Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Received Some New Headphones Today

I met a friend for lunch today for our own little headphone meet. I brought 2 portable amps, Bottlehead, iphone 3G, Macbook, Grado HF2 and Shure 840s. He brought his MiniDisc (yes I said MD) and Senn HD650 and another Senn that he said he liked. (Suffice he didn't like it that much after I showed him the Grados...)

I met w/ him because he complained that his HD650's didn't sound right connected to his older Denon AVR (2805 I think). Sigh, oh those newbies...

What didn't he like about the 650's when they were powered by his Denon? Did you take any pics of all the equipment and headphones together at the meet? Its late and a little headphone porn is in order .

Sorry no pix. His Denon AVR doesn't have enough power via the headphone jack to power his 300 ohm HD650's. My RSA Green Hornet wasn't a very good match but the iBasso D10 was slightly better. In both cases, the volume was cranked all the way up for a not so loud volume. He liked it best connected to the Bottlehead S.E.X.

Then I showed him why I like my easier to drive HF2's and 840's. He could tell the difference. I also warned him to make sure he brought good source material. I listened to his Minidisc and complained of hiss which he didn't notice, until I pointed it out. Then I played a Jack Johnson track (which always seem well record for some reason) from iTunes and he could tell the difference. I told him to listen to his CDs to make sure he wasn't ripping poorly mastered CDs into lossless format. Garbage in, garbage out.

Good advice. Hiss is never a good thing. He should maybe look into a budget headphone amp and budget source like the Sansa Clip+ which has expandable memory or a Nano. I know the LD tube amps MKII+?, MKIII have 3 gain settings which can be set to match the the impedance/sensitivity of the headphones. Might be a good amp to power the 650 with? Source material is very important as well, was the hiss present at all times, was it still there when the MD was connected to an amp?

It was only on his MD player, either line out or headphones, amped or not. He was complaining that it was a $400 MD player but I told him that it could easily be the CD that he ripped.

For lack of a better place to ask the question thought I'd continue with this thread for you headphone experts.

I am wondering if there's such a thing as good quality wireless headphones? I have absolutely zero experience in this area so thought I'd start by asking our resident experts. More worried about sound quality than price, but obviously a good cost to performance ratio is desired. This is mostly for short range (i.e. not whole house), say within a 15 foot radius from source transmission. Thanks for any opinions out there.

I have no experience with wireless headphones. This would be a great question to ask Alan Lofft about. I would think there would be some drawbacks to wireless headphones and that price/performance would be much harder to achieve. I know Axiom was developing a wireless bookshelf speaker at one point so they might have some insight into this technology. I know great sounding standard headphones (open, closed, portable, circumaural) can be found on the cheap $<150, some even at prices much less than that.

The couple of Bluetooth ones I have tried (owned none) seemed to have issues if you walked around too fast. Might have just been that particular brand.

Thanks Doc. I'll see if Alan chimes in here, otherwise I'll PM him in a day or two. I am thinking of this for office use where cables constantly interfere with rotating my chair or crossing the room for filing cabinets etc...

I have heard Alan say before that he checks every subforum except for The Water Cooler. Odds are he will not see this thread. Probably best to PM him or start another thread in another subforum on wireless headphones. JohnK might also be able to shed some technical insight into wireless headphones.