Bilavideo
Caution: Incomplete trades.
- Joined
- Feb 29, 2008
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Oh my jumpin' Jesus! I just got my HD800 and it's everything they said about it and more! I haven't burned these in. I'm running off of ground zero. I don't even have them hooked up to an amp of any kind. I'm running these suckers straight off my iPod - and they're unbelievable!
Mind you, my iPod is having a hellacious time powering these headphones, and with such anemic powering the tonal balance remains a little tinny, but the level of detail is superb! I'm literally going through my iPod, finding new details in old songs and it's as if a little genie came along and remastered all my old CDs.
Take, for example, Dizzy Gillespie's "On the Sunny Side of the Street," from Sonny Side Up. With these phones, you can hear that tiniest bit of space between the perception of horns meeting the same musical mark and the human reality. That tiny parallax makes the recording more real, more nuanced, and more interesting. My poor iPod is barely cranking out George Thorogood's "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer," but even on the edge of ampliblivion, the pick work is a 12-course meal. The Wallflowers' "One Headlight" both smacks and yields space, even while the vocals remain as intimate as a sidebar. The guitars never overwhelm but the mids are never recessed, either. It's another full-course meal right off the plate of FM-radio offerings from the nineties. On Bob Marley's "One Love," the unamped bass is almost as prominent as the cymbals. The vocals are crisp and the balance between the three is perfect, with nothing getting sacrificed just to give prominence to something else.
I'm still geeking out through the Eagle's "One of These Nights." Everything is there - from popping bass, through the lush mixture of guitar tracks and high hats. The vocals are prominent but neither out in front or buried within the instrumentation. Good God, I could eat this sound. That lead guitar is as scrumptious as those backing vocals. These headphones are fast, fast enough to reveal not only the extra little fuzz on Joan Obsborne's "One of Us," but the wah-wahs in her vocals and the otherwise-imperceptible seams between the separate tracks that were layered to make it sound as if this were a single recording rather than an assembly of parts. On Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time," there's an effect (I lack the vocabulary to properly describe) where the acoustic-guitar intro that sounds like a discrete series of quarter notes walking up and down a major seventh scale turns out to be a doubling of eighth notes run together with both sides of the pick, run just long enough to chime like little bells but played in short enough succession to create a kind of mirroring that just sparkles.
With these cans, you can really get your analytical freak on.
I haven't begun to burn these in yet, nor have I stopped to plug in my amp. I first wanted to know what to expect if all I had was a naked iPod (fig leaf not included). The slightly sugary-sweet presentation must be where the 702 crowd thinks their darling holds a candle to the HD800. No doubt, both phones open up the sound stage in ways that lead to comparison, but even unamped, the HD800 is more balanced and the detail is unparalleled. And with respect to bass, I'm listening to Cherish's "Only One," which is crisp to the point of sibilance - and yet the bass (at least in the intro before it gets drowned out by busy vocals) just bounces. Is Enya's "Only Time" as throbbing as it could be without an amp? No, but even a track as plastic and synthetic as that one yields detail after detail - from the finger-nail-tapping-like texture of that rhythmic synthetic plucking to that weird clap-snap artifact at around 16 seconds (around the words "road goes").
As with my first pair of Grados, I feel like I'm uncovering the painting beneath the painting. The presentation could use a little more punch (from the amp I'm depriving myself of at the moment) but I can't fault these cans for balance, nor do they strike me as remotely unengaging. I briefly owned a pair of HD650s, which werelike the HD800s in some respect (comfort, balance, a sense of space) but these cans seem to mock the complaint that Sennheiser cans are unengaging. They answer the question as to whether you can have it both ways - balance and earnest passion. Sum 41's "Open Your Eyes" is no less in-your-face on the HD800. It just doesn't color some part of the frequency spectrum to the detriment of another. Supernova's "Oreo" is as insane on these cans as on any other (while the garage-sound of that little bit of feedback whine just leaps out on "Our Way" every bit as much as that cowboy-like "yeeeehaaaaaaa").
If anything, these cans have put the excitement back into the music. I feel the way I did when I went from cassette to LPs and realized how much more energy there was. They make my iTunes downloads sound more like records than anything I've ever heard. REO Speedwagon's "Out of Season" took me back - three decades - like that food critic in Ratatouille. The Clash's "Overpowered by Funk" has new life. Van Halen's "Panama" is sibilant but incendiary. There's so much raw energy here, the obscenity is back. Cocked and loaded, the safety is off.
Some suggest that analytical phones are a bad choice, that they reveal too much. I suppose they do, if you're simple and you like your music that way. I think I much prefer the idea of complexity. That's my life. That's my world. That, apparently, is also my music. If your house is filled with Greek busts, you might want to stick to something that preserves the perception of seamlessness. At this point in life, I prefer the unforgiving creases of those Roman portraits. I've always been put off by Sennheiser's appropriation of the "HD" prefix to so many of their products, as if insulting the public's intelligence by confusing a visual term of art with the characteristics of an auditory tool. This time, however, I think Sennheiser has stolen it fair and square. If nothing else, the HD800 is a "high-definition" headphone.
