A couple of years back I spent a few days in hospital after some surgery on my snoz. A wayward hockey stick decades before had wanted the same space my noggin was in and the nose came out second best.
For amusement, I had my laptop and a pair of Sennheiser 458BT wireless headphones and I looked forward to many hours of Yes, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Alan Parsons Project, ELP and more.
The sound quality was very good; sadly the battery life not so much, max-ing out after around 5 hours despite being rated at around 30 hours. Whether I had a dud pair, or there was some other factor involved, I’ll never know.
Fast forward to today, and the new HDB630 wireless headphones from the same company are rated at an astonishing 60 hours! A full recharge will take around 2 hours; however a partial “fast” charge will give you 7 hours playback in just 10 minutes. And that isn’t the only surprises.
The price of the HDB 630 will give you a gold coin change from a grand, which is a LOT of money for a pair of headphones I am the first to admit. But measured against what? Other makes and models obviously, I suppose.
Well, you cannot measure the HDB630 against offerings from say JBL, Audio-Technica, Sony or BOSE that the average person may purchase for around the $300 mark. That would be akin to comparing a Lamborghini Aventador against a Honda Civic. And anyway, the HDB630s are not aimed at the mid-priced mass market which when putting together a nice hi-fi system for the lounge room with surround sound for the big screen TV a person might spend $500 on speakers.
For the same system, which would undoubtedly include a top range turntable, the audiophile – the market these headphones ARE aimed at – would not bat an eye at forking out for some KEF, Klipsch or Fyne speakers which might cost anywhere from $2.5K to $5K a pair.
So Why Are The Sennheiser HDB630s so good?
Well, you start at the construction and the materials used. Sennheiser says that each component has been crafted to work with every other component “in harmony” as they describe it. I suspect that is a little marketing speak there, but it is true that the way these headphones have been tuned – and yes you can tune headphones so that all the components, collectively known as the “audio chain” are in – well – harmony – give a neutral sound with a nice balance and very good clarity in the mid sections of the audio spectrum.
It’s a very clean sound with no muddiness at all. I played Camel’s “The Snow Goose” which is quite complex music firstly through my Logitech speakers on the computer, then through a pair of Sennheiser HD300s and finally through the HDB630s. No comparison. It was astonishing the difference. And the HD300s are bloody good headphones!
The engineering of the headphones uses a 42mm transducer which in audio-speak, gives a “wide soundstage”, which to you and I simply mean it’s like being there.
You can ramble all you like about how it all works, but just as you don’t need to know how the fuel injection in that Lambo works you just have to hear it to appreciate how good the engineering is.
Not Just Wi-fi
One of the biggest issues with Wi-fi is compression – squeezing the file size down to make it smaller to transmit it, and consequently losing some of the “fi”, the fidelity of the audio. Sennheiser has allowed 3 ways to circumvent this problem.
The first is to supply the HDB630s with a special Bluetooth dongle that allows the hi-res codecs of aptX, aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, AAC and SBC to be transmitted and therefore keep the fidelity of the music together. This means that no matter what device you use for playback, the dongle gives it the ability to play these codecs, which are of course a much higher resolution than standard MP3 files normally use.
The second is by allowing direct connection between the headphones and the source via USB-C and the third, a “standard” analogue 3.5mm plug connection. With the last two, you have lossless listening up 24bit/96 kHz.
In comparison, a CD is 44.1kHz and typically at 16 bit.
The App
Yes, of course there is an app and this adds a parametric equalizer (EQ) into the mix along with crossfeed. So, what does that mean if you are not an audiophile? Simply it allows you to play around with frequencies to tune the sound the way you like to hear it. Out of the box, the HDB630s will play the music exactly as it was recorded, but the EQ option lets you alter the centre frequency, gain and bandwidth of frequencies (how “wide” any single one may be).
Space is a little short here to fully go into depth of the science behind all of this, but in plain, minimalistic terms, if you want more bass or less treble or bigger midrange, then you can.
Crossfeed is a little different, but it is mainly used on classical music and lets you take the music that may be concentrated on one channel and balance it across the two channels.
For example, when the orchestra was being recorded, if say, all the woodwinds were on the left, when the music is played back, that’s where you’ll hear them, in the left channel. Crossfeed will smooth those instruments across both channels.
And of course there is adaptive noise cancellation available.
Conclusion
A few years ago, my brother and I were in a store looking for some monitor speakers. He is a sound engineer, has his own studio and needed a new set of reference speakers to add to the mixing desk. The salesperson pointed out a pair that were about $99 for the pair and said, “These have a ripper bass to them. Really loud too”.
Needless to say, he didn’t buy them. In fact we just left the shop.
If you want your headphones to be boom box like, or be party headphones, seriously, save your money. While they will do that with tweaking the EQ, it would be similar to living in a 3rd story flat and having a St Bernard dog as a pet (and yes, I have seen that!).
There are headphones made for that specific market; the Sennheiser HDB630s as I said at the very start, are designed for the music purist, the audiophile, in mind.
It’s really hard not to appear musically snobbish about all this I have to admit. Music can be very personal and even emotional. It can be a friend as well as being a comforter in times of stress and so I believe it should be heard the best way it can. And of course, so does the performer!
If that’s you too, I really do suggest you try for a “test drive”; I think you’ll be amazed at the difference you’ll find, and then that price tag becomes a little less of an issue.
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