High End Audiophile Thread Part 2

DiY -> Great YT

 

Received my Sony WH-1000XM3 today. I wasn't excepting anything special sound quality wise and indeed, it's no contest between it and HD 6XX (or HD 58X). But the noise cancellation... is something else. It's perfect for travel and air plane use.

The Sony's sound signature is very warm. honestly, too high mid bass peak - causes more harm than good; no, it doesn't make EDM sound better in this case (it's just bloat that hurts the bass detail and everything around it). Makes HD 6XX sound bright (esp mids) and cold in comparison but also much, much more neutral if you swap between them. HD 6XX also has more treble detail (heck, clarity and detail across the board). Sony is not sibilant and somewhat soft sounding. HD 6XX are bright in comparison, thanks to much more prominent and brighter mids and clearer, tighter bass.

Then again, comparing open vs. closed headphones intended for different use case....

Disabling noise cancellation obviously improves the sound quality. All in all though the sound signature is quite pleasing and the drivers are quite high performing. For something wireless and noise cancelling.

 

By the way, my O2 amp started to play ball. Not sure what happened but it now measures fine too. I did open it an push the opamps down so who knows... I can now use it as proper vol pot. The headphone out on AE-5 is too hot for my taste to give proper range. The vol pot from Zx isn't optimal so it's good that I can ditch it now. Unfortunately one screw is busted on my O2 but at least it's sealed...

Did a proper test for Sony's today at work. Indeed, they are comfortable which is nice. They do really nice job in blocking the noises. Going to Japan this Friday so that's when the true test is.

 

They munched your ears or the seat lol?

 

What are you talking about?

 

I quoted it.
You said "ate", I implied whatever had been comfortable was being eaten.
I dunno, one tries to inject some humour into a mistake :shrug:

 

I know very well what you meant. Thus ninja edited the evidence out of the original post.

 

Cool, lost in translation.
Internet fogworks at work lol.

 

Uhh... I've made quite a few typos lately...

 

Age related finger spaz I'm afraid, it doesnt get better.
Neither do the people who pick up on it

 

Oh, I've done much worse I assure you. I wrote quite interesting stuff here when I was a kid (wow... it's actually been about 15 years since I registered). (Just don't try diggin' my old posts. )

To be honest I've been typoing forever and my grammar sucks. I hate to admit it but I can't write proper Finnish any more. My teachers would probably say that "hey, you never did!" and they'd be right. It has always caused problems for me, especially in junior high school or whatever is comparable to Finnish yläaste (grades 7–9).

 

The noise cancelling worked great on the flight. It made a massive difference. In the end I could use the lowest volume setting and hear everything just fine. Unfortunately there was high pitched interference that was annoying (that audio output was far from clean).

 

Thank you all for your help and suggestions. I ended up buying a Sennheiser PC 360 gaming headset, but it had some strange vibrations in the left ear-cup, when I played songs with a lot of base at volumes higher than 40%, but I fell in love with the open and clean sound right away, but I obviously had to return it to my retailer a few days later, because it was broken from day 1, got my money back and thought to myself, why not get rid of that annoying mic while I'm at it (which I barely use anyway) and bought a pair of Sennheiser HD 599 headphones and was once again blown away by the improvement. Tracks I had previously skipped through in my synthwave playlist suddenly came back to life (already sounded much better in my PC 360 vs. QH-90), but this was something else and they don't miss a tone and the base was much more pronounced and is by far the best purchase I've made in 2019. Another good thing with the Sennheiser HD 599 is that it's super light (can barley feel them on my head), whereas with the PC 360 they pushed really hard against my head and I couldn't wear them on my head for more than 1 hour before it would hurt and I had to take a break.

 

Comfort is often overlooked. Grats on the headphones and I'm glad you're enjoying them.

 

HD599 are great for everything. Love their smooth sound.

It's basically a borderline of sanity, beyond that, there are audiofools like me.

 

HD 59x series comfort is pretty incredible and those are really solid cans. I still have my HD 595 though now I obviously use my HD 6XXs all the time.

 

So they do put uncompressed audio for BluRays... Seems to be common for those live recordings at least.

My SawanoHiroyuki[nZk] - R∃/MEMBER limited edition came with BluRay of Sawano's LIVE [nZk]005 concert so, I used it for testing (24-bit, 48kHz uncompressed audio). I didn't pay extra so 24 tracks for free essentially.

With MakeMKV ripping the BluRay was a breeze. Then mkvtoolnix-gui split the chapters in nice audio tracks (left video track out). Then I used ffmpeg to encode them to flac. Tagged with Mp3tag. Perfect.

 

Yesterday I finally bought HD600. This is the headphones, no matter how many times I audition, I fell in love with, over and over again.

HD600 always sounds good. No matter what I listen to or how my mood. Something about it, that always make me come back to them when auditioning dozens of headphones.

I think it's forgiveness. HD600 truly forgives the music, there nothing it trying to force. Listening to HD600 doesn't take my attention away, it's like good old friend.

From a more technical point of view, I bought HD600 to accompany DT1990 for it's natural mids, it makes music sounds melodic, vocals more forward and overall easier to listen to.

Right now I am using HD600 to relax with and listen to music with vocals or classical instruments. As well as watching youtube or other media consumption, where I don't need details, poorly mixed audio and just want to listen to what matters. HD600 also goes well with music where DT1990 sound a bit too sibilant. (Muse or Oasis tend to get very intimate with microphone)



DT1990 on other hand, are the headphones that bring everything from the music. I can hear every detail in bass, treble, etc.. it's all there. Needless to say, listening to DT1990 takes a bit of commitment, cause DT1990 will completely take all my attention. They still surprise me to this day how much fun I have with them, it is addictive. However it's a double edged sword. Having so many details can come at price of sibilant or other unpleasant sound, depending on quality of the sound.

DT1990 are still the most fun headphones I've listened to. They are shine with well mastered music. Daft Punk, Hans Zimmer, Gorillaz, Avicii, Caravan Palance, most EDM, etc... every bass beat is clean, fast and packs a punch. Treble resolves high hats perfectly as they extend further into treble. The clean sub bass extension and details in treble are just too addictive. Not to mention how clean and tight it all sounds. It took me about 6 months to get used to treble on DT1990 and it was well worth it. Using EQ at start helped a lot to ease the sibilant sound and let the brain adjust.

I think I am set for a while now. Maybe once stax will be able to resolve sub bass better, I finally be ready to upgrade, till then I got all what I need.

copied from my reddit post : https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/c40poa/dt1990_hd600_german_brothers_one_is_not_like/

 

@sverek You will also discover as you improve your source and headphone amp, the HD600 will only get even better. The HD600 can be very detailed, and bass response can be excellent when you give them a proper EQ based on their FR curve.