yarrrrrrrrr..... expensive headphones suck

evidently it is headphone-swapping-month, which is saving me lots of money.

i got my hands on a pair of very-well-broken-in hd650s, recabled with expensive magic copper that lets electrons flow freely instead of all congested-like. that's right, this incredibly stiff, inconvenient, always-in-the-way cable turns the stock hd650s from the 101 in LA during rush hour to the 101 in palo alto during rush hour, you know, with a free-flowing diamond lane, rushing at 100 miles an hour in the proper direction. no restriction of flow!

okay, enough about the silly recabling. the owner says it makes an audible difference, and he's probably not making it up. i haven't had a real listen to hd650s without the recable so i dont know.

he's been listening to them for months, and says that although they color the sound greatly, adding warmth were there wasn't any, he's now gotten so used to them that he can't listen to any other set of cans without crippling disenjoyment. so i volunteered to take them off his hands for a while so he could go cold-turkey and return to his other, lonely, neglected phones.

so far, i have not been impressed. doing an A-B with the 701s is like having earwax removed: i can actually hear spaces and air and soundstage with the 701s, and at lower volumes. with the 650s, everything sounds "veiled", which is a term i borrow from the forums, a term which the owner denies exists, but is truly apt. i suppose my metaphor of earwax combines well with the "veil" description: listening to these cans is like listening to music through a thick veil of earwax.

that's not to say they're bad. proponents of these cans laud their "smooth" "silky" "intimate" sound. they're plenty detailed, and have very pleasant presentation and a deep, lovely low-end. if i hadn't been used to the airyness of the 701s i'd be impressed. but with the 650s, there's just less "there" there. and i like a lotta "there".

they seem rolled off at the top. i've got a swell song featuring some of those finger clapper cymbals that bellydancers use. with the 701s you feel like you're in the room with the bellydancer. not so with the 650s. too much sparkle has been removed from the highs.

in their defense, because of this smoothed out, warmed up presentation, they're less fatiguing than the 650s. they sounded pretty sweet with some amon tobin last night, but i was a bit tipsy and swept up in crappy writing, so who knows how accurate my perceptions were?

folks say that once you get the 650s recabled for balanced operation. i could actually get those, as my DAC has balanced out, and even though the DAC's manufaturer scoffs at audiophiles who use his unit to drive balanced cans, those laughable audiophiles swear by the sound. balanced 650s go for, hilariously enough, $650. for that i could get two pairs of dt990s or a very nice tube amp, either of which i suspect would sound more to my liking.

speaking of which, someone needs to loan me some dt990s for a spell...