Busted. Damnit.
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the same here 
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I witnessed it and almost gave my RME away 
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oh I have to get my ears near a finished HEDDphone
by the way: I was one of the prototype at the show listeners and always been open about the conditions and surroundings. I am not really surprised, about the fact my “most interesting” headphone at munich high end 2018 was the one from Berlin.
In may 2018 I was sure, its over 2.5k Euro and around 1kg - so it was a niche product and the version 2 or 3 could be something in a far away future. Happy to see I was wrong
Has anyone experianced the studio monitors by HEDD? - i have at a friends place and was very impressed. So as his “producer buddies” who do it since the late 80s.
With Focal, another european speaker brand kicks some balls with quality, price and looks.
I would love to see a comparison between the Hifiman Arya and the HEDDphone, as they could be similar(with some EQ) in my understanding. In price brackets they are at least.
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I hope the Heddphones will be as permissive with EQ adjustments as my Ultrasone Ed15 Veritas is …
It’s comfortable to correct by many DB some parts of the frequency response without introducing massive audible distortion or sound porridge…
It looks very promising… and I am a bit afraid that SR1A is less permissive without any risks for speakers. It looks like Heddphones shouldn’t be concerned with any issues due to this technology
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Also, it’s a game changer in other markets. In the UK it’s less than half the price of HE1000se and…get this less than 1/3 of a basic 1266TC.
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Ah, so they did change the tuning since I heard them in London, I want them for the low end performance which seems to not be the case anymore. The pads were shallower on the prototype, I wonder if using different pads would increase the low end back to what I’ve heard by sacrificing the stage.
I think that would be a reasonable assumption… just need to find pads that would fit it lol… it would be a cool experiment!
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For what it’s worth, I don’t find them lacking in the low end at all. But my reference is coming from the 800S.
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The SR1a is much more tolerant of EQ adjustments than any headphone I’ve heard, including the HEDDphone. The lack of a cup and open baffle means you can apply relative extreme changes with EQ without getting other issues resulting in exciting resonances or phase issues within the cup.
If you do this on the HEDDphone, while the driver seems perfectly happy (and may be able to tolerate even larger EQ excursions than the SR1a), you rapidly run into other issues - and while a +2 dB boost to 60 Hz and below was pretty much fine, more than I started to hear unintended effects elsewhere.
I never heard the prototype, so hard for me to say.
The bass quality is excellent, as is the extension. Adding deeper pads may boost the bass level, or it may just cause resonance issues - or both - or neither. If they’re anything like the SR1a, the bass will come up a bit in the first days of actual use … though these don’t “need” as much of a boost there as the RAALs do (depending on how their drivers are angled).
It’ll depend what you’re coming from.
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I should add that, for me, while what I nominally consider to be perceptual neutral is a base level 1-2 dB higher than the HEDDphone produces (in my setup) out of the box, that’s only something I’m boosting because I can do so easily (the rigs they’ll be run always have EQ available).
If I was coming off the HD800/HD800S or Utopia, and was happy with the bass levels there, then these are either similar or higher in their native output.
What will affect the long-term broad-genre usability for me, here, more is whether the sibilance and occasional shoutiness I hear in some places either goes away with a bit more use (break-in - even though they’re not supposed to need any), or can be EQ’d out. If not, they may wind up being something I don’t use for some genres.
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Putting these on this morning, after they continued to run over night (they have 66 hours of run-time on them now), I have wound up dropping my sub-bass/bass lift by 1 dB. Whether that’s due to a physical change (as it was with the SR1a over the course of the first 200 hours) or “brain-burn-in”, I can’t. say.
(Note that in initial my impressions, above, I was not using any EQ for the evaluation.)
Also, I would currently say that these seem to outputting a higher level of bass than the demo set I heard last week (which I would assume already had more hours on them than this set). Whether that is down to my coming into these expecting less bass from my first exposure being a bit lean, or an actual difference is hard to say - so this weekend I will try and sneak in a back-to-back comparison with the set @TylersEclectic has (and he can give these a try in the same setting).
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Sounds like a plan! Looking forward to it!
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Since I’ve got a fair bit of listening time in now, I figured it was time to measure these things (don’t like to do that before I listen for a bit). This is at 72 hours of runtime.
Plots are provided for HEQ (closest to Harmann), HPN, my custom compensation (what is perceptually neutral for me) and the RAW plot (the peak at 4.5 kHz is a common artifact with the EARS tool).
The above plots are smoothed at 1/6th octave, with the same vertical scaling, to match against those @Resolve did in his review.
And I typically do 1/12th octave smoothing, which looks like this (all other things the same):
Fundamentally, these plots look like those done by @Resolve. Which is encouraging, Differences are, I expect, down to variations between miniDSP EARS units, and measuring environment.
Details on measurement rig, approach and calibrations can be found here.
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I mentioned earlier that I’d attempt to illustrate what I hear from the HEDDphone in terms of it’s rendering/projection of stage, and imaging/spatialization within that.
Here’s a simple graphic that shows what I hear vs. the Utopia, MySphere and SR1a:
The Utopia has a narrow, shallow, projection. There’s very little depth to it, beyond where the image forms relative to the listener. This is very intimate staging. For the most part it is not possible to discern depth-wise location - instruments essentially appear distributed across a curved plane.
The HEDDphone has a much wider rendering, and as a result lateral localization and separation is much more apparent. The sound can appear to come from well outside the head/headphones. Instruments are rendered closer than the Utopia, but with a little more depth. It is still not possible to localize instruments or performers in terms of how deep in to the image they are, or whether one is in front of, or behind, the other.
MySphere has a similarly wide lateral throw to the HEDDphone, but adds clear depth-wise cues that make it apparent when one instrument or vocal is in-front/behind another. It also projects further from the listener.
SR1a - shown here with the drivers set at 45 degrees (having them wider broadens and somewhat deepens the image). The image is the widest, and the deepest, sits further from the listen and clearly lets you hear depth-wise cues and locate instruments and performers both front-to-back and side-to-side. Not quite to the same level as a well-setup near-field speaker rig, but the closest I’ve heard and unique in the headphone space.
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That’s intimate.
Great graphic.
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