Page 5 - To Soothe a Savage Breast

Listening

I managed to take about an hour or so and listen to a pair of Sony R10's when I was in a Sony store in Tokyo a few years back.  These were the best sealed-back headphones Ive ever heard, and at $8000 they damn well had better.  Now, Im about to piss off a lot of audiophiles out there, but even the mighty R10s had a coloration I didnt like.  It is like putting plastic cups (or in the case of the R10s, wood bowls) about an inch away from your ears.  It didn't matter how nice the sound was, and it was nice, I just heard the cups.

Obviously, my personal preference is for open back headphones for music and gaming, as opposed to sealed-back designs like the R10 and the s-500.  The problem with open-back headphones is that you hear everything around you including the music youre trying to listen to.  Of course, everyone around you can also hear what youre listening to too, and it usually sounds like a horde of hissing insects.

In my view, by being a closed-back design, the s-500 are already at a disadvantage for neutrality of sound.  Sealed speakers become very dependent on the material they are made with (plastic, wood, metal) and the less inert the material, the more the material will impose its sound into what you hear.  To make these headphones totally artifact free, they would need to be massive like cinder blocks with astronaut isolation.  While its not impossible to make headphones out of brick and look like a space helmet, nobody would want to wear them.  Even the most clueless geek would understand that fashion disaster.

Now then, the x-500 has a pretty good trade-off between neutral sound and weight.

If I didnt have anything nice to say about the s-500, and had to say something nice about it, I would say that it is damn comfy.  Wait a minute.  They are damn comfy.  After wiggling my ears into the padding, they become pretty well stuck on the head and you can stay for hours.

I compared the Everglide s-500 to the Grado SR-125 headphones, using Foobar2000 and an Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1 for playback.  The Everglide actually do pretty well against the Grado's, but in the end, the s-500 lose out from the darker, slightly less detailed sound.  I am, however, in danger of getting far too serious with the s-500.

Hendrix, Purple Haze

You can barely hear Jimi clear his throat for the vocal entrance with the s-500, something that is clearly audible with the Grados.  The s-500 are quite snappy, thanks due to the biocellulose buttkicking, but not eye-blink, punch your lights out, snappy.  When the kick-drum, uh, kicks into the song, the s-500 is pretty strong, going deeper and more powerful than the reference Grado SR-125's.

James Brown, Mind Power

One of the fun things about JB's music is that you get to try and figure out what he says when he talks to the band in a song.  This is where open-air headphones will take down any and all sealed-back headphones.  The horn section is way back in the back of the mix, where it is almost lost in the room.  You could hear James, but the horn players' replies were all but intelligible on the s-500.  However, the s-500 are pleasantly punchy, especially on the extra crispy 'bone playing.

Run-D.M.C. Dumb Girl

Get ready for the Bump Truck Revival.  You know it's coming.  The bass is almost too much on the s-500!  Not quite to the point of infertility (as my wife would appreciate), but still pretty dope.  Though the cans are really well padded, they are noticeably darker sounding than the Grados, which have little to no padding.  With the Grado's you can tell that Run is using the 808 drum machine, but with the s-500 you just hear drums and cymbals.

The s-500 are not bad at all.  They really do have good detail, and the biocellulose does what Everglide says, it is punchy!  However, they are a little too resonant for my tastes.  While having less ambient noise is great, they actually sound a little bit like plastic cups over your ears.  They also have a slightly muffled character to them, possibly from absorption from all the padding.

The upside is that if you listened to the s-500 for any length of time, an hour or two, you will get used to its sound and think it is natural.  I can imagine that there are a lot of other products out there that are much worse than the s-500, and you wont ever get used to the sound, no matter how much time you have them on your head.