[Redcarmoose]

As I said in the first post, it's all in the crossover, drivers and then speaker design is probably the most important. My main listening room I have speakers which are comparable to $20,000 speakers. To give you an idea what a difference in crossover components just look at the differences in cost between crossover components. Those speakers have probably 20 crossover components, and the capacitor I have on my tweeter is a $70 cap, on each $80 tweeter. Most speakers even "hi-end speakers will use a cheap $3, and I built them with the excellent Jantez Super caps which are still only $20 caps. Some DIY will spend more money on the crossover than they do on drivers, as long as you are using drivers which justify good xover components. But the beauty of building your own speakers, is you can upgrade them by upgrading the xover components.

As I said, I think I'm just spoiled. I've seen the crossovers in commercial speakers and it's a down right joke. I had a real nice set of speakers with a dual VC 7" Focals, and the Scan Speak 2905, which is a fantastic tweeter, and the crossover was JUNK. The resistors started turning into dust, the caps were $3 caps, just a joke, but they sounded fantastic. I cannot tell you how many people said they could not believe how good they sounded.

And what I have now....my brothers Dunlavy's are the only thing I've heard that even comes close.

Everyone is different. You could have two families going out on a car trip. They get to the mountain vista.

Family (A) goes and starts running along till they make it to a totally different area of the park. The father is breathing hard, mom is out of breath. The two kids in family (A) know what to expect as this is the routine. They do this for fun an take pride in the fact that they didn’t sit still and quickly and safely traversed and saw beautiful country. It turns out the father was an outdoor guide and his family reflects his values.

Family (B)
These guys are more intellectual maybe. Maybe not, but they are different and they drive up and park. The kids get out and look at the sky. They are still looking at nature but looking for rain and birds. Dad gets out a paint set up and the whole family walks 20 feet and they sit down under a tree. Paining starts, daughter is writing poetry and mom has a violin, much to the dismay of Family (A) as they are on their way out way way far away.


So neither family is better. They simply have completely opposite ideas of how they interpret the park. Both are into nature and both are super cool people who are showing their children pretty much the same set of values. One is more physical and one more intellectual.

This is headphone and speaker people. They are both into music but approach it from a different direction.

Now this is where it gets good.:....

Their brains will interpret nature in opposite ways. They are both seeing nature yet as it’s the same the perspective is different.

The next level:


We take family A and ask them to act like family B. We ask family B to do just what A does.

What happens at this point is their brains are wired to not see the park from the perspective. It’s a mental thing as perception is a huge part of how we are wired to judge out environment.

https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/dunu-studio-sa6.24665/reviews#item-review-24391


This is the first time I have randomly placed my own review as a leaning post to a question of this style. Yet I did because it goes off on a wild tangent finally arriving at very low cost IEM set-ups being great.

Why?

Why could low cost stuff be great?

Synergy that’s all. But the second half of the review deals with unexpected results, much like your unexpected results.

We don’t know what we are doing until......

a) Our brain understands the input.
b) Finding input our brain accepts.

Cheers!

 

[Edward777]

Headphones are usually much more articulate, given everything else is the same. A good DAC/AMP matters as much as the transducer. HD 700/800 are way more articulate than HD 600.

Thanks for the response. I have a Schiit Magni/Modi 2 Uber combo in terms of DAC/AMP. I'm sure the HD 700+800 are more articulate, but I definitely don't feel like spending hundreds or thousands more just to understand lyrics a little better. It seems insane that it would require that much money to decipher lyrics, but perhaps, as the poster said below, the recordings of older stuff make it harder to understand their lyrics.

 

[Edward777]

So here's the thing about classic rock, soul, jazz etc. A lot of those recordings were really bad. Some remastered are better, some are not. One of the problems here is the sound engineer doesn't compensate by raising the singers voice to a volume that matches the other instruments. In my opinion one of the inherent flaws with headphones is that they use a single driver to reproduce the full range of the audio spectrum. An 8" driver cannot reproduce the bass of an 18" driver, so how could a 2 or 3 in driver reproduce the full audio range on the scale accurately. IMO, with the right speakers they 100% can do a better job than headphones, all the way around!

