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#1
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target
for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? Is this a wrong group? Thank you. |
#2
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
"Body Roll" wrote in message
oups.com I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? The best under $200 wired phones are arguably Sennheiser HD 580s. |
#3
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
Arny Krueger wrote:
"Body Roll" wrote in message oups.com I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? The best under $200 wired phones are arguably Sennheiser HD 580s. How about enclosed types? Mark Z. |
#4
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
In article .com, "Body Roll" wrote:
I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? Is this a wrong group? Thank you. ATH-AD700 |
#5
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
"Mark D. Zacharias" wrote in
message . net Arny Krueger wrote: "Body Roll" wrote in message oups.com I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? The best under $200 wired phones are arguably Sennheiser HD 580s. How about enclosed types? I've looked hard, but not found them. |
#6
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message . .. "Body Roll" wrote in message oups.com I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? The best under $200 wired phones are arguably Sennheiser HD 580s. An excellent choice--for open phones. Keep in mind that the HD580s are fairly high impedance units; you may have trouble driving them with battery operated equipment. For closed phones, try the Senn 280. I use the Sony 7506, but the Senns weren't on the market when I bought my Sonys. Norm Strong |
#7
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
wrote in message
news "Arny Krueger" wrote in message . .. "Body Roll" wrote in message oups.com I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? The best under $200 wired phones are arguably Sennheiser HD 580s. An excellent choice--for open phones. Keep in mind that the HD580s are fairly high impedance units; you may have trouble driving them with battery operated equipment. HD580 energy sensitivity isn't all that bad - but they may have something like 3-6 dB worse voltage sensitivity than the more sensitive of the low-impedance phones I've tried. For example, I use them interchangably with MDR 7506s and a low-impedance headphone amp. For closed phones, try the Senn 280. Been there, done that and I'm intentionally not recommending them. OTOH, MDR 7506s while not my SQ or comfort faves, do IMO a better job than 280s based on both SQ and comfort. I use the Sony 7506, but the Senns weren't on the market when I bought my Sonys. And that my friend may have saved you about $100. ;-) I'd really like some phones that compare favorably with the HD580s in terms of comfort and SQ at about the same price (or less). |
#8
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
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#9
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
GregS wrote: In article , (GregS) wrote: In article .com, "Body Roll" wrote: I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? Is this a wrong group? Thank you. ATH-AD700 Reviews of the AT's are becoming more numerous, but seem unamous as saying basically awesome, running over competition. I will be able to make more comments as I just ordered a pair for $115 including shipping. Do you have a link for a head2head vs HD580 and/or MDR 7506? These are to be run off a laptop and a headphone port on a wired remote for a set of powered PC speakers (Altec Lansing 6041). I assume the high impredance (low driver efficiency or what? I'm a total newbie) is not an issue in that setup? Thanks! |
#10
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
In article .com, "Body Roll" wrote:
GregS wrote: In article , (GregS) wrote: In article .com, "Body Roll" wrote: I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? Is this a wrong group? Thank you. ATH-AD700 Reviews of the AT's are becoming more numerous, but seem unamous as saying basically awesome, running over competition. I will be able to make more comments as I just ordered a pair for $115 including shipping. Do you have a link for a head2head vs HD580 and/or MDR 7506? These are to be run off a laptop and a headphone port on a wired remote for a set of powered PC speakers (Altec Lansing 6041). I assume the high impredance (low driver efficiency or what? I'm a total newbie) is not an issue in that setup? I find 3 headphone forums. Headwise, Head-fi, Headphonic. Its a bit hard to look through all the threads. Headwise has no current review of the AD700. The AD900 seems to be very popular but pricey. greg |
#11