And that's with both hands tied behind its back.
Mind you, my iPod is having a hellacious time powering these headphones, and with such anemic powering the tonal balance remains a little tinny, but the level of detail is superb! I'm literally going through my iPod, finding new details in old songs and it's as if a little genie came along and remastered all my old CDs.
Take, for example, Dizzy Gillespie's "On the Sunny Side of the Street," from Sonny Side Up. With these phones, you can hear that tiniest bit of space between the perception of horns meeting the same musical mark and the human reality. That tiny parallax makes the recording more real, more nuanced, and more interesting. My poor iPod is barely cranking out George Thorogood's "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer," but even on the edge of ampliblivion, the pick work is a 12-course meal. The Wallflowers' "One Headlight" both smacks and yields space, even while the vocals remain as intimate as a sidebar. The guitars never overwhelm but the mids are never recessed, either. It's another full-course meal right off the plate of FM-radio offerings from the nineties. On Bob Marley's "One Love," the unamped bass is almost as prominent as the cymbals. The vocals are crisp and the balance between the three is perfect, with nothing getting sacrificed just to give prominence to something else.
I'm still geeking out through the Eagle's "One of These Nights." Everything is there - from popping bass, through the lush mixture of guitar tracks and high hats. The vocals are prominent but neither out in front or buried within the instrumentation. Good God, I could eat this sound. That lead guitar is as scrumptious as those backing vocals. These headphones are fast, fast enough to reveal not only the extra little fuzz on Joan Obsborne's "One of Us," but the wah-wahs in her vocals and the otherwise-imperceptible seams between the separate tracks that were layered to make it sound as if this were a single recording rather than an assembly of parts. On Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time," there's an effect (I lack the vocabulary to properly describe) where the acoustic-guitar intro that sounds like a discrete series of quarter notes walking up and down a major seventh scale turns out to be a doubling of eighth notes run together with both sides of the pick, run just long enough to chime like little bells but played in short enough succession to create a kind of mirroring that just sparkles.
With these cans, you can really get your analytical freak on.
I haven't begun to burn these in yet, nor have I stopped to plug in my amp. I first wanted to know what to expect if all I had was a naked iPod (fig leaf not included). The slightly sugary-sweet presentation must be where the 702 crowd thinks their darling holds a candle to the HD800. No doubt, both phones open up the sound stage in ways that lead to comparison, but even unamped, the HD800 is more balanced and the detail is unparalleled. And with respect to bass, I'm listening to Cherish's "Only One," which is crisp to the point of sibilance - and yet the bass (at least in the intro before it gets drowned out by busy vocals) just bounces. Is Enya's "Only Time" as throbbing as it could be without an amp? No, but even a track as plastic and synthetic as that one yields detail after detail - from the finger-nail-tapping-like texture of that rhythmic synthetic plucking to that weird clap-snap artifact at around 16 seconds (around the words "road goes").
As with my first pair of Grados, I feel like I'm uncovering the painting beneath the painting. The presentation could use a little more punch (from the amp I'm depriving myself of at the moment) but I can't fault these cans for balance, nor do they strike me as remotely unengaging. I briefly owned a pair of HD650s, which werelike the HD800s in some respect (comfort, balance, a sense of space) but these cans seem to mock the complaint that Sennheiser cans are unengaging. They answer the question as to whether you can have it both ways - balance and earnest passion. Sum 41's "Open Your Eyes" is no less in-your-face on the HD800. It just doesn't color some part of the frequency spectrum to the detriment of another. Supernova's "Oreo" is as insane on these cans as on any other (while the garage-sound of that little bit of feedback whine just leaps out on "Our Way" every bit as much as that cowboy-like "yeeeehaaaaaaa").
If anything, these cans have put the excitement back into the music. I feel the way I did when I went from cassette to LPs and realized how much more energy there was. They make my iTunes downloads sound more like records than anything I've ever heard. REO Speedwagon's "Out of Season" took me back - three decades - like that food critic in Ratatouille. The Clash's "Overpowered by Funk" has new life. Van Halen's "Panama" is sibilant but incendiary. There's so much raw energy here, the obscenity is back. Cocked and loaded, the safety is off.
Some suggest that analytical phones are a bad choice, that they reveal too much. I suppose they do, if you're simple and you like your music that way. I think I much prefer the idea of complexity. That's my life. That's my world. That, apparently, is also my music. If your house is filled with Greek busts, you might want to stick to something that preserves the perception of seamlessness. At this point in life, I prefer the unforgiving creases of those Roman portraits. I've always been put off by Sennheiser's appropriation of the "HD" prefix to so many of their products, as if insulting the public's intelligence by confusing a visual term of art with the characteristics of an auditory tool. This time, however, I think Sennheiser has stolen it fair and square. If nothing else, the HD800 is a "high-definition" headphone.
And that's with both hands tied behind its back.
