The Search For Headphones

My current head-fi is a pair of Sennheiser HD650s I bought in 2014. Before that I had a pair of HD580's. There's a 2019 edition of the HD650's available for £550 on Amazon, I paid less for mine. A LOT of reviewers will say that, as far as they are concerned, the HD650 are the best pair of headphones they have heard, not only at the price point, but at all. Mixing engineers like them, audiophiles like them, ordinary listeners like them. I like them, but they lack a certain... something that might not exist.

The 2019 edition of my HD650's cost as much as my KEF LS50 speakers (on sale). Headphones can cost less than £50 and the pro reviewers are very enthusiastic about the Meze Empyrean, £2,800 at Audio Sanctuary. There are more expensive sets.

Look at a headphone review channel on YT and you will notice those guys have a LOT of headphones. Read some of the comments on the boards and it becomes obvious that some people just like buying headphones. I think there are 'Headphonies' like there are 'Watchies' - people who buy headphones. Instead of, you know, holidays or armfuls of CDs. Oh, and both Watchies and Headphonies are slightly deranged. No doubt.

My theory is that watches just don't deliver, on repeated use and viewing, a big enough belt of feel-good hormones to produce satisfaction. Not like a Monet. Or a Ford Mustang. Or listening to a next-level hi-fi. Hence a continuing need to trade, swap or purchase something different.

I look at those reviewers' racks of headphones, see the same symptom, and suspect a similar cause. Maybe the differences between audiophile headphones might be even more subtle than that between speakers. I wasn't going to rely on reviews.

So I went to Audio Sanctuary in New Malden (five minutes from the station, hidden in a square off the High Street) and explained my conundrum. I wanted the next step up from HD650's. They found me a pair of Denon AH-D7200, Audeze LCD-2, Focal Celstee, and the Sennheiser HD800S (slightly out of my budget, but I did ask). The Focals were an instant NO. Someone else might like them, but I didn't. The Audeze were exactly as 'warm' and with exactly the effect on my neck of the extra weight as everyone said. If they could just shave a couple of hundred grams off, and ease the bass back a little... which brings me to the Denon. If you stole my Sennys and left the Denons, I would not complain. Nice sound. Better build quality that the, let's face it, plastic Sennys. However, with none of these did I think: ah, so this is what modern headphones sound like!.

Until I got to the HD800S. Vanishingly light on the head. Slightly light on bass. But everything else was there. I could tell the second clarinet was sitting too close to the oboe in a recording of Bruckner 3 (slight hyperbole, but not a lot). Better control of the loud and quiet bits. But on Miles Davis' Cellar Door Sessions, the bass did feel light even compared to the HD650s, and everything else sounded pretty much the same. It wasn't WOW!, but it was noticeable.

So many headphones. So little difference.

Some of this is the nature of my search. I was looking for a 'neutral' sound, or anything that made me go WOW! Pretty much by definition, there's really only one way to do 'neutral', and once the engineers have figured that out, they can spend the rest of their days figuring out how to cut the costs. Or figuring out just how much more expensive it is to get that last little improvement, and can they produce anything better at a price people will be willing to pay?

Sennheiser aim for 'neutral': it's what they do. Many of the other companies spend money on the look of the headphone, with polished woods, deep leather ear-pads and so on, and that creates a luxury feel that some people will pay a premium for. Sennheiser prefer the, uh, functional look, it keeps the costs down, which gives them a price-for-quality advantage that's hard to beat.

If I listened to headphones a lot, and if a lot of that was nineteenth-century Romantic symphonies and concertos, or opera (shudder!) from any period, I might take the plunge on the HD800S. But I don't. I listen to EDM, jazz, rock and pop, and most music composed before Beethoven. Any pair of audiophile 'neutral' headphones over about £450 or so will make a good show of that.

(And if I'm going to pay that kind of money for a pair of headphones, I'm bringing the Hegel into the store.)