[SilverEars]

I just read about 30 pages of this topic to see if I found a convincing answer to my question but unfortunately I still haven't found it . Can anyone help me?

Comparing de HD-600 (old version) with the HD-600 (2019), do they sound the same despite the different look?

I saw a lot of people saying "yes" and on the official website they tell "yes only the look is different, not anymore".
But unfortunately I didn't see any side-by-side comparison of the two or any comparative graphical measurement.

Has anyone here seen any analytical comparison about possible differences in sound?
*If you have seen it, please share the link if possible

Although people think Sennheisers are very good with consistancy, there will be slight driver frequency response variations I've experienced it with 3 HD600s. Couple of them sounded brighter than I prefer, and one sounded just right. When it comes to purposeful changes by Sennheiser that effects the sound, at one point they changed the foam material inside the pads that changed the thickness to change the sound, but I believe there will be some slight variations to the frequency response like all transducers having some degree of variability depending on QC quality. They will not be identical to each other, which is important to understand about production of transducers.

If we ignore the low-end, and look at response differences of 650, 600, and 660S, we can see on the responses, that differences are slight, but audible. It would similarly be the case between two different 600s to differing degrees, but you cannnot control this. It's the luck of the draw.

Appologies if I've caused driver nervosa.

 

[buffalobill]

Cool, i might buy a pair. Is there a reason we don't see that many high impedance headphones any more?

 

[SilverEars]

Cool, i might buy a pair. Is there a reason we don't see that many high impedance headphones any more?

It's probably due to people going more portable and availability of headphone amps with generally low impedance outputs these days. Before dedicated headphone amps started coming out, receivers had headphone out jacks that had power limiting resisters in the line that added 120+ ohm resistor causing high impedance output. Before headphone amps, I don't believe there were concerns of getting amp's output impedance down so low like today. For speaker taps, yes, but not headphone outputs.

So for high impedance outputs, the 300 or 600 ohms work well since you want headphone impedance to be significantly greater than the amp's output impedance.

Also, planars started popping up as well, and they are generally on the low impedance side.

 

[kman1211]

Although people think Sennheisers are very good with consistancy, there will be slight driver frequency response variations I've experienced it with 3 HD600s. Couple of them sounded brighter than I prefer, and one sounded just right. When it comes to purposeful changes by Sennheiser that effects the sound, at one point they changed the foam material inside the pads that changed the thickness to change the sound, but I believe there will be some slight variations to the frequency response like all transducers having some degree of variability depending on QC quality. They will not be identical to each other, which is important to understand about production of transducers.

If we ignore the low-end, and look at response differences of 650, 600, and 660S, we can see on the responses, that differences are slight, but audible. It would similarly be the case between two different 600s to differing degrees, but you cannnot control this. It's the luck of the draw.

Appologies if I've caused driver nervosa.

Honestly I’ve found Senns to vary as much as some other headphones I’ve tried. I’ll say Senns can vary just as much as Beyers can based on my personal experience of owning multiple examples of the same headphone from both Senn and Beyer. Don't have quite enough experience with other brands to say how they compare in terms of sound consistency. I wouldn’t say any of my HD 650’s or HD 600’s were exactly the same. My first HD 600 was actually distinctly warm and slightly muffled while the second was noticeably tighter and more neutral maybe even a tad bright. Honestly I find after some more pad break in my current HD 6XX sounds better than any of my past HD 650's and the HD 650 I had before was the worst one I had which had a slight hollowness to it’s sound. Sometimes you get better examples of a headphone. And sometimes there are slight changes in manufacturing and mild changes to tuning.

 

[bagwell359]

Are the Sennheiser HD600 still considered a good headphone, or are the outdated in todays market?

Not to me. If you must have subbass or a super refined treble - look elsewhere. But if you listen to music anchored in the midrange - they are superb. Large scale classical to a guitar with voice to a solo piano.

If you get them and run them on a standard SS amp they'll do fine, but they will really sing on the Bottlehead Crack w/ Speedball transformerless tube amp - which has been waxed ecstatic right here on HF in thousands of posts. The kit goes for I believe $415. You get more bass in the 35-70Hz range, liquid mids and tasty highs which don't extend like SS, but are certainly working at 14 kHz. I'm assembling the pieces of one for my own build as I write.

