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Topic: Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600 (Read 74044 times) previous topic - next topic
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Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #100
You originally said the whole reason you were looking for headphones was because you needed it to not wake the baby and for office use.


Yes. I just brought up K702 as I got to compare them few days back with my HD600s again.

In the same post (which was quite before some of your other detailed and excellent posts) I had also mentioned that the search is still for a closed headphone.

Since I already like 2 headphones with flat FR graphs (HD600, K702) I think I should like 7506 

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #101
Also very interested in the outcome of this thread.

Since I first plonked a pair of ADAM A3X on my desktop open backed headphones have become redundant.

Any advance on Sony 7506?

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #102
Also very interested in the outcome of this thread.

Since I first plonked a pair of ADAM A3X on my desktop open backed headphones have become redundant.

Any advance on Sony 7506?


There are a number of headphones I'd rather have and do have and use in preference to the 7506s that I have.

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #103
This thread made me realize I could try aiming a bit higher than what I currently have, if my budget allowed... The 7506 are quite affordable in reality, but if I'm lucky enough to find a pair here they will be way off in price. Living in the third world is not easy, ladies and gentlemen...

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #104
There are a number of headphones I'd rather have and do have and use in preference to the 7506s that I have.

They have changed their production plant from the original facility in Japan. Only very old ones are from there but I'm not sure what the cut off date was or if there was a time where they had production from more than one country. On the inside left ear band there is a "Made in..." stamp. Where were yours made, out of curiosity?

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #105
Any advance on Sony 7506?

Has there been any advancement over the V6/7506 design, in Sony headphones, you mean? Nope. Assuming you want as flat and neutral a response as possible, like your Adam speakers, then there are no better circumaural headphones based on diffuse field corrected dummy head measurements, that they have ever made, at any price. Keep in mind this completely flat sound they have wont sit well with people expecting the bass boost (and often also treble reduced) sound which is quite common in so many headphones these days though. Also, it is said by some that most recording engineers don't expect average folk to have such admirably flat systems, so they EQ their mixes accordingly, and when such recordings get played back on truly flat systems they can sound too bright. Research funded by the NRC a couple of decades back noted this problem. I think Sean Olive (and Toole?) may have a paper on it, if you want to learn more. [I find my V6 to be quite friendly to simple tone controls on the rare occasion I need to tweak them, though, thanks to their flat-from-the-get-go response.  ]

There have been a few offshoot models, quite similar to the V6/7506, that came and went over the past decades. There was an MDR-V7, for example, which IIRC had a straight cord, not coiled, and they might not have collapsed into a ball (no hinged ear cups). Also in Japan they have (had?) versions which have slight cosmetic differences and are not made for export, for example MDR-CD700, MDR-CD900, and MDR-CD900ST. Sony has claimed different specs on these (just like they do the V6 and the 7506, even though they are the same thing) and some supposedly had "vaporized sapphire coated diaphragms" (for example) instead of just plastic, OOPS, I mean, "polyethylene terephthalate" [*COUGH*, soda bottle plastic]. Mostly marketing fluff, I suspect, not that I can say I've seen curves run on these variations.

P.S. Don't be confused into thinking other similar sounding model numbers are also clones of (or at least are very close to) the V6/7506. Here's a short list of those: MDR-V600, MDR-V900, MDR-V900HD, MDR-7505, MDR-7502, MDR-7520, MDR-V700DJ . None are even remotely close in terms of overall flat response.

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #106
There are a number of headphones I'd rather have and do have and use in preference to the 7506s that I have.

They have changed their production plant from the original facility in Japan. Only very old ones are from there but I'm not sure what the cut off date was or if there was a time where they had production from more than one country. On the inside left ear band there is a "Made in..." stamp. Where were yours made, out of curiosity?


My 7506s  might be more than 10 years old, and guess what, I can't find them quickly. I seem to recall that they were made in Japan.

