Sennheiser - HD 800 S

The Sennheiser HD 800s sport an open, circum-aural dynamic stereo headphone design that makes you feel directly connected to the music. Music emerges from silence and sounds so profound that would travel into a soundstage of amazement. Soundstage refers to being able to sense the spatial surroundings of a recording.

Headphones have always had a basic physics problem when it comes to transducers. Better sound always requires a larger surface area but this also results in more distortion due to oscillation at high frequencies. Sennheiser essentially blew everyone’s mind when they showed off the Neodymium-powered two-layer ring radiator inside the HD 800 S. Firing at your ear in a strategic 60-degree angle to simulate free-air sound arrivals it has claimed to sport the largest diameter ever seen for such applications.

The 56mm or 2.205" (with a 40mm voice coil) is twice the size of your average tweeter. Generally, you don't encounter them until you shell out about 100 times that for the full speaker. This results in controlled oscillations, which leave the headphones to do what headphones do best, that is create the best and clearest sound possible.

The Japanese Alcantra Earcups boast of suede-like fabric material that you’ll find used for the interior of many high-end automobiles and racecars. It definitely feels like an airy version of suede, as it doesn't have the heft of most leather materials. Also the fabric breathes, which is great for long listening sessions when you don’t want to have to air out your ears. Handcrafted ear pads made of high-quality microfiber fabric and the ear cups are covered with a thin metallic mesh.

3 meters of fabric-sheathed Kevlar-reinforced Teflon-insulated 4-strand straight OFC copper wire in a Y harness. The cable is covered with a fabric sheath, making it flexible and non-microphonic. Two connection leads, a 6.3mm connector and an XLR-4 balanced cable to offer even better quality sound from sources with balanced outputs.

Any set of headphones that give a real sense of ‘being there’ are open-backed, meaning that air and sound can come in and out of the headphones. The sound has less of a ‘laboratory feel’ this way. It’s not great for noise isolation, as people will be able to hear whatever music or movies that you’re listening to.

The headphones come in at a pretty heavy sounding 11.5 oz (or 330 grams for the metric folk), but they manage to distribute the weight evenly so that you don’t really notice the weight at all. They are large headphones and cover even the largest of ears. But they feel light and after a two-hour film, your head won’t be sore at all.