 

[SilverEars]

Honestly I’ve found Senns to vary as much as some other headphones I’ve tried. I’ll say Senns can vary just as much as Beyers can based on my personal experience of owning multiple examples of the same headphone from both Senn and Beyer. Don't have quite enough experience with other brands to say how they compare in terms of sound consistency. I wouldn’t say any of my HD 650’s or HD 600’s were exactly the same. My first HD 600 was actually distinctly warm and slightly muffled while the second was noticeably tighter and more neutral maybe even a tad bright. Honestly I find after some more pad break in my current HD 6XX sounds better than any of my past HD 650's and the HD 650 I had before was the worst one I had which had a slight hollowness to it’s sound. Sometimes you get better examples of a headphone. And sometimes there are slight changes in manufacturing and mild changes to tuning.

I always assume Beyers would be a bigger varying animal in the spectrum of things.

Sometimes people tend to hold the stereotype that everything from Germany should be precise. If that were the case, they would have rivaled Japanse in reliability of vehicles, but we all know that wasn't the truth.

We also know Sennheiser isn't perfect either if we look at what has been released lately. Some hits and some misses.

A more precise sounding HD600 or H650 to rival the precision of the HD800(S) technicalities was what should have been in development.

An ideal headphone is one that has ideal tonality combined with high technicalities. I think the Sennheiser really hit the ideal tonality in the mids to upper frequency portion from their work on HD6-- series. The popularity reflects that.

I actually ended up surveying several DT770s to realize that there was one that was the best response of them. I had to use the Shure pads to get the response I wanted. It was a 250 ohm one, and I strongly believe it was from a batch with a certain box art, as there were changes over the years. I found the response of this DT770 to be better than the usual ones with recessions on some parts of the mids, and this ideal one had more presence, and sound better detailed as well. I was so impressed with it. It's surprising what a radom sync in FR can do.

So far, nobody has really investigated this scientifically, so we do not have good evidence of this phenomena. Scientific studies we see generally are data from sampling of a portion. This would be like that to realize consistancy and variability.

 

[bagwell359]

Senn's product hole is a bit of riddle. They have the 6** base. The 700 was a failure. The 820 hasn't done well. The 800/800S has done well in a market that's not big enough to drive them far. They've got a ton of other products in markets I don't care about, so not sure there. Still in the desktop market between $600 and $1700 where you could fit $895 and a $1295 products, there is nothing. I can't believe they didn't try. I can only think they failed and decided to eat it.

 

[SilverEars]

Senn's product hole is a bit of riddle. They have the 6** base. The 700 was a failure. The 820 hasn't done well. The 800/800S has done well in a market that's not big enough to drive them far. They've got a ton of other products in markets I don't care about, so not sure there. Still in the desktop market between $600 and $1700 where you could fit $895 and a $1295 products, there is nothing. I can't believe they didn't try. I can only think they failed and decided to eat it.

No kidding. Even their iem line shows that they don't seem to have a consistancy in tuning philosophy. Based on all that they put out, it seems almost like HD6-- series was just a lucky tuning. If they were actually good at tuning, then they would be consistant at it. Probably different project leads on different projects. Even Axel seems inconsistant.

 

[BrainFood]

. My first HD 600 was actually distinctly warm and slightly muffled while the second was noticeably tighter and more neutral maybe even a tad bright.

I recently returned a hd600 that also was a tad warm/ muffled. In comparison to my 58x, it was less sharp in the treble area, which was unexpected tbh

 

[mobbaddict]

No kidding. Even their iem line shows that they don't seem to have a consistancy in tuning philosophy. Based on all that they put out, it seems almost like HD6-- series was just a lucky tuning. If they were actually good at tuning, then they would be consistant at it. Probably different project leads on different projects. Even Axel seems inconsistant.

Or maybe the HD600 is just the heritage of a different era. It's difficult for an industrial company to remain consistent across decades and to renew its capacity of innovation. In the same period of time Apple almost went from bankruptcy to becoming the most valuable brand in the world. It's even possible that there are people at Sennheiser now who would be glad to terminate the HD6 series and to replace it with fresher looking products. In terms of marketing it must be difficult for them to rely on 20 years old products to fight the new planar competition. But so far they proved to be unable to do that.

 

[BobG55]

Or maybe the HD600 is just the heritage of a different era. It's difficult for an industrial company to remain consistent across decades and to renew its capacity of innovation. In the same period of time Apple almost went from bankruptcy to becoming the most valuable brand in the world. It's even possible that there are people at Sennheiser now who would be glad to terminate the HD6 series and to replace it with fresher looking products. In terms of marketing it must be difficult for them to rely on 20 years old products to fight the new planar competition. But so far they proved to be unable to do that.

