Today I'm taking a look into the Sennheiser HD 26 Pro on ear headphones. It promises to be a different sort of beast to anything I might have used before and has a price tag to suggest I could be on to a winner.TECH-NOTES
Here's the technical data direct from Sennheisers product page:Impedance 100 Ω (stereo)
Frequency response 20 to 18.000 Hz
Sound pressure level (SPL) 115 dB (1 kHz, 1V)
Max. sound pressure level 128 dB (1kHz, 200 mW, ActiveGard™ off)
Characteristic SPL 105 dB
THD, total harmonic distortion <0.5 % ( at 1kHz )
Contact pressure ca. 3,9 N
Ear coupling supra aural
Jack plug 3,5 mm jack plug with screw on adapter for 1/4" (6,3mm) jack
Cable length 1,5 m easy replacable
Transducer principle dynamic, closed
Weight Without cable: 180 g
ActiveGard™ protects from peaks over 105 dB at 1kHz, on / off switch
It looks good. Lots of good numbers, although I'll be interested to hear the high frequency clarity with what seems like quite a low 18kHz specification. Some may say that it's too low but it actually makes sense considering most adults can't anything over 20kHz anyway.
HOW DO THEY SOUND?
Through out my listening tests, I immediately found them to have a natural and familiar character, despite never owning any decent Sennheiser headphones before now. My standard listening material all sounded great. What is my standard listening material I hear you ask? I typically cover a load of different styles from my high bitrate mp3 & m4a collection, plus a few bits direct from original CD's. Here's a little extract of what I was listening to while writing notes for this review.- MODERN POP / ELECTRONIC
- Aluna George / Disclosure / James Blake
- PROG METAL:
- Animals as Leaders / Periphery / Plini / Tesseract
- PROG ROCK:
- The Aristocrats / Guthrie Govan / Steven Wilson
- FILM / GAME SOUNDTRACK:
- American Beauty / Fight Club / Oblivion / Taxi Driver
- L.A. Noire / The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
- ROCK
- AC/DC / The Foo Fighters / The National / The Rolling Stones
- ACOUSTIC
- Jon Gomm / Mike Dawes / Turin Breaks
- JAZZ
- Gregory Porter
- CLASSICAL
- Mahler
Across all of that I can say that I really really enjoyed the overall depth of sound. I felt a connection to the music in all cases. The qualities of the arrangements, performance and mixing all becoming abundantly apparent in my time with each artist.
Clear, defined, punchy; all of those excellent technical descriptions came to mind and a few others that I won't list for the sake of brevity... They are not especially flattering but have a bit of a bass bump; more than I'm used to, but it's a side effect of the extra isolation they provide over other models I've had in the past. They also describe a detailed high frequency capable of resolving exceptional clarity in the top end, which comes with it the slight caveat that MP3's, even iTunes decent bitrate m4a files, have audible artifacts not always highlighted by other good headphones. All of that despite the technical specification listing a highest useful frequency of 18kHz...
At work, recording speech and dialogue I found them to be accurate and detailed enough to make decisions on microphones and recording EQ. They keep everything nice and tight and the extra isolation, which I'll get onto later, gave me an extra boost in confidence in knowing what I was monitoring and isolating background noise problems.
What about when ActiveGard is enabled? Well it's effectively a limiter. It doesn't sound great, and 105dB is a massive volume, so my advice is you'll probably never need it in day to day audio monitoring. Infact for that use case I'd go as far as saying that with the passive isolation you get from them it's borderline unnecessary.
ERGONOMICS / ISOLATION / COMFORT
These are an over ear headphone design, meaning that the earcups sit actually on your ears. Having never really owned any quality on ears, I was pleasantly surprised that the background noise isolation was actually pretty exceptional. The combination of headband pressure, soft leather earcups and a thick driver enclosure keeping out a good amount of noise. Vastly more than the Audio Technica M50x and with zero additional noise, as is the case with the Bose QC15.
The cable is fairly short, but it is plenty long enough for my usage. Plugging in to devices that require a bit of reach could cause issue. It's terminated in the usual mini jack with a screw on jack adapter, which really covers the best of both worlds. It also comes with this little clip for the cable, which can be used to stick a microphone on so you can use them as a comms headset, which I think is actually a nice touch.
After long periods of wear, over an hour, these cans do cause me a little discomfort due to me having to wear glasses most of the time. I'm more used to completely over ear designs, such as my Bose QC15 or Audio Technica M50x. Both of which sound good but are flawed in different ways.
Handling noise is also a slight problem despite the curly bit to relieve cable tension. I noticed during quiet moments that I was hearing some low frequency rumble from my own heartbeat and from movements in the cable. This is however a very minor quibble with what are some very high performance headphones
CONCLUSIVE VICTORY?
Nearly. I love the sound and these will be promoted to my cans for location audio work and a fair bit of general listening, but I don't think I can help but be a tiny bit disappointed by the comfort factor for people who wear glasses most of the time, which lets face it is a lot of people.
However it's difficult to deny that they really are an aural treat to your ears. Despite the specification for quite a conservative high frequency reproduction, they produce plenty of HF content that is useful for most human ears.I'd highly recommend anyone looking for new headphones to add these to the list of options they should try out, as in terms of pure audio performance they are going to be tough to surpass.
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