Headphone News

Shure announces new addition to SRH line: the SRH750DJ headphones

Shure announced some new headphones in the SRH line: the SRH750DJ. As one could feasibly guess from their name, they were designed with DJs in mind. The headphones use custom 50mm drivers, which should "deliver high-output bass with extended highs," which is something no self-resepecting professional DJ should be without. The cable and ear cups are replaceable, which should extend the headphones’ longevity.

Click here to read more and see a larger image!

Ultrasone unveils new flagship: the HFI-2400

Ultrasone, the manufacturer known for the HFI-2200s and probably other headphones as well, has unveiled a new flagship model today. You can read more about it and see a larger picture by clicking this posts’s title!

Prepare to be ASTOUNDED by our HD 800s review!

Oh man! We got the Sennheiser HD 800s in the mail today! Click here to read the full article, which is full of terrible iPhone pictures!

Grado makes revolutionary "in-ear" headphones

Grado, a company known for its innovative design, is set to revolutionize the headphone industry once again. The new GR8s are the first headphones in Grado’s line-up that won’t rest outside the head. Due to an as yet unspecified technological breakthrough, these new headphones will actually fit inside the ear.
 

Read on for our preliminary breakdown of this incredible feat of engineering.

[via Gizmodo]

HPI is now on Twitter! So I guess we have that going for us.

Twitter is arguably the greatest technological advancement since technology was even invented. HPI has therefore decided to leap into the future of communication as we know it by creating a Twitter account. We’ll update it when we get test results or publish reviews. It should also serve as a more direct means of communication between us and you, our adoring fans.

A bunch of review retrospectives

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 MX W1 Review Retrospective

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.

The great HPI burn-in experiment

One myth a lot of headphone users hold particularly dear is that of burn-in. The idea is that your headphones sound less than ideal straight out of the box. What you have to do is play 100-200 hours of music, which gets the headphones’ innards to loosen up.

The problem with this is that, while burn-in is a very widely held belief that isn’t limited to headphones, there really is no proof of its existence or nonexistence.

What we’re going to do, starting right this very second, is run a battery of audio tests on the headphones fresh out of the box, and then after getting burned in for at least 100 hours (we’ll note the total time the headphones were burned in; sometimes we’ll need to ship the headphones back before the 200 hour mark). We will be using different genres of music each time we do the burn-in, and we’ll try to get in multiple copies of the headphones so we can test with different genres of music to see if the effects are different.

If you have any suggestions on different stuff we can do with this experiment, email us!

[Bad Photoshop courtesy of images from HeadRoom and chuckbauman.com]

MX W1s have a problem charging?

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.

First listen: Sennheiser MX W1 wireless in-ear headphones

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). 

Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 review retrospective

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, so our apologies to those who follow our sadly neglected RSS feed.

We just got our review up of the ATH-ANC7s. Our verdict? They aren’t anything special, but they’re priced very generously. They don’t have great sound quality and their active noise cancellation isn’t quite good, but they cost $100. Have you seen what active-cancellers generally cost? At this price, the ATH-ANC7s are a good pair of entry-level active-cancelling headphones. You should check these out if you want a pair of headphones to wear on the go, but hate sticking headphones into your ears.

The Sennheiser HD 800s are bonkers

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.

Sony unveils "Extra Bass" series

At Sony’s press conference we got some info on some of their headphones, but mainly got to check out their new line of bass-boosting headphones. The Sony Extra Bass Headphones, as they are called, consist of the over-ear MDRXB300s, MDRXB500s, and MDRXB700s, and the in-ear MDRXB20EX and MDRXB40EX headphones.

A quick look at the Sennheiser HD 800s and MX W1s

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.

Monster Turbine Headphones First Impressions Review

At the Monster press event today, they were giving away some freebies of their new $150 headphones, the Turbines. There was a very limited amount, so they were only giving them out to a a select few, super important, ultra handsome journalists. Needless to say, they gave every single one to HeadphoneInfo.com. Our super-strict ethics policy mandates we can’t actually keep them, but we will be borrowing them long enough to get them into our lab. What follows is a really precursory review of the Monster Turbines, complete with our utterly subjective opinion of how they sound.

Sony media player to have headphone-independent noise cancellation

We’re here at CES 2009, awaiting awesome news from all your favorite headphone manufacturers. Interestingly enough, the first interesting news of the day is only tangentially related to headphones: Sony is introducing a new media player with headphone-independent noise cancellation. That’s right, the media player itself will feature active cancellation. We’re guessing it’ll work the same way as it does in headphones: the device will have a mic, listen in for ambient noise, then output inverse sound waves.

This technology raises a few questions. First of all, what does this mean for active cancellation on headphones? The feature ruins audio quality, gives your headphones a battery dependency, and often means you can’t listen to your music without the feature active. If this feature gains popularity, will active cancellation migrate off of headphones and onto devices where it can be better implemented? Further, will the active cancellation focus exclusively on bassy sounds? On the headphones we’ve reviewed, the active cancellation mainly eliminates lower frequency sound. If the feature doesn’t, then will the sound of your pocket fabric rubbing against the mic have an adverse affect on audio quality?

There’s a good chance we’ll have answers to these questions and more after the Sony press event tonight. 

If you want to check out a story on the media player itself, the Sony Walkman NWZ-X1000, check out the article on our sister site, MediaPlayerInfo.com.