Sony MDR-DS6000

Summary

The Sony MDR-DS6000 headphones are a set of wireless headphones with digital surround sound. They also offer compression (so you don’t get deafened when the loud bits come on) and music and cinema modes that tweak the sound. This base station requires a wall socket, which means you won’t be able to take the DS6000s on a road trip, but the headphones  come with a rechargeable battery; all you have to do is place them on the base station and they charge up. We found that the battery lasted about 7 hours and 20 minutes.

Though the DS6000 certainly has some interesting features, it falls short in terms of sound quality, it had small issues with distortion across the frequency spectrum. Also, while it did well emphasizing bassy and lower-midrange tones, higher frequencies are a bit lost. And these headphones weren’t particularly comfortable.

The Sony MDR-DS6000 headphones are priced at $399.99 from Sony.

Frequency Response (3.10)

In this test, we look at how well the headphones reproduce frequencies across the audio spectrum, from boomy lows to squeaky highs. Therefore, on the graph below you’ll see frequencies (in Hertz) running along the bottom, and the response (loudness, in decibels) down the left-hand side. The green line is the left channel, and the red is the right. The two dotted black lines are the limits that we look for in our scoring; ideally, both the red and green lines should fall between the limits.

For about half the graph, the lines do a good job of sticking within the limits. At around 5-6kHz, however, something dire happens, and the frequency response drops off. At one point the right channel just barely makes it back inside the limits, but then spirals downwards. What this means is that high frequency sounds might sound somewhat muted, and high frequency sounds (such as high hats and squeaky voices) may feel a little lost in the mix.

Distortion (1.73)

Total harmonic distortion is the difference between the initial waveform (the soundwave we send to the headphones) and what HATS ends up hearing from the headphones. Though the DS6000s never really have much distortion until the high frequencies, they have a small amount across the audio spectrum. The worst of it is towards the high-end, but there is a lot of minor distortion across the entire range. This may be caused by the compression that the system uses to send the audio wirelessly, but we unfortunately have no way of tracking this down.

Tracking (6.62)

If headphones have perfect tracking, it means that both ear cups would reproduce all frequencies at equal volumes. Unfortunately, no headphones have perfect tracking, which is why we test for any differences between the left and right channels. On the chart below, above the zero line means the left channel is louder, below and right is louder. In this case, the MDR-DS6000 did pretty well; the line is close to 0 across much of the graph, indicating that the two sides are well balanced. At higher frequencies, the right ear cup is louder than the left by a few decibels. Typically, we see lines that are a lot smoother from the low to high-mid frequencies, then a giant scribble towards the high end. Though this line is a bit rougher towards the start, it holds it together better than some towards the high-end. Overall, the DS6000s are better than average, and they produce generally well-balanced sound.

Maximum Usable Volume (10.00)

Here, we keep cranking up the volume and checking for distortion. What we’re looking for is the level of output you can expect from these headphones before distortion reaches a noticeable level of 3%. In this case, the DS6000s were able to output 124.84 decibels before it succumbed to distortion. This is a good level, since any more and you’d damage your hearing, which we don’t recommend, but the DS6000s should be fine if you like it loud.

Isolation (1.37)

For closed-back headphones, the DS6000s don’t block out a lot of external noise. Like most open-back headphones, like the Sennheiser HD 555s, or Grado SR60s, the DS6000s provided some isolation from higher frequency sounds, but little or none from low frequency ones. Really, since the DS6000s aren’t in-ear headphones, and they don’t have active noise cancellation, we wouldn’t have expected much better performance than this; if you’re looking to listen to music or watch movies in a noisy room, get a pair of in-ear headphones like the Etymotic ER6is or a pair with active noise cancelling like the Bose QuietComfort 3s.

Leakage (7.58)

Strangely, it seems like the DS6000s create a one-way passage to your ears: they let external sounds in, but they don’t let your music out. While you might hear more of the train going by your window than you would like, the person sleeping on the chair next to you won’t be disturbed by your music, as we found in our tests that very little of the sound leaked out; only in-ear headphones did a better job of keeping your music private.