Thanks for the response. I get what you're saying. Ideally, when I'm older and wealthier and have my own home, I'd get a nice set of floor-standing speakers, but until that day, I use headphones, since I like my privacy and they take up less space, etc. You're probably right on the older recordings being more difficult to decipher when it comes to lyrics. Exile on Main St. is, of course, a classic example of this, but I don't think ANYONE can decipher those lyrics without resorting to a lyrics sheet. That's the type of music I listen to, though, so I've just learned to make the best of it.

I was actually listening to some Chicago yesterday (I know they get hated on critically, but I think they were actually a pretty solid band in the beginning!), and it definitely can be tough to decipher lyrics, but I can usually get the gist. A band like that has so many different things going on at once (they were a seven-piece for most of their history, I believe, with horns, drums, multiple singers, etc.), but I still thought it sounded pretty cool on my HD600s. It was an ALAC rip from the 2002 remastered greatest hits collection, so remastered, but who knows as to the quality. I do like Rhino stuff, though! Now I'm rambling.

 

[techboy]

Just a good amp/DAC can change everything with the same headphone. You will hear crystal clear what lesser gear couldn't reproduce. But buying a 700 might be cheaper than getting a good amp and dac.

 

[Edward777]

Just a good amp/DAC can change everything with the same headphone. You will hear crystal clear what lesser gear couldn't reproduce. But buying a 700 might be cheaper than getting a good amp and dac.

What would you say is a good DAC/amp? I'm pretty happy with the Magni/Modi stack, but maybe one day when I have a lot more money I'd upgrade. Yeah, I'd like an HD700 one day ideally, but it might be a while.

 

[techboy]

What would you say is a good DAC/amp? I'm pretty happy with the Magni/Modi stack, but maybe one day when I have a lot more money I'd upgrade. Yeah, I'd like an HD700 one day ideally, but it might be a while.

That is subjective and depends on your budget.

 

[Sennheiser]

Ok, let start off by saying, my Audiophile journey started some time after I got my first car and installed an Alpine CD player at a time when CD's were the new format and no one had CD's. Fortunately for me, I didn't have hardly any anything either way!

This was probably about 1988. Not my first car, but my first decent car stereo. Some time after that, one of my older brothers had left a pair of Bose 902's at our parents house, and my youngest brother ended up using them...and then started the journey toward actual Audiophile. He's got Mark Levinson stuff and Dunlavy speakers now.

I ended up building several DIY speakers and I have a B&K pre/pro and a real nice Parasound amp now.

I'm not going to belabor these too much, except to say, I have kids now and I'm older, and I find myself really wanted to listen to my music especially when everyone is asleep when I can enjoy it and turn up the volume!

I did my research, I even bought a Monolith LS to power the headphones.

Before I really say what I think of the HD650's let me give this context! Recently I built speakers for my main entertainment setup. Which consists of a gaming PC, with a 43" UHD monitor. I decided I was going to add a cheap receiver and build speakers rather than use PC speakers, since I'd had a setup of those for over a decade.

I've built a few of Troels Graveson's DIY plans, so I decided on a very cheap 5 1/2" bookshelf plan that was very inexpensive but incorporated the equally inexpensive but exceptional sounding Vifa XT tweeters. While I was at it, I bought a subwoofer plate amplifier and built an 8" powered subwoofer!

Now, to the headphones. Obviously I've owned many headphones in my time. I have a pair of the Logitech 935 cordless gaming headphones. But since I have the background I have, while the 935's are great for gaming, well for me the sound was always "okay they are headphones, and they have their advantages, and audiophile is never going to be one of them."

This has been my attitude about headphones for a very long time. "They are headphones, and they will never be audiophile."

