Music on the move? is like fast food, you eat it when you are busy and don’t have the time to sit and enjoy it. But listening to ?good music? is like a luxury of a leisurely candlelight, five-course dinner in fine china and silver cutlery. You not only satisfy your taste buds but also pamper yourself with the rich aroma and ambience! Similarly, portable media players with those tiny earphones may be able to provide you the entertainment but cannot give you the soul-enriching sound of those fine notes on either side of the audio frequency bandwidth that most audiophiles swear by.
For the serious music lover there are not too many choices for a superior headphone. Only a few brands! And the one that stands out is a German brand called Sennheiser.
HD650 ? the thoroughbred headphone ? is the star of the Sennheiser stable. It comes encased in a jewelry box-like metallic silver container most suitable for a gem that will dent your pocket by Rs 29,990, but will mesmerise you with the romance of music for the rest of your life. The two circumaural cans of the HD650 are of ‘open dynamic’ design. Extremely lightweight aluminium voice coils are used to ensure excellent transient response and optimised magnet systems for minimum harmonic and intermodulation distortion. The soft but firm velvet touch conch-shaped padding that encapsules your ears isolating them from external noise (passive noise cancellation) are user replaceable.
On the back of the cans a fine acoustic, metal mesh ensures a precise damping over the entire diaphragm surface for absolute precision and life-like reproduction of music. The cans suspend with swing hinges to a padded flexible headband to compensate for the non-ergonomic design. (I found the pressure around the ears uneven and at times not very comfortable). The Kevlar (material used to make bulletproof jackets) reinforced 3-metre-long connecting cable has a gold plated ? inch audio jack (with an adaptor lead to 3.5 mm jack plug). The HD650 resonates at the nominal impedance of 300 ohms and weighs a good 260grams without cable (a bit heavy). The claimed frequency response of 10 Hz to 39,500 Hz is startling, as the human ear can only detect sound frequencies ranging from 16 Hz to 20,000 Hz.
With cans of this huge claim and class in my possession (even if only for reviewing purpose) I needed some music of the same class! Trying music already compressed in MPEG3 format was not a good idea, as the frequency (data) you loose out in the process to compress the music are precisely the same as what these cans claim to reproduce. In search of those forbidden frequencies, I tried some waltz: Tchaikovsky?s Sleeping Beauty, Haydn?s Symphony in E minor ? Trauer and again with Tchaikovsky?s Swan Lake with equal ease. The HD650 delivered!
Digging deep in my old collection of LP records, I fished out two records ? one an Afro music called Jungle drums: wild fantasy for heavy drum beats and the other a classic rare collection in quadraphonic by two greats, Yehudi Menuhin and Stephane Grappelli playing violin and piano respectively, called Tea For Two. Jungle drums was a cakewalk for HD650, as it reproduced those heart-pounding heavy beats with the ease of a sumo wrestler. But for the Tea for Two I am not sure which was better ? the music itself or its reproduction by the Sennheiser HD650, for I am only a human being with just normal hearing.