[Krutsch]

Are the hd600 and 650 being discontinued???
Some guy posted a thread regarding that on reddit saying that moon audio is listing them as discontinued by the manifacturer....

Wouldnt that be a stupid move.by sennheiser? Discontinue 2 legendary headphones without even having anounced their sucessors?

Cheers

 
That's called click-bait... getting people to click to Moon Audio to check it out. Moon Audio, Amazon and Sennheiser are not listing the HD-650s as discontinued.

 

[castleofargh]

  It's not about how loud something is. It's about control of the diaphragm. I really doubt any of the Dragonfly models are adequate for an hd600/650. These are not 300ohm headphones regardless of what the marketing material says. You really need to put some power into them. 
 
I think a better amp would change your mind quite quickly. 

this makes zero sense. it's not marketing it's electricity and how loud you'll listen to your hd650 totally determines how much voltage and power will be needed. if anything, marketing is what convinced people that they needed unlimited powaaaaa to drive a fairly sensitive high impedance headphone.
 objective needs are assessed through objective measurements, not taste and gut feeling.
 
 to control the diaphragm you have mechanical damping from the headphone, and electrical damping from the interaction between the headphone and the amp, where the impedance ratio will determine most of the result. if you lack current the sound will distort like mad so it's not a matter of sounding better with more current(more than what?), you have enough into the load at a given loudness, or the sound will be horrible. not just different from personal preference, but actually wrecked sound.
so while I tend to agree with the control of the diaphragm argument at an objective level, the fact is that many of the praised amps in here have high impedance and as such a very poor electrical damping ability. suggesting that for most people it doesn't matter, or that maybe they actually like it a little underdamped. or maybe they just like the little mid bass bump as a result, or maybe they just like those specific tube amps. and of course, maybe it has absolutely nothing to do with power and diaphragm control at all and people just assume it does.
 
personally I do like to have some headroom when it comes to power because I often make a heavy usage of DSPs of all sorts and they usually need to compensate the gain to avoid potential clipping in the process. as a result the amp will need to have all the headroom I will lose on a digital level.  so I still tend to rely on this kind of vague estimates http://www.head-fi.org/t/197776/sennheiser-hd650-impressions-thread/27645#post_11806577  for myself I consider that if a source can do 100db into 300ohm at 1khz, it can do anything I'll ever need. I stick to 115db as a target when doing it for others because I don't know them and how loud they'll listen. less than my target loudness will make me consider my use, while a good deal more than my target loudness will simply make me avoid the amp if it doesn't have gain implementations specifically done for practical use around 1 or 2X gain. more is just impractical for comfortable volume setting of the hd650 and minimum risk of channel imbalance IMO. in short, I don't mind extra power as long as it doesn't create a problem for my use.
 
anyway, from that very very safe general approach of aiming for 110 or 115db max into 300ohm, the dragonfly seems to come a few db short(not by much really, but the specs are based I imagine on a well behaved USB port, so that might deserve some more investigation when used on battery powered devices for example). IMO it mainly begs the question, is the user the type to listen at very loud levels with replay gain, heavy EQ, and stuff like that? if so, he might want to consider other options. otherwise for normal listening levels the little thing will do just fine in actual power and loudness needs with the 650. in practice most sources will do fine at reasonable listening levels. that's electrical reality not marketing, but of course it's only power and loudness, there is more to good audio than that. some sources may not be totally transparent, and the listener will then logically have personal preferences. that is true and should obviously matter to the user, but don't confuse taste with electrical requirements.
 
 
PS: for the anecdote, my O2 right now is set to output 0.03V(I'm not done with some measurements and leave it there out of laziness). even then I'm not at 100% in foobar.  I'm considered a quiet listener and I don't expect everybody to enjoy music in the 60/70db area most of the time, but it would be lunacy to say that my sound isn't good enough because my amp lacks power. it could be improved on many levels for sure, but power isn't one in that usage. 

 

[Solrighal]

"It could be improved on many levels for sure". Masterful understatement my man

 

[Pedro Oliveira]

That's called click-bait... getting people to click to Moon Audio to check it out. Moon Audio, Amazon and Sennheiser are not listing the HD-650s as discontinued.

I think its very weid. Evolution happens and things get forgotten with time but in this case we arr talking about 2 legendary headphones. Its weird that a company cuts the production of 2 headphones like this without even having announced something to replace them.

Even if new 6*0s are coming out i am pretty sure sennheiser would only discontinue the 600s and 650s long after thebnew models are introduced to the market....

But i doubt this 2 will ever be discontinued.... They are too loved and like the hd25 and beyers dts they are too important....

 

[jbarrentine]

 
it's not marketing it's electricity 
 
into 300ohm, 

 
 
I was referring to the fact that the hd600/650 are marketed at 300ohm but have a huge impedance hump closer to 600. 

 

[Rob80b]

   
 
I was referring to the fact that the hd600/650 are marketed at 300ohm but have a huge impedance hump closer to 600. 

A carry over from the olden days and pre headphone amp era when most headphones were run off an integrated amp or receiver that had and to quote "very high output impedance"....
more
"High-End Headphones Favor High Impedance - There can be some significant advantages to higher impedance headphones. A higher impedance allows for more turns of wire to be used in the voice coil of the driver. This can result in a better “motor system” with fewer compromises resulting in better overall sound. Higher impedance headphones also require less current to drive and that typically reduces distortion in multiple ways. It makes them more immune to output impedance differences between sources and also less sensitive to long cables and sharing a common wire in 3 wire cables and 3 wire connectors (i.e. headphone plugs and jacks). The amplifiers driving headphone nearly always produce lower distortion into higher impedances."
http://nwavguy.blogspot.ca/2011/02/headphone-impedance-explained.html

 

[castleofargh]

  "It could be improved on many levels for sure". Masterful understatement my man

on the matter of improving sound, I finally got myself to try sonarwork, and I've never been so happy and disappointed at the same time about a software before.

