Sennheiser 595 (was Re: Headphones for under $200)

Chris Malcolm <cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Arny Krueger <arnyk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'd really like some phones that compare favorably with the HD580s in terms
of comfort and SQ at about the same price (or less).

Looks like Sennheiser have stopped making the 580. How about the 595?

I found a pair locally at a good price I could return if I didn't like
them (100 UK pounds). What I wanted was headphones which could hear at
least nearly as much detail as my QUAD 63 ELS speakers, could be
listened to for hours without physical or audio discomfort, and worked
well being driven by low powered battery stuff like small radios and
MP3 players.

They demonstrated immediately certain things which I've learnt to note
as signs of especially good quality. I suspected them of being a bit
dull and lacking in top, and then when some well-recorded cymbals came
along, I heard so much distinct shading of detail that it's clear what
they lack is artificial top tizz, and have plenty of real clear
undistorted top. They make it easier to listen to sources with a lot
of background noise such as vinyl hiss and crackle because they make
it easier for the ear to distinguish noise from signal and to listen
selectively to one or the other. Listening to talk radio I'm sometimes
startled by how vividly I can hear the acoustics of the room in which
the talking is taking place, noticing for example that one talker is
close to the left hand wall, the other is in the middle of the room
and further from the microphone. Deep bass is very clearly pitched
without being exaggerated.

So they were clearly a high class act, as they should be at the price.

Their revelation of detail is good enough that I heard things I hadn't
heard before on my QUAD ESL 63s, such as a pianist humming quietly or
a violinist turning a page, and had to pull the 63s in to a tight
closely focussed set up, almost like giant earphones, to hear the same
detail. It's not entirely clear now which of the Senn 595 phones and
QUAD 63 speakers is the more detailed, since at the edges of
perception they sometimes seem to bring up slightly different
details. That's as good as I wanted them to be with respect to detail.

The sound isn't as relaxed and spacious as the 63s, which I suspect is
partly just the in-the-head effect of phones, and partly a small
residual colouration from the physical enclosure, the padded tube
between the diaphragm and the ear. On the other hand, it is relaxed
and spacious enough to produce such enjoyably good quality that I've
found myself listening to them a lot, including music I wouldn't
normally listen to, simply because the sound is so good. And I find
myself going through my collection of favourites, hearing things I
hadn't heard before.

The padded tube between ear and phone is a bit larger in the 595s than
the 600 or 650, because in the 595 the drivers are moved a bit forward
and tilted back in an attempt to give a more natural provocation of
the pinna effects of the ear folds. They do, at least with my ears,
have a more foward sound stage than ordinary earphones and headphones,
which to me always produce a sound stage in a straight line between
the ears when the source material has been close miked and mixed into
position. With source material that includes at least some of the
ambience of natural acoustic, such as from a crossed stereo pair of
microphones, there is the usual acoustic image ambiguity between the
sonic clues to the original room acoustic, and the sonic clues that
you're listening to a small driver very close to your ear through a
small well damped tube.

I suspect on general principles that this slight tilted forward
displacement of the 595 drivers will have bought a more natural open
sound on close miked position mixed recordings at the cost of slighly
inhibiting the development of a truly binaural sound image which you'd
get from an artificial head recording, which would be slightly less
inhibited by the slightly more open (slightly less tube) construction
of the 580, 600, and 650 series. If so, then on good recordings with
enough good binaural ambient clues, the 580 family might more easily
develop a bigger and more spatially detailed image on suitable
recordings. Just a guess, but if so I wouldn't want to buy that extra
fidelity at the cost of losing the easy portable battery device
drivability of the 595s.

For drivability with low-powered battery devices I compared them to a
couple of 30 Ohm headphones and a few 30 Ohm earphones. The 595s
measured as 50 Ohms, and despite that produced a distinctly louder
sound than any of the others. They were also easier to drive, in that
I found that I could turn up the volume enough on the other phones to
hear quite nasty clipping, whereas the 595s were loud enough that at
the loudest I could bear to listen to there was only very much milder
clipping. I verified that this was amplifier clipping rather than the
phones cracking up by driving two pairs of phones in parallel, which
made the clipping much worse in both.

So not only are they very good audio quality headphones, but they're
*more* easily driven by low-powered battery earphone drivers than even
the typical earphone supplied with the device. That's an unexpected
and welcome bonus. I suspect it's the result of particularly powerful
magnets with very high gap field strength. That's always good news in
magnet powered drivers. It's a long standing suspicion of mine that
the contribution of gap field strength to the quality of magnetic
drivers is underestimated.

They have two minor ergonomic failures. One is that the cable, at
least on mine, is a cheap stiff cable instead of floppy and
acoustically dead. The other is that the converter from big headphone
jack to little earphone jack produces a long protruding double-plug
lever that will probably sooner or later damagingly wrench the
earphone socket of a small portable device. Since they're so very good
with my small portable devices, I've obtained an extension cable with
a small right angle jack to preserve the integrity of my sockets :-) I
was a bit worried in case the extra wire would degrade quality, given
how much some folk enthuse about expensive third-party cable
replacements for top Sennheiser phones. But I needn't have worried. My
ears are obviously too old to hear the differences between bits of
wire :-)

I have no idea how these 595s compare with the now out of production
580s, or whether I'd think the probable extra quality of the 600 or
650 would be worth the extra money. What I can say is that I'm very
pleased to have got the sound quality, low-power drivability, and
physical comfort, of these phones for 100 UK pounds. But I should warn
the reader that I have no experience with the quality versus price
equation with headphone. So I have no idea, beyond the shortage of
reviews on the web supporting such a possibility, whether this quality
could be matched by another headphone at half the price.

--
Chris Malcolm cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]










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