means that headroom took a sample of several popular, but good, headphones and averaged them together. The normalized chart of HD590 is the difference between the HD590 and that supposed average. Also, smoothed means that they somehow got rid of the jagged spikes that actually exist in the raw data. They smoothed it because reading a chart with frequently occuring spikes all over the place can be hard.

If you are able to find the raw non-smoothed non-normalized data at headroom, you will find out that all of the headpones are far from a flat frequency response.

 

[wallijonn]

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Note the suck-out in the midrange and upper midrange area of the HD 590. That's the exact area in which the human ear is most sensitive to. As a result, though the suck-out looks small, it's actually quite audible to most people. And the peak in the mid-treble - and the emphasis there - made for semi-fatiguing listening.

By the way, I am not a big fan of the HD 590 - or any of the other 1999-model "bionetic" HD 5xx series Senns.

 

[Jasper994]

While I very much enjoy my 590's, I find myself using my 280 pros a lot more. Mostly for their isolation but also because they don't suffer from the recessed midrange issue. On the other hand, I absolutely love them for when I listen to classical music and most of my DVD-A collection since they are better able to resolve the higher level of detail.

 

[pedxing]

I have just noticed that these cool J-Curve charts have one problem - about 50% of the area of the chart is devoted to frequencies below 30 Hz. That means about less than half of the chart is showing us data that most of us cannot hear.

Probably most of the people who look at these charts will overcome that short coming, but I worried that the data that is squished at the other end of the treble frequencies may have been lost because of the limited space on the right side of the chart. Is this a problem or are the overall trends on the right hand side of the chart good enough? Are the measured frequency responses on the left side of the chart mostly noise? If its noise, is the noise bad or detrimental to the performance of the headphone?

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Quote:

Originally posted by pedxing I have just noticed that these cool J-Curve charts have one problem - about 50% of the area of the chart is devoted to frequencies below 30 Hz. That means about less than half of the chart is showing us data that most of us cannot hear. Probably most of the people who look at these charts will overcome that short coming, but I worried that the data that is squished at the other end of the treble frequencies may have been lost because of the limited space on the right side of the chart. Is this a problem or are the overall trends on the right hand side of the chart good enough? Are the measured frequency responses on the left side of the chart mostly noise? If its noise, is the noise bad or detrimental to the performance of the headphone?

Actually, j-curve explained that the frequency figures are 1/10th of what frequencies they really represent. In other words, 30 on the graph's scale is actually 300 Hz - and nearly half the graph is showing everything from the lower mids on down.

 

[pedxing]

Quote:

Originally posted by Eagle_Driver Actually, j-curve explained that the frequency figures are 1/10th of what frequencies they really represent. In other words, 30 on the graph's scale is actually 300 Hz - and nearly half the graph is showing everything from the lower mids on down.

I see. That's the reason why in the corner its labelled Hz/10.

Thanks.

 

[LargeSock]

Just to drive this further off-topic:

What's the cause for the radical dip in frequency response seen somewhere around 8 kHz? This seems to be prevalent in almost every headphone measurement I've seen that isn't smoothed.

 

[3lusiv3]

Quote:

Originally posted by LargeSock Just to drive this further off-topic: What's the cause for the radical dip in frequency response seen somewhere around 8 kHz? This seems to be prevalent in almost every headphone measurement I've seen that isn't smoothed.

I have wondered this as well.

After playing around with my equaliser in iTunes I have now changed my mind and have decided that my 590's sound best with no equaliser at all.

 

[Mullle Meck]

Hello everybody. Sorry to resurrect an old thread but since the images in this htread are gone and this is the only google result discussing this, I descided to do a little trickey with wayback-machine and fetch and reproduce the frequency response curve of the sennheiser hd 590.

Story:
Headphone.com did around the introduction of the hd 650's in 2004 decide to change their testing methodology but did not re-test among the hd590 a lot of older headphones on their site. (I might try and find others later)

With wayback-machine I found their source hd 590 frequency response but the curve did not "look right" because of a different measurement, using their old site I found the FR of the hd580 and hd600 with the old testing. I used an online program to extract data points and put them into matlab and did some math stuff. The graphs are as follows:

To get a reference to what the frequency response is with a more modern methodology, I sampled the FR curve of the hd600 from 2 different sites, The new(er) headphone.com standard and the Reference Audio Analyzer.pro standard. The hd580 result did I include to see if my results where accurate.
Here are the two frequency response curves:

and

I hope this helps anyone in the future who wants to know about sennheisers old flagship

//David