Headphone News Blog

In an effort to get you guys the awesome headphone reviews you salivate for, we've let the Headphone ReviewBot collect dust lately. Allow us to remedy this by quickly summing up our last four reviews. If you like reading, we recommend you read the full reviews. If you hate reading, then you will love this blog post.

Sennheiser's MX W1s are an interesting look at some technology that might, in the future, be affordable. At the moment, though, it isn't. The MX W1s have audio quality that's about what we'd expect from a good set of wireless in-ears: not good by any stretch, but not horrible either. We suppose the MX W1s will be attractive to some, if only for the novelty factor, but we really, really recommend waiting for the price to drop. At $500, we cannot recommend buying these.

Well, we have the MX W1s in for review, but we've run into a strange issue: they don't want to recharge. At first the headphones complied with our requests, their orange "I am charging!" LEDs shining merrily. As time wore on, however, we started having more and more trouble getting them to charge. When we'd plug them in they wouldn't recognize their orange LED would flash briefly, but we couldn't get it to stay on.

Our PR contact said it's a known issue and set me up with Sennheiser's tech support line (860-434-9190 if you need it). We've left a message and are awaiting a response. We will update this blog post as we delve deeper into this mystery.

UPDATE: Apparently some of the early production units are simply broken. If you own a pair and run into a similar issue, Sennheiser will replace them for you. Just call the aforementioned support number.

We just got in a pair of Sennheiser's MX W1s, which are wireless in-ear headphones. Our super-fast initial impressions? The audio quality seems fine for a pair of in-ears, especially wireless ones (in-ears and wireless headphones, separately, often have poor audio quality compared to wired, full-sized headphones). The sound was a bit muffled/blanketed and suffered from some high-pitched noise. We didn't really notice the whine unless we listened to classical or quiet music. 

The headphones have two pieces that go into your ear: the first sits in the ear, like Apple's packaged-in headphones, and the second helps wedge the ear piece between your concha and tragus to keep it from falling out. We were very surprised to see they didn't come with any sleeves for the main in-ear piece; the result is some discomfort and very poor isolation. UPDATE: haha, we're dumb and didn't fully empty one of the boxes. They do come with one pair of sleeves for the main part and two sets for the smaller nub.

Keep an eye out for our review, which we hope to get up soon(ish). 

We got to spend a few minutes with the Sennheiser HD 800s yesterday. We don't have much time right now for a full report on it, but we will say this: there is just cause for the things costing $1400.

Jude from HeadFi sums up our impressions well in this article, including the way he gushes over it, not knowing where to start on his diatribe of how absurdly awesome these things are. We wouldn't know where to start either, although it would probably involve us squealing like a 4 year-old girl for about 15 minutes.

We stopped by the Sennheiser booth tonight at Digital Experience and got to see the HD800s and MX W1s in person. We couldn't listen to either, but maybe – if you guys eat all your vegetables – we could stop by their booth tomorrow to give you our worthless, subjective opinion on how they sound. We did, however, scrounge up some information on each.

It's always easier to write reviews about headphones with hilariously glaring issues than those without them. Unfortunately for us, the MM50 iP headphones are really pretty good. They have great audio quality with ridiculously low distortion levels, are comfortable, come with a microphone, and only cost $100.

We only have three complaints, two of which aren't very important. First of all, the MM50 iPs don't isolate as well as other in-ear headphones. They still scored above the Bost QuietComfort 2 and 3, and well above the average result for our site, but there are in-ear headphones out there that can do a better job. Secondly -- and this is partially responsible for the previous issue -- the MM50 iPs don't come with many sleeve options. Had there been a triple-flange sleeve available, we're sure they would've isolated much better.

The one main issue has to do with durability. The plug sticks out and the MM50 iPs don't have a great cord guard. We can see the cable bending sharply at the plug, getting pulled and just generally accruing wear and tear quickly. If you're keeping your media player in your pocket, try to keep the plug facing upwards.

All this being said, the bad sides don't even come close to marring how good the MM50 iPs are; they scored more in their audio performance section then most of the other headphones we've reviewed. They're currently #1 on our rankings, with a healthy margin between them and second place. The MM50 iP headphones are well worth their $100 tag.