One thing I have never been is narrow-minded, so for quite awhile and because I have kids now, I started thinking about giving headphones a try! And I 100% wanted to give them a completely fair and unbiased chance. After all, it was for my benefit.

My brother had some really nice Sennheiser headphones, and I had some nice IEM myself not that long ago. I am a Sennheiser fan for sure.

So having said all that...I got a pair of HD650's bought a headphone amp and with rapt anticipation eagerly awaited my newest audiophile addition.

I hooked them up, played all sorts of music from several sources....and I kept thinking..."ok, these do not sound that good" especially when I added volume. I tried hooking the amp directly to a DAC from my PC, headphones directly to the Denon, (which I could not tell a differance between the Denon and the LS, if anything the Denon sounded better to me.)

Then I did this....I compared what I was listening to the cheapest speakers I have in my three systems. My speakers with drivers, a combined $120, plus xover and cabinet, and it's so bad by comparison, frankly I'm floored! I was listening to the HD 650's and switch to my bookshelfs, and it was like putting a soothing poultice on a gaping wound. Now don't get me wrong I did enjoy them, I listened to them for about a week. Then I decided to return them. I listened to one of my favorite concert blurays, "Talking heads, Stop making sense." and Eagles, Farewell tour I, and then I said, nope, these are going back.

I filled out the return, and they we're only going to refund $425 of the $500 I spent.

So I got them out of the box hooked them back up...and then went back in the box, and they went back today! I just could not justify the money spent.

Here's why...the last night, I really gave them a go then I took them off, I noticed my ears were hurting a little, I switched to the speakers, and that was it...I cannot listen to them loudly... my bookshelfs at low level BLEW the 650's AWAY anyway, let alone volume with my small sub, so I could NOT justify the $500 spent.

In summary, headphones cannot come close to a well-built small speaker setup for a fraction of the cost. Personally I think it's the physics. A good full range speaker uses physics for one, crossover for another, and the cabinets, to make truly natural music reproductions!

One of the biggest things to me that I noticed was the highs. To my ears they just did NOT sound good...now again, this was a back to back comparison to my speakers! Maybe I'm spoiled because I built them, and built the crossovers, but I just copied plans and I followed the plans and didn't cut corners.

In any case, it was 100% worth the whole experience. I've been wanting to try this for several years, and I appreciate everything people here have contributed. You guys have done several things for me. Gave me all the information to try this out, decide if this was the right for me, and make me confident that I'm making the right decision.

I'm keeping the headphone amp. I'll try out some cheaper headphones around the $200 range, and maybe some cordless...I have some in the bedroom I really like, and for the price it just a good buy! But as far as headphones go...I'm not spending more than $200 ever again. I just can't see a return for the investment that would ever justify the money spent.

In summary, I want to be clear. I am not saying the 650's sounded bad. They sounded very good. Just not $500 worth of great, and not even close to my bookshelf speakers. That was the deal breaker for me. When I took the headphones off, unplugged them restarted what I had just listened to, well to be fair, it wasn't fair! It wasn't even close! It's hard to describe other to say, it is like a balm. I wanted so BAD to LIKE these 650's, but when I unplugged them I was like "good GOD!"

Music is like medicine, and the vehicle for the medicine is the differance of whether it went into the muscle vs the veins. This, to me was the differance of headphones vs speakers! Putting the balm next to the wound or on the wound!

Thank you for the review.
Sorry we didn't see it at first... we use the "Head Gear" showcase to track reviews: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/sennheiser-hd-650-headphones.9315/reviews
Hope you enjoy some more medicinal music and relieve stress during these times!

 

[Clausen]

Thank you for the review.
Sorry we didn't see it at first... we use the "Head Gear" showcase to track reviews: https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/sennheiser-hd-650-headphones.9315/reviews
Hope you enjoy some more medicinal music and relieve stress during these times!

WOW, I never expected a response from Sennheiser. That's very freaking cool. I really love Sennheiser and even more now. I'll remain a customer and will recommend for sure!