Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
I was wondering if these headphones would be a good investment in terms of price and performance based on the headphones I already have. Should I be looking at getting higher tier headphones since the 598s were already pretty good to begin with? I use them for games and music on my PC and have a Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card.
EDIT: You could consider the Schiit Jotunheim (balanced output), but then you'd need to fork out for a set of balanced cables. The Jotunheim lets you use your own DAC or use the onboard DAC, you could experiment to see which one you like better.
But I really don't think balanced is worth it. You probably won't hear a difference. The HD650 is only supposed to take 200mW at 300ohm, so the Magni2 is just fine for it. 500mW is really high, not too many amps will give you that power. I'm not sure if tube power is the same, but a Valhalla2 is a good choice and does pair very well with the HD650 (as well as the HD800).
Here's some info off of Tyll's site innerfidelity: http://www.innerfidelity.com/images/SennheiserHD650.pdf
He sets it at a more reasonable 90dB. Most people should be listening in the 60-90 range, and probably closer to 70-80 to prevent hearing damage, so for the most part 200mW should be fine. There is that bass hump where it can spike up a bit so you might want some more headroom, but the high outputs people are looking at are rather overstated IMO just going off of what I've read.
My own listening tests suggests distortion on even a HD600 drops incrementally as you head to about 200mW at 50% max output. This is consistent with many listening reports where the HD650 tend to stop scaling much on amps giving well above 500mW.
Cokeman. You're right, you don't need 500mW, and I have stated this before. You can get good volumes even from the back of a phone, but the context here is scaling and distortion.
Even a little bit of power, say from a FiiO can help a lot, because like everything else in audio, scaling is logarithmic.
I maintain a church PA system which is a different thing to HIFI but I can comment on balanced cabling. The main purpose of this cabling is to cancel induced EM noise through phase inversion. This can be a significant issue in long cable runs in environments of high RF interference. In my experience it is not normally an issue in the short cable runs used in home HiFi though it could be in exceptionally EM noisy environments. However it should be noted that a properly set up balanced system should have separate signal ground to power earth so that the signal ground reference is stable and free of anomalies. In domestic HiFi RCA based systems, this is just not the case. It is difficult to marry the two systems together in a way that keeps the signal reference and power earth correctly isolated from each other. Some pro PA manufacturers sometimes don't do this correctly either. So I guess my take home point is, it's probably not worth pursuing balanced connections in a domestic system because aside from the difficulties, you have to add extra electronic processes in the system. Every process and connection degrades the signal so High Fidelity is about keeping the signal path as short, simple and unadulterated as possible. That is the secret to great performance in a nutshell. Sure you have to satisfy requirements but minimalism is the guiding light.
Oops. My comment above unintentionally references a specific contributor. It was meant to be a general discussion comment, not specific to any one person. Sorry, I don't see an edit option that allows me to remove the reference?
Ken