Sennheiser HD800 Headphones

Sennheiser HD800 Headphones

REVIEW

You can’t really look further than Sennheiser when you’re talking about professional headphones or ‘Head-Fi’ as it’s referred to in the pro industry. With their HD600 and HD50 headphones, they pushed the pro envelope a lot further than they’d expected with each being as successful as the next. Now, after a good three years since the HD650, Sennheiser has released, which by the name of it seems like an upgrade but is in-fact far from it, the HD800 monster of headphones.

OUT OF THE BOX
The HD800 comes in a box large enough to fit a little multimedia sound system, and once you get the headphones out the box, you’ll see just what all that space was for. These guys are huge, probably larger than most headphones you see out there. And the phones look exactly like how a speaker’s driver would look from the back if you were to remove the back panel from a loudspeaker. By the looks of it, Sennheiser is obviously not housing some flat piazza-electric drivers in there. This is the real thing, which is confirmed by what looks like the magnet ring marking the end of the earcups. This in-turn has been covered by a wire mesh to keep any prying fingers from the driver assembly. Overall, these headphones look as industrial as a bulldozer with a healthy mix of plastic and metal (bracing the driver to the headband).

TECHNOLOGY
What we meant by saying that the HD800 is far from an upgraded version of the HD650 is that Sennheiser decided to start over from square one when it came to the design. The transducer used in the HD800 is 56mm across, which Sennheiser says is the largest of all headphones out there. But it is not the inside of the earcups that vibrate to the transducer but rather the outer shell that’s been closely guarded by the metal braces. Sennheiser claims that this creates less distortion than having the inside of the earcups vibrating. The driver itself is mounted on the stainless steel support at an angle to replicate the way the sound from a loudspeaker is heard. All of this does bring the weight of these massive earcups to a staggering 330 grams which need to be held up with the cushioned headband. How much my head can cope with it over a lengthy listening period is something I will find out in the next section.

The 10 foot cloth covered cable is silver plated, oxygen free copper wiring and is reinforced with Kevlar to keep the cables performing to their optimum for a very long time. The best part is that the cables are removable from the headphones with the help of Sennheiser’s proprietary solid metal connectors. They terminate on the other end as a TRS* connector, and since no TRS-to-EP adapter comes boxed with the headphones, you’ll need to get one separately. Now that we got all