High-End Headphone Round-up

I agree, it's great to see Beyerdynamic headphones given some recognition.

Compared with some other more consumer focused brands Beyerdynamic headphone are VERY well built and are obviously designed for everyday use.

I also agree that the Beyerdynamic DT880 and DT990 are both excellent headphones. I regularly recommend them to customers. The semi open designs are a good compromise between sound isolation and open character of sound. It's a shame these models exceeded the £150 limit for this feature.

@comedian It would be great if you could do a proper high end round up as I have a pair of SR125s that I would like to upgrade, primarily because the sound stage is nonexistent.

Comedian, what are you powering your 125's with?, the soundstage on the 125 can be opened up much more depending on what your driving them with, eg. Most MP3 players will have pretty poor DAC's, but stick a set of 125's into a Denon or a PC with a high end Audio card and you will be amazed at what these will do :), because the fidelity on these things are very high the nuances that high end DAC's produce get passed on in there full glory creating a very good soundstage. The only thing that would worry me about getting headphones with some sort of built in soundstage is that it's kind of done some pre-processing for you, and I prefare to control that. But if your main use is for MP3 players then these might not be the best. I noticed in the review the editor never used anything with a decent DAC, I'm not sure onboard DAC's are that great, so no wonder he noticed a closed soundstage, if Stuart had connected them to say an SB X-Fi he would have noticed a massive difference.

I think i might be alone in liking "clinical" rock and pop :D I enjoy my music to be as faithfully rendered as possible, with as much detail as possible, and a wide soundstage with clear seperation between instruments. This applies to rock and pop as much to jazz/classical as far as i'm concerned. I just bought a pair of akg k701s and am extremely impressed. I highly recommend them. Incredibly detailed across the frequency range. Powerful, thuddy, but tight bass. Some would call them neutral, but as far as i'm concerned that's a good thing. If i want to a colour the sound, i can do that through eq. I'd rather nothing in my audio chain was hard wired to do it a particular way. High z/low sens does mean they wont go loud enough through your average dap though. I use a home built cmoy and that does the job nicely however.

One final comment i would make: such neutral, faithful cans seem to expose (at least to my ears) how much modern records are mastered to push the trebble. I imagine that's because many cheaper, integrated "mini" systems and car stereos have massively over driven bass, both in the amp and speaker stage, and so they need to crank the trebble in mixing to compete. I sometimes turn the trebble down on my desktop amp through the akgs as it can get uncomfortably bright at high volume.