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message . .. wrote in message news "Arny Krueger" wrote in message . .. "Body Roll" wrote in message oups.com I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? The best under $200 wired phones are arguably Sennheiser HD 580s. An excellent choice--for open phones. Keep in mind that the HD580s are fairly high impedance units; you may have trouble driving them with battery operated equipment. HD580 energy sensitivity isn't all that bad - but they may have something like 3-6 dB worse voltage sensitivity than the more sensitive of the low-impedance phones I've tried. For example, I use them interchangably with MDR 7506s and a low-impedance headphone amp. For closed phones, try the Senn 280. Been there, done that and I'm intentionally not recommending them. OTOH, MDR 7506s while not my SQ or comfort faves, do IMO a better job than 280s based on both SQ and comfort. I use the Sony 7506, but the Senns weren't on the market when I bought my Sonys. And that my friend may have saved you about $100. ;-) That's good to know, because I was very close to buying the 280 just for comparison purposes. Your response is the first I've read that calls into question the comfort of the 280. I'm operating strictly on theory here, since I've never tried--or even seen--a pair of HD280s. I just assumed it was comfortable. I guess we should never "assume" anything; it makes an ass out of u and me. :-) Norm |
#12
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Headphones for under $200
Arny Krueger wrote:
wrote in message news "Arny Krueger" wrote in message . .. "Body Roll" wrote in message oups.com I'm looking for decent wired headphones for under $200. Bose at Target for $160 sounded good enough to me, but the folks on rec.audio.car are of low opinion about Bose drivers. What are decent headphones in that price range? The best under $200 wired phones are arguably Sennheiser HD 580s. An excellent choice--for open phones. Keep in mind that the HD580s are fairly high impedance units; you may have trouble driving them with battery operated equipment. HD580 energy sensitivity isn't all that bad - but they may have something like 3-6 dB worse voltage sensitivity than the more sensitive of the low-impedance phones I've tried. For example, I use them interchangably with MDR 7506s and a low-impedance headphone amp. For closed phones, try the Senn 280. Been there, done that and I'm intentionally not recommending them. OTOH, MDR 7506s while not my SQ or comfort faves, do IMO a better job than 280s based on both SQ and comfort. I use the Sony 7506, but the Senns weren't on the market when I bought my Sonys. And that my friend may have saved you about $100. ;-) I'd really like some phones that compare favorably with the HD580s in terms of comfort and SQ at about the same price (or less). Looks like Sennheiser have stopped making the 580. How about the 595? -- Chris Malcolm DoD #205 IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK [http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/] |
#13
Posted to rec.audio.misc
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Sennheiser 595 (was Headphones for under $200)
Chris Malcolm wrote:
Arny Krueger wrote: I'd really like some phones that compare favorably with the HD580s in terms of comfort and SQ at about the same price (or less). Looks like Sennheiser have stopped making the 580. How about the 595? I found a pair locally at a good price I could return if I didn't like them (100 UK pounds). What I wanted was headphones which could hear at least nearly as much detail as my QUAD 63 ELS speakers, could be listened to for hours without physical or audio discomfort, and worked well being driven by low powered battery stuff like small radios and MP3 players. They demonstrated immediately certain things which I've learnt to note as signs of especially good quality. I suspected them of being a bit dull and lacking in top, and then when some well-recorded cymbals came along, I heard so much distinct shading of detail that it's clear what they lack is artificial top tizz, and have plenty of real clear undistorted top. They make it easier to listen to sources with a lot of background noise such as vinyl hiss and crackle because they make it easier for the ear to distinguish noise from signal and to listen selectively to one or the other. Listening to talk radio I'm sometimes startled by how vividly I can hear the acoustics of the room in which the talking is taking place, noticing for example that one talker is close to the left hand wall, the other is in the middle of the room and further from the microphone. Deep bass is very clearly pitched without being exaggerated. So they were clearly a high class act, as they should be at the price. Their revelation of detail is good enough that I heard things I hadn't heard before on my QUAD ESL 63s, such as a pianist humming quietly or a violinist turning a page, and had to pull the 63s in to a tight closely focussed set up, almost like giant earphones, to hear the same detail. It's not entirely clear now which of the Senn 595 phones and QUAD 63 speakers is the more detailed, since at the edges of perception they sometimes seem to bring up slightly different