(proper happy and sad at the same time meme)
I have one of my EQ setting for the hd650 that's almost a perfect copy of what sonarwork does.(well not in the time domain where I did stuff like a barbarian with all pass filters). so I can confirm that I find the sonarwork EQ to feel very nice to my ears. and I feel like an EQ god for reaching about the same sort of signature on my own ^_^. my ego is happy.
but at the same time it's a sound I already have. and I already measured my headphone for channel imbalance so not much point in sending it for measurement.
 they basically have nothing that I don't already have(well close enough at least). but the reason I already have it is obviously because I believe it has significance.
it's one of those rare occurrences where I don't see the point of having it for myself, but at the same time I feel like I should tell people to at least try because Sonarwok does a damn good job with or without custom calibration, I really have nothing bad to say about this software and the decisions they made, and when you know how much I love to complain, that's a statement in itself

.

 

[castleofargh]

 

 
it's not marketing it's electricity 
 
into 300ohm, 

 
 
I was referring to the fact that the hd600/650 are marketed at 300ohm but have a huge impedance hump closer to 600. 

oh, ok I get it. well specs are usually for 1khz and never claim to be more. it might not always be clear but it's usually how it's done so that it has some meaning with the sensitivity also measured at 1khz.
then some small variations are to be expected. I actually get an almost spot on measure with 297ohm and almost the exact same value on the other side at 1khz on mine. but online measurements often show some variations up to a few tens of db from pair to pair. as it often happens with headphones.
so using those specs for estimations is aiming at a ballpark value we can use. we don't even care for phase or anything so obviously it's prudent to aim for some matter of headroom and the 110 or 115db based on specs will rarely let anybody down. it's not absolute perfection but it's also precise enough to give a usually reliable idea. some might wish to adapt that target to how loud they listen to music, or to the type of amp and headphone combo they plan to use(some designs could be more appropriate for specific type of drivers). but then again the hd650 is an average nice kid, it's a little low sensi for some portable use, but aside from that, power will mostly be fine.
if anything people should be worried about headphones/IEMs where the impedance goes below the value given at 1khz, because that's where the current draw will be the strongest and an amp might have troubles aside from going loud enough. amp are very rarely sad to drive 600ohm. unloaded measurements are done with 10kohm(the input of the measurement gear) and that's often where you'll have the best possible behavior for the amp.

 

[LazyListener]

@castleofargh
 
Could you explain why weaker amps with higher impedance phones generally provide an overall thin sound, whereas more powerful amps generally provide a fuller, weightier, and richer sound?  I've noticed this with my weaker Dragonfly and Fiio amps versus the Magni 2.  More power can't simply mean more overall volume.  There must be more to it than that.

 

[lugnut]

   
That's called click-bait... getting people to click to Moon Audio to check it out. Moon Audio, Amazon and Sennheiser are not listing the HD-650s as discontinued.

I am not saying they have been discontinued, I do not know ! However Moon Audio does indeed have them as out of stock and discontinued.

 

[Krutsch]

  I am not saying they have been discontinued, I do not know ! However Moon Audio does indeed have them as out of stock and discontinued.

I just went to Moon Audio, added a set w/ Dragons to my cart and went to checkout. No mention of out of stock.

 

[LazyListener]

 
I just went to Moon Audio, added a set w/ Dragons to my cart and went to checkout. No mention of out of stock.

A few days ago, they were listed as "out of stock, discontinued" at Moon Audio's site.  Saw it myself.

 

[marcussmj]

Hey guys just want to ask if anyone has paired the Graham Slee Solo with hd650 and what are your impressions?

 

[castleofargh]

  @castleofargh
 
Could you explain why weaker amps with higher impedance phones generally provide an overall thin sound, whereas more powerful amps generally provide a fuller, weightier, and richer sound?  I've noticed this with my weaker Dragonfly and Fiio amps versus the Magni 2.  More power can't simply mean more overall volume.  There must be more to it than that.

I can't. basically because correlation doesn't mean causality. you and others will notice that when you get try different amps, you prefer the sound in some ways for a few of those amps. nothing wrong with that, it's perfectly possible that different amps will not sound the same, just like it's perfectly possible that some more powerful amps could end up being in the group you prefer. but how do we know it's related specifically to power? it's not like it's the only variable that changed in the experience.
did you try many very powerful but dirt cheap amps? do they also sound better? we can see trying 3 amps as changing 1 variable each time, the amp power. but we can also see every single design difference in each and every amp as an independent variable, and power is but one out of hundreds of possible causes for a different sound. you just so happen to consider it as the likely culprit for no particular reason except noticing a correlation.
 
I always remember that video when I feel like I'm seeing patterns and wonder if they're conclusive or not(which happens to me like 20times a day for audio only

).

I also kind of get angry at the guy telling me I'm not so smart at the end ^_^.

 

[Silent Xaxal]

Something for those discussing a "discontinuation":

https://www.moon-audio.com/blue-dragon-sennheiser-hd-650-headphones.html

If I am to believe this, it sounds like Moon Audio will only sell the HD650 as a combo with one of their cables.