Three Sennheiser headphones reviewed!

[yuki]

Some people collect thing such as stamps, action figures… Though for me, my collection started 6 years ago, collecting headphones. Why? Because headphones are extremely practical to individuals who like music! In this review I will be sharing my favorite 3 still in production Sennheiser headphones that sound great and are efficient enough to use on most devices without an amplifier. I will be looking at a pair of EH-150’s, PX-100’s and a pair of HD-485’s.



I am going to be using an EEE PC 700 series with an external hard drive and on board audio to give you my opinion on 3 of my favorite low impedance and efficient cans from Sennheiser. I find the on board audio on the EEE to sound very good. The EEE PC uses a realtek ALC662 codec with an integrated dac and headphone amp. I tracked down the datasheet, which was a pain as the realtek site was down while writing this, so I had to look else where. The S/N on the headphone amp is 98 dB (which I am guessing is measured as full sine). The codec is capable of 96 KHz sample rate with 24bit quantization, seems good so far. It seems that they do not list headphone output wattage, though they give 1.4 volts rms as the output voltage max and using 32 ohms gives use about 60 mW rms so 30 Mw rms output… THD+N is about -75 dB as well so it looks great on paper, and sounds good in practice as well ^^, at least to my ears !

Ok now I have the listening platform out of the way, I will pick 5 songs to play on each and they will be the same songs to use on each headphone. They are all in FLAC from the original CD played with no EQ or other enhancement through winamp. The songs I will use are:

Artist: Kraftwerk
Song: Dentaku (pocket calculator in Japanese)
Album: the mix

Description: A very warm song with plenty of bass goodness, punchy and not resonant.

Artist: Bjork
Song: Joga
Album: Homogenic

Description: a very full song, with extreme highs, good dynamics…

Artist: Shiller
Song: Leben I feel you
Album: single version on maxi single

Description: strong bass but with very good high so very contrast, subtle almost non existent mids.

Artist: Rush
Song: Tom Sawyer
Album: Moving pictures

Description: strong mid and high frequency levels, very clear

Artist: Royksopp
Song: what else is there
Album: the understanding

Description: strong punchy bass, almost a tad resonant with a really powerful high, the mids are not so detailed, but very ambient in the mids (very cool mix ^^)