details. That's as good as I wanted them to be with respect to detail. The sound isn't as relaxed and spacious as the 63s, which I suspect is partly just the in-the-head effect of phones, and partly a small residual colouration from the physical enclosure, the padded tube between the diaphragm and the ear. On the other hand, it is relaxed and spacious enough to produce such enjoyably good quality that I've found myself listening to them a lot, including music I wouldn't normally listen to, simply because the sound is so good. And I find myself going through my collection of favourites, hearing things I hadn't heard before. The padded tube between ear and phone is a bit larger in the 595s than the 600 or 650, because in the 595 the drivers are moved a bit forward and tilted back in an attempt to give a more natural provocation of the pinna effects of the ear folds. They do, at least with my ears, have a more foward sound stage than ordinary earphones and headphones, which to me always produce a sound stage in a straight line between the ears when the source material has been close miked and mixed into position. With source material that includes at least some of the ambience of natural acoustic, such as from a crossed stereo pair of microphones, there is the usual acoustic image ambiguity between the sonic clues to the original room acoustic, and the sonic clues that you're listening to a small driver very close to your ear through a small well damped tube. I suspect on general principles that this slight tilted forward displacement of the 595 drivers will have bought a more natural open sound on close miked position mixed recordings at the cost of slighly inhibiting the development of a truly binaural sound image which you'd get from an artificial head recording, which would be slightly less inhibited by the slightly more open (slightly less tube) construction of the 580, 600, and 650 series. If so, then on good recordings with enough good binaural ambient clues, the 580 family might more easily develop a bigger and more spatially detailed image on suitable recordings. Just a guess, but if so I wouldn't want to buy that extra fidelity at the cost of losing the easy portable battery device drivability of the 595s. For drivability with low-powered battery devices I compared them to a couple of 30 Ohm headphones and a few 30 Ohm earphones. The 595s measured as 50 Ohms, and despite that produced a distinctly louder sound than any of the others. They were also easier to drive, in that I found that I could turn up the volume enough on the other phones to hear quite nasty clipping, whereas the 595s were loud enough that at the loudest I could bear to listen to there was only very much milder clipping. I verified that this was amplifier clipping rather than the phones cracking up by driving two pairs of phones in parallel, which made the clipping much worse in both. So not only are they very good audio quality headphones, but they're *more* easily driven by low-powered battery earphone drivers than even the typical earphone supplied with the device. That's an unexpected and welcome bonus. I suspect it's the result of particularly powerful magnets with very high gap field strength. That's always good news in magnet powered drivers. It's a long standing suspicion of mine that the contribution of gap field strength to the quality of magnetic drivers is underestimated. They have two minor ergonomic failures. One is that the cable, at least on mine, is a cheap stiff cable instead of floppy and acoustically dead. The other is that the converter from big headphone jack to little earphone jack produces a long protruding double-plug lever that will probably sooner or later damagingly wrench the earphone socket of a small portable device. Since they're so very good with my small portable devices, I've obtained an extension cable with a small right angle jack to preserve the integrity of my sockets :-) I was a bit worried in case the extra wire would degrade quality, given how much some folk enthuse about expensive third-party cable replacements for top Sennheiser phones. But I needn't have worried. My ears are obviously too old to hear the differences between bits of wire :-) I have no idea how these 595s compare with the now out of production 580s, or whether I'd think the probable extra quality of the 600 or 650 would be worth the extra money. What I can say is that I'm very pleased to have got the sound quality, low-power drivability, and physical comfort, of these phones for 100 UK pounds. But I should warn the reader that I have no experience with the quality versus price equation with headphone. So I have no idea, beyond the shortage of reviews on the web supporting such a possibility, whether this quality could be matched by another headphone at half the price. -- Chris Malcolm DoD #205 IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK [http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/] |
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