My new Denon AH-D2000′s arrived today in the post all the way from the USA after two weeks eagerly waiting for them, after a massive bit of research to find a new pair of headphones, to use as a common reference point to base live and studio mixes from.
I first started looking at a lot of youtube videos and one series of videos caught my eye. The 7 or 8 part series of videos was done by Dave Rat, Red Hot Chili Peppers FOH sound man for 20 years+, so you’d assume he knows his stuff.
There’s part one of the video series, he tests a massive range of headphones in the quest to replace his current headphones, which have been discontinued and cannot be repaired as spare parts for them cannot be found anymore.
I highly suggest watching his other videos, he has a lot of great insights into live sound production, his approach to group compression and the use of VCA’s is particularly amazing.
Now, from Dave’s videos, we find that these headphones are particularly flat, tick! We then find that my current headphones before these, the Sennheiser HD280 PRO’s suffer from an amazing bug where an object with some mass is resting against the headphone makes it clean up it’s response considerably as well as it’s low end response. Dave thinks it might be the cup design causing cancellations as they flex.
Later on in the series Dave takes the best headphones he had tested thus far and introduces a new test, a test of their low end response, in particular the ability to maintain a sine wave as low as they can and the amount of harmonic distortion down low. The Denon’s performed amazingly in this test, showing extremely low voltage (volume) loss ending up 6db down at 20Hz which is amazing, minimal harmonic distortion and maintaining a sine wave down to 20Hz and barely triangling at 15Hz. Very top notch.
Now, with Dave’s opinion of these headphones I embarked on product reviews of these cans and threads on them in Audiophile headphone forums. Many failed to notice that their sound is indeed ruler flat and complained of a lack of warmth or such other characteristics that actually mean coloration. The name of the game is a reference set of headphones so you can listen to exactly how some recordings actually sound without additional EQ being added by your headphones. So if you hear too much bass or some such, it’s probably because the studio who recorded the track wasn’t monitoring with a sub or had it too low and compensated for it. That’s the thing, unless you push through pink noise and use an RTA you are going to have your ears and your source material impacting on how the headphones sound. Take those variables away and you have an objective test, so in the end you will have a pair of headphones that you can trust to be accurately reproducing the source so you can concentrate on the source.
Now, onto my listening. I plugged these into my little Focusrite Saffire which I use at home to keep my set of Yamaha MSP5′s plugged in always as well as having two preamp’s on hand and a decent headphone output. I loaded up the new website you are reading this on right now and streamed By The Numbers – Threats, one of my first live recordings which I enjoy putting on and listening to, to this day. The sound stage was what first struck me, you can hear panning extremely precisely. Some say there are a limited number of pan postition’s that you can accurately pick out (center, 15, 30, 45, 60 using a certain pan law, basically there are around 11.) and with these headphones you can pinpoint them all exactly. Hearing the drum overheads image the spread of the drumkit allows you to pinpoint the sparkle of extremely low cymbal touches and get a lovely sense of movement on tom rolls. You can hear the lovely play between the guitar and the sax, each in their own slot as they were on stage. Very impressed thus far.
Then my attention was drawn to the bass and kick relationship. One wrought with phase problems you must solve in their timing so they don’t cancel the other out. The bass response of these headphones bring me much more confidence in doing such things. I listened to a few tracks I mixed out of Teenage Kicks studio knowing I had mixed them a little too bass heavy before we got a sub in there. You can tell, then you move to tracks after we got a sub and it’s like night and day, the bass pushes back and sits where you intended it to sit.
Next I put on some metal, as much of my work recently has been in the metal scene, I started off with War Faction, again streamed from this site, my initial assessment of having the vocals too low was once again confirmed (Supposedly it is the style AKA Lamb Of God but I disagree…). You could hear more of the crowd and for the first time the very subtle snare reverb I put on. So a big Tick! for that, being able to hear the quality in reverb tails is one major indication of high quality speakers, in my opinion it has translated across to headphones as well!
Next I put on some Viral Millennium, of which I am currently engrossed in mixing an album from, and I’m hearing so much more detail and depth to sounds that I have been messing with for the past few weeks. The number of new approaches that have come to mind upon listening to these tracks with the Denon’s is amazing. They have taken the speakers out of the equation so you can just concentrate on the source material. Exactly what I wanted.
I think for an inital impression I’ve covered a fair amount. In the following weeks and days I’ll put these through the ringer listening to many albums I know very well like Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Opeth’s Lamentations live DVD. They have made listening to music an outright pleasure as oppose to before, an before was a brilliant experience, so it gives you an idea of how pleased I am with these headphones.
For the price, I don’t see many other headphones coming near this level of quality, the big brother AH-5000′s and AH-D7000′s are more than double the cost of the AH-D2000′s and many reports are right in saying that you can’t possibly get twice as better as these headphones, to justify double the money spent.
One very happy customer,
Russel Murton