My opinion is that the HD600 simply remains one of the best headphone on the market regardless of price. As for replacing it with fresher looking products the old adage comes to mind : “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

 

[kman1211]

I always assume Beyers would be a bigger varying animal in the spectrum of things.

Sometimes people tend to hold the stereotype that everything from Germany should be precise. If that were the case, they would have rivaled Japanse in reliability of vehicles, but we all know that wasn't the truth.

We also know Sennheiser isn't perfect either if we look at what has been released lately. Some hits and some misses.

A more precise sounding HD600 or H650 to rival the precision of the HD800(S) technicalities was what should have been in development.

An ideal headphone is one that has ideal tonality combined with high technicalities. I think the Sennheiser really hit the ideal tonality in the mids to upper frequency portion from their work on HD6-- series. The popularity reflects that.

I actually ended up surveying several DT770s to realize that there was one that was the best response of them. I had to use the Shure pads to get the response I wanted. It was a 250 ohm one, and I strongly believe it was from a batch with a certain box art, as there were changes over the years. I found the response of this DT770 to be better than the usual ones with recessions on some parts of the mids, and this ideal one had more presence, and sound better detailed as well. I was so impressed with it. It's surprising what a radom sync in FR can do.

So far, nobody has really investigated this scientifically, so we do not have good evidence of this phenomena. Scientific studies we see generally are data from sampling of a portion. This would be like that to realize consistancy and variability.

Honestly you would think so based on what people say but I’ve found Beyers surprisingly consistent. With really only one example with two T1.2’s sounding very different. But they were also the normal one compared to the Black edition and there is debate they tuned the Blacks to be warmer and darker, heard two black ones which both were on the warm side and sounded identical and only silver one which was so bright I couldn’t wait to tear the headphone off my head. But I never personally confirmed this though many reviews I’ve seen seem to indicate there may be a difference between them based on how their sound is described but some seem to indicate they aren’t. Not sure if the silver pair was a lemon, there are some tuning changes, or what. And there really is no done measurements to confirm it either.

German products do seem to get a reputation of precision but I would say it’s not quite the case.

I personally think they did get lucky on the HD
6 line or maybe its just a headphone line that keeps some of their more vintage tunings as many vintage headphones and vintage Sennheisers focus more on mids in general. Sennheiser is definitely inconsistent in their tuning across the range. And they also seem to have a habit of discontinuing their better cheaper headphones and replacing them with something worse.

You do sometimes get a good one that stands out as being distinctly better than others and sometimes you get a bad one that is distinctly worse but usually there is a consistent middle ground.

 

[kman1211]

I recently returned a hd600 that also was a tad warm/ muffled. In comparison to my 58x, it was less sharp in the treble area, which was unexpected tbh

I haven't heard the HD 58X, but I do gather both the HD 600 and HD 650 are less sharp in the treble than the HD 58X so not really surprised you find the HD 600 to have less bite up top. I like keeping an HD 650 or HD 600 around in my headphone stable because they have less bite than most headphones and more midrange focus so they allow me to focus on different aspects of music.

 

[Midgetguy]

I haven't heard the HD 58X, but I do gather both the HD 600 and HD 650 are less sharp in the treble than the HD 58X so not really surprised you find the HD 600 to have less bite up top. I like keeping an HD 650 or HD 600 around in my headphone stable because they have less bite than most headphones and more midrange focus so they allow me to focus on different aspects of music.

To me, the HD58X has slight difference to my HD600 because of the increased bass presence. Because of that, it tends to make the treble slightly sharper than the HD600, but the HD58X was still plenty enjoyable to me. The only reason I don't have it anymore is because I have the HD600 and with them being so similar that will forever be my main headphone. The HD58X has found a good home; I gave it to my friend who had been without a nice set of headphones for a while after his K7XX died. The HD58X for $150 is a stellar deal for the sound quality it produces IMO.

 

[DivineCurrent]

I agree the 58X and 600 are very similar, of course along with the 6XX. All three give you different flavors of a similar tuning. I happen to use and prefer the 58X over the 600 nowadays, as the 600 can get shouty with less than stellar recordings. The usual culprits are EDM, modern pop, rock, the 600 has just a bit too much in the 1-3 kHz range. The 58X sounds best with those genres in my opinion, due to it lowering that midrange presence plus the better extended bass. The 600 to me has the clear advantage with classical, jazz, and vocal heavy tracks.