Sennheisers at last
Finally decided to replace the ill-fitting earbuds on my Rokr phone with something better. At first I was thinking of a pair of panasonic earbuds. And then there was Wikipedia. Somewhere within an article, I picked up the fact that circumaural headphones (those earphones that fully surround the ear) were the best audio devices. A look at the $500+ sennheiser 600 series convinced me that it was the best class of headphones to get. Unless of course, I wanted to risk deafening myself with static from an in-ear monitor.But then I started browsing for candidates and realised that the cheapest models began at $40. So the stage was set for a battle between the Audio-Technica ATH-M20 and the Sennheiser HD201. First up - scouting online reviews. The impression that quickly emerged was that the sennheiser was more towards classical while the audio-technica was an entry level studio monitoring headphones. Both will, of course, look weird when it is revealed that the source of sound will be nothing but my humble Motorola Rokr E1. In the end, I settled for the german sennheisers.
In this case, the feeling of settlement was far from concrete. Especially the excruciating search for the Sennheiser headphones. It was virtually non-existent in both sim lim square and orchard road. Some vendors who did have it were happily hawking it at 50-69 dollars. What a rip off. To put the icing on that bitter cake, one 'nicer' fellow was asking me how much I wanted to pay for a $70 headphone that should have cost just a little over half that amount.
Finally at the Singapore Motorshow, I showed a glimmer of brilliance when I theorised that the lifestyle-oriented Suntec City had a higher probability of stocking the Sennheiser HD 201 than the entire hardware mecca of Sim Lim Square. But it did. I found one within a few minutes, guided by store owners who pointed me towards other stores that did stock the model. So here am I happily savouring the rich sound from these iF Award 2005-winning headphones. Not a bad deal at $39.90.
The strings and piano backings to most of the songs showed a great improvement with the timbre of the sound sounding much fuller than the tinny earbuds. The large drivers (the small 'speaker' inside the earphones) also sounded really relaxed while doing their job, so much so that when i pulled off the headphones, they were much louder than I had expected. My motorola earbuds, on the other hand start to distort their sound way before the maximum. However, the bass wasn't as powerful as the professional studio monitoring headphones, as many people have noted. Nevertheless, I usually prefer less bass in my music (Don't really know why, my ears just hate excessive rattling, boomy bass), so this looks to be a nice audio investment - seeing that the construction is really quite impeccable with durable plastic joints and support structures. But I'm still within the 'break-in' period for these headphones, so I'm still holding my breath for the world-class sound that forms sennheiser's trademark to come emanating out of the earphones in a few days time.
posted by Zhong Liang @ 10:50 PM
2 comments
