Sennheiser HD 650 – Review

Sennheiser HD 650
Company: Sennheiser
Price: $599
http://www.sennheiserusa.com

Yeah, I know. You just did a double take at that price, right? I don’t blame you. Spending that much money on headphones, for most rational people, would be, well, crazy. But then those people would not be audiophiles. And let’s get something straight right up front: these are NOT headphones you wear connected to an iPod. That would be like putting a Hemi in a Honda Civic.

The HD 650’s are the best headphones I have ever used. Period. And don’t take that lightly. I have been using high quality headphones for twenty years. Long before I got "into" computers, I was into high quality audio equipment. I remember when I was in High School, my friends would come over just to listen to music. They would hear sounds in their favorite albums that they didn’t even know was there when listening to the same music on their Walkman, boombox, or even their father’s Hi-Fi gear.

The problem was that my father liked good sounding music. When I was growing up, Dad had a really nice sound system that he had picked up right after he got out of Vietnam. He had purchased his Bose speakers in Japan at an Air Force duty-free store. Still, at the time, he spent over $500 for them, and that was 1968! Imagine how expensive those would be in today’s dollars. He also had a nice pair of headphones, the make or model escapes me now, but they also sounded really, really good. So good, in fact, that when the Sony Walkman became popular in the 1980s, and I took to walking all over town wearing mine on my hip, I knew even then that the sound of the headphones were nowhere near the quality I could and would get when I used my dads headphones at home.

Later, in the 1980s, I spent a lot of money (for me!) on a pair of Koss Pro/4X headphones. They sounded great! Far superior to anything you could get with a Walkman. I would plug these into my Pioneer amplifier and rock out to my music without getting yelled at by my parents. Later I picked up a used pair of PortaPro from Koss for portable music listening, but I sat on them one day and never replaced them.

Fast forward to today, and the vast majority of my music listening comes in either my car or from my iPod / iPhone. Not the high quality music reproduction I ‘m really used to, but with four kids and a wife, well, I take what I can get. So when it came time to review the Sennheiser HD 650, a pair of headphone renowned for their reproductive quality, I jumped at the chance. The only negative I can really say now is that I have to send these back to Sennheiser soon. That, and there is no way in the world my wife would ever, short of winning the lotto, buy these headphones for that much money. And that, I am sad to say, really is the biggest tragedy.

We all love the idea of carrying our entire music collection around wit us, or at least a large part of it, on our iPods. It is kind of comforting knowing our favorite song, album, podcast, etc. is just a scroll wheel away. For my two older kids, that is how it has always been. No more do they have to listen to the radio for hours at a time hoping to hear their favorite song, as I did when I was their age. Now they can fit hundreds of songs on a tiny iPod shuffle, or thousands on an iPod classic. But there is a price to be paid for having that much music at your fingertips, and that is compression. Compression, in this case mostly MP3, reduces the quality of sound in music. For the average iPod music listener, that is a fair trade for the convenience to having so much music on such a small device. For audiophiles, not so much.

I originally plugged the HD 650’s into my home (Onkyo) sound system and listened to a CD. WOW did they sound fantastic. (Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd) The sound is… well, almost perfect. They sounded better than anything I have listened to in years. I almost forgot how good music could sound. There was a depth to the sound quality I don’t think my kids have ever heard from prerecorded music before, but it was a depth of sound, an ocean of it, that I have been denied living in an iPod and MP3 world for so long. Rich, melodic bass was complimented by crisp, clean treble. The sound stage was not just in front of me, but all around me. Inside me. With my eyes closed, I was completely and utterly drawn into the music totally. I was so impressed, I wanted to hear more!

Then I plugged the HD 650’s into my Mac, and played some tunes from iTunes. And that trade-off I was writing about above? Yeah, there it was. Music that sounded just fine on a decent pair of headphones sounded better with the HD 650’s, but the flaws in digitally compressing music also became much more apparent. The difference between even a high quality MP3 encoded at 256kpb was no match for the remastered CD version of the same song. Apple’s Lossless compressed music fared a little better, but not by much.. And I know that, if I still had a good turntable and vinyl, my CDs would fare just as poorly in an audio test.

Man, I miss high quality sound.

At 9.3 ounces, the HD 650 are both lightweight, and very comfortable. They have a very soft and supple black velour around each can, with just the right amount of padding, which is to say not too much, nor too little. The over the headband is also comfortable, providing soft padding.

Adjusting the size is easily done. A gentle tug will move the cans right over your ears, fitting perfectly.

The Aluminum voice coils in the HD 650 produce the best vocal quality I have ever heard. Spoken word content, if recorded well, gives the feeling of actually being in the same room as the person talking. Audio books get a whole new depth of quality here.

Like true audiophile headphones, these have a 1/4-inch gold plated plug, and ships with a 1/8-inch gold plated adapter for use with iPod type headphone jacks. (Sorry iPhone users, that adapter does not work with Apple’s cell phone.)

Bandwidth: 10 – 39500 Hz
Sensitivity – 103 dB
Total Harmonic Distortion – 0.05%
Impedance – 300 Ohm
Warranty – 2 Years

The Sennheiser HD 650 are the best headphones I have ever used. Ever. I used to visit Hi-Fi audio dealers to test out equipment, and as impressed as I was back in those days with some of the audio reproduction, I don’t ever remember being so completely blown away as I was listening to the Sennheiser HD 650.

Amazing.

We score on a 1 to 5 rating system here at MyMac Magazine. I am giving the Sennheiser HD 650 a 5 out of 5, but even that does not really do them justice. If you love music, and can afford them, you will never regret purchasing these headphones. They are, as many other reviews and owners have point out elsewhere online, the best headphones money can buy. Simply stellar.