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #107
After going through

http://nwavguy.blogspot.in/2011/09/more-power.html

I am wondering if I should drop the plan to buy E07K and instead buy Fiio E5/E6 (I know Arnold and others have also been advising nothing more above that  )
I guess 103.8 peak dB SPL for HD600 by E5 should be more than enough ...
(if I replace HD600s with AKG K702 later it would be an even easier load)
For Sony MDR-7506 it should be even more than enough.....

But if the output from laptop is still not good after using E5, I will need to buy something like Creative X-Fi Go USB
(I plan to borrow my friends E17 and use it as an amp only with my laptop to find that out first)
In that case other options like Fiio E10 (and maybe others due to price drop) also are not much costlier as its two in one functionality.

Only one quick question though is :
The headphone impedance itself varies by freq

So is it necessary to keep some more headroom to account for that ?

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #108
Do we already know you need to use a headphone amp, in the first place? We don't even know for sure which headphones you are going to get, but of all the headphones you've been discussing as contenders, you already own the ones which would be the most problematic to power directly from a portable device, like your laptop, namely the HD600s. You are also in a much better position to judge what kind of music you listen to, how loudly it is recorded or varies per recording, how loudly it plays from your existing device into said headphones, and if this level meets your individual needs or not. Does it?

You should completely disregard any "rule of thumb charts" which have to guess at all these variabilities, which you can actually test for, simply by trying them out!

Granted, there are other things you might secondarily worry about beyond "Is it loud enough?", such as hiss level and/or an impedance mismatch which causes some mild distortion and frequency response errors, often fairly mild on circumaural headphones compared to balanced armature IEMs, but we really should nail down which headphones are best for you before we can start talking about what's the best amp (if any) to get for them. [Plus that really should be a separate thread, if you ask me]



Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #109
I have decided on MDR-7506 for closed. And for now would be keeping the HD600s (maybe later I will replace the 600s with K702s)
So for now amp will be for MDR-7506 and HD600s.

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #110
how loudly it is recorded or varies per recording

Which is, if I may add, not relevant if you use ReplayGain when playing them back. It could end up not being loud enough for you afterwards, though most players that support the standard allow you to pre-amplify.

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #111
Any of you guys follows Rins blog? http://rinchoi.blogspot.com/
Lately he's measured the HD650, HD280, K702 and publishes an additional graph on each headphone he tests conforming to the new Olive-Welti target, from the same people that published "The Relationship between Perception and Measurement of Headphone Sound Quality" a while back.


Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #113
^Thanks, Martel.

Arnold, please report in with your 7506's country of origin stamp, if they do show up. Thanks.

Hifisound,  regarding amps, for my HD600, MDR-V6, and other various headphones, I personally use (should you care) a Behringer UCA-202 USB corded DAC {but I don't use its headphone jack}, its line level out feeds a Behringer 802 mixer, and I haven't bothered to buy a Fiio E6/E11 (or similar) for the mixer's line out yet, because its internal headphone jack seems just fine to me. Also I am waiting for a Fiio product that fits my particular portable needs, and they don't have one yet.

The Sony's V6s are so easy to drive, even my cell phone does it adequately (it serves as my portable DAP), at least for my own particular volume needs, YMMV.

ThomasPin, Replaygain doesn't work for hardware devices though, like for example live TV broadcast, where he may have varying source levels to contend with or may need to temporarily turn up the gain more during quiet passages, within a program with a large dynamic range: "ridning the gain" as they call it.

Markanini, I avoid head-fi  like forums/blogs, like the plague, (subjective based and typically using no level matching or blinding) but a cursory examination of udauda's posts, plus his blog, seems to indicate he is well read, however just a hobbyist (same as me) who winged building his own, crude dummy-head, but has no actual science credentials to speak of, [degrees in audiology, psychoacoustics, etc.] Unlike the aliases tonemeister or meatusmaximus, for example, who post there occasionally. Did I get that right?

[I have many major problems with the methodology of the 2012  paper you mentioned, Welti/Olive, but I guess that would be for another thread.]

Closed Back Headphones like Senn HD600

Reply #114
If you like the Sennheiser HD 600, then you'll probably like the Sennheiser Momentum, which some suggest sounds
like a closed back version of the 600s.