Audiophilepure

Sennheiser HD 800S Headphones

The designers at Sennheiser have also gone to great lengths to ensure that the HD 800S is comfortable to wear. They have employed ultra-soft microfibre padding and very light composite materials to reduce weight. They have also taken into consideration that no two end-user heads are exactly the same and so they have designed earcups with dual-axis articulation which adjust to the unique structure of every end user head and result in a very comfortable fit that reduces the fatigue of having the headphones on for very long periods of time.

The HD 800S also comes with a choice of ultra-low capacitance 9.8 feet/3-meter-long cables which are impedance-matched. You get a ¼-inch/6.3mm stereo connector for use with headphone amps, DACs and A/V receivers and a balanced, 4.4mm connector for use with the newer generation, balanced output devices.

The ear cups of the HD 800S are not perfectly round. Rather the rear of the ear cup is flatter than the front side. I found this to be a distinct advantage when listening to these headphones while resting my head on the headrest of my Eames chair. The flatness of the ear cup’s back mean that they did not touch the headrest of the chair, making it a lot more comfortable, listening to these headphones in this seated, leaning back position.

For the audition, I plugged the HD 800S into my Bryston BP19 preamp connected to my Calyx Femto DAC, fed by the ROON Nucleus Plus server which manages my library of over quarter of a million digital tracks, most of them in high resolution formats. The ROON software is very intuitive and allows me to store, organize and access my library in a more convenient manner than another other audio playback software I have tried. Also, the up-sampling engine on the Nucleus Plus is the best that I have encountered to date.