Quote:
Originally posted by kelly
The CD3000, though? It's a $600 headphone. If you plug it into any of the Sony ES players--they're likely largest audience, from what Hirsch says, it probably wouldn't sound right. I'm just trying to figure out what they were thinking here. |
The CD3000s were never intended to be used at home with the lounge sofa and consumer CD players. They were originally designed as a high end studio monitoring headphone. That in part explains their sound as I heard it. Very relentless, very merciless. In my mind the CD3000 is literally a more refined V6, they contain many similar characteristics.
However us headphone freaks being what we are just have to go out of our way sometimes to drag, kicking and screaming, any and all headphones into our own homes to use as a normal "relaxing" headphone. When the headphone starts turning out otherwise, we start freaking out and calling it a turd. The problem though is we're using the headphone in the wrong application. Sure a headphone should be able to run anywhere and sound good, but certain headphones are developed strictly for monitoring and audio engineering purposes, i.e. as workhorse headphones. These headphones tend to have a certain ruthless characteristic that makes them very unfriendly for candlelight-in-the-dark listening sessions. The V6 is one example of this. The CD3000 is yet another. Other companies may be better at creating a more "nice" sounding monitoring headphone (Beyerdynamic comes to mind), but then I wonder if that headphone, when used in the environment it's meant for, is even doing its job correctly. When I think studio monitoring I think agressive, ruthless, merciless, and even unpleasant, and you need that to reveal deficiencies during recording sessions.
Biocellulose is simply a fabrica or material that Sony just developed for the drivers of their higher end headphones. There is ultimately many ways you could tune a driver and change the surrounding cup and isolation materials to change the sound. I've owned the MDR-E888, MDR-CD1700, MDR-CD3000, and the MDR-R10 before and all four of them sound very different from each other. Ultimately there is no such thing as a "Sony in-family sound" that can be deduced from these headphones just because their drivers are made from the same material.
