LAS VEGAS — Some people think "audiophile" means "someone who loves music," but they’re wrong. Audiophiles carefully consider their choice in speaker wire and spend thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on their audio set-up. With a lofty price tag of $1400, Sennheiser’s HD 800 headphones are for them.
"It’s going to be the new standard for audiophile headphones," explained Eric Stubbert, industry team manager for consumer electronics at Sennheiser. Like most audiophile headphones, these ones are open, meaning that sound escapes from each side. The key to the HD 800’s wide-ranging frequency response, according to Stubbert, is a "completely new" ring-shaped transducer.
This hole was necessary because Sennheiser increased the size of the transducer to 56 millimeters in its quest for deeper bass, but at that size the transducer was no longer capable of moving fast enough to reproduce high frequencies. The hole to the transducer allows the headphones to reproduce low bass and high treble with clarity.
Each pair of Sennheiser HD 800 headphones is hand-assembled in Germany. Audiophiles might also be pleased to note that the headphones’ cable is made from silver-plated, oxygen-free, Kevlar-reinforced copper.
(Sennheiser is also showing off the wireless earbuds that impressed us last year at CES ’08 — and the year before, when we tested Kleer’s reference design.)
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