foreign they make headphones we all know that
but did you know they also make iems you probably did well maybe you did maybe
you didn't but they don't just make the fancy wireless earbuds that you put in your layers and connect to your little
phone with the Bluetooth but they also make some Primo bona fide audiophile
grade earbuds now Sennheiser has not really received a ton of a claim for
their earbuds in the past but with the recent revisions and additions to their
new lineup their ie600s have been very very very well received and we're hoping
to see success with the ie200s you have the ie600s which I believe are around a
thousand dollars I'm going to check that right now and you have the ie900s which
are like two thousand dollars but these cost about a fifth of the price of those
IE 600s but are they going to be one-fifth as
good or are they gonna blow me away well there's only one way to find out now
what's a little surprising to me is that Sennheiser they have the brand name
recognition to charge a hefty premium for a lot of their audio products
because people will buy them just by trusting the brand name alone but you're
smarter than that you're here to find out if they're actually worth your time and I'm ready to go on that Journey with
you so let's take a look at the outside of the box one thing Sennheiser doesn't uh
seems to skin found on is a premium packaging maybe the ie600s were far more
fancy but this is just a pretty cheap very thin cardboard box nothing wrong
with that I mean it's just headphones you're gonna you're gonna take them out of the box and you're gonna throw away
the box so who really cares looking at
the Box a nice picture on the front featuring The iems themselves a new
world of High Fidelity sound uh yeah okay Sennheiser technical data we have a
six Hertz to 20 kilohertz response the SPL is a 119 DB with an impedance of 18
ohms these should be relatively easy to drive with the high impedance being cut
out by the very high sensitivity and total harmonic Distortion is less than
.08 percent so far below the threshold
of human hearing when it comes to detecting Distortion all really good
let's let's take them out and take a look
um I opened these already but the only
difference is that they were wrapped in this a lot nicer than they were when they just came out now but uh don't
worry about it in here we have our headphones and in here we got ear tips
our little pouch that's a a very little pouch
oh boy all right we got some reading material
and a tasty scrumptious morsel
multiple different types of ear tips now the ear tips with these are kind of
interesting now these ear tips are a little different than usual because they
contain a filter in them so in each of these earbuds it's pretty tough to see
there's like foam on the inside of these I'm gonna take it out of the big ones
there's this little piece of foam so the
role of these filters are twofold one is that they actually do affect the sound
and two they prevent stuff from getting into the driver there is probably going
to be on the headphones there will probably be another like layer to
prevent things from touching the driver itself another filter on the inside of the earbud also the inside of these kind
of have a harder plastic almost they're
not or a more structured rubber or more structured silicone it's very tough to
get the angle on the inside you can see that there's like two different lines
so that little lip in there allows for their patent pending dual
tuning system where basically it allows you to put an ear tip on at two
different positions so here we'll take the wires off
so here you have the driver just by itself
and then you come on like that where there's this significant
gap between the
so here you can see there's a significant gap between the edge of the
actual uh ear tip and the driver body that allows for what they call dual
tuning and then if you press it in all the way
it's added second tuning profile or I guess or maybe it's normal tuning
profile I'm
skeptical to say the least is it really a feature putting your ear tips on wrong
like that's kind of what they did is that they said oh well sometimes you
have you ever like not put your ear tips on all the way on your drivers and then you know so they sound different and
they're like yeah that's that's a feature baby it's just a weird feature
but let's talk about the drivers let's talk about the iems themselves we're
gonna put some stuff away put where it came from also help me okay
we're gonna toss them in our little in our little I am actually going to take
this opportunity to swap out to the smaller ear tips since I believe they
fit me best I found the small foam ones to be the most comfortable but obviously
it's all very personalized to you right here we have the gold-plated mmcx
connector and in each earbud you have a
single seven millimeter Dynamic driver so one driver has to handle everything
from their quoted six Hertz to 20 000
Hertz and that is not always an easy task most speakers that you see have two
drivers in them they have a dynamic driver he's referred to as a woofer and
then they have something called a tweeter which is basically a second driver meant to handle very high
frequencies you don't need those two drivers when it comes to headphones
because you don't have to push nearly as much air that's where bigger speakers
come in right if you need to push a lot of air at a low frequency it takes a lot
of energy which is why subwoofers tend to have really really big drivers but
you don't need to and with headphones because they're pushing such a small amount of air you
can get by with just one drive many companies will use multi-driver setups with balanced armatures or just other
Dynamic drivers but that tends to introduce complexity and cost now you
can find multi-driver setups at the price point that these are at
but it's either here nor there a well-tuned single driver can form just
as well as any multi-driver setup you could imagine we haven't even talked
about the cable oh boy the cable we have a braided cable that honestly sucks like
it's honestly an insult but you're paying a decent amount for these
headphones and look at this this is the
Cinch so this it's like
the cheapest piece of like plastic tubing it's like they cut like some sort
of straw like that's that's really all you give I've seen better cables on 20
headphones I don't mind this ear hook mechanism I think it's good now the
strain relief on the bottom of the cable is pretty good same with up here maybe
it's a little lacking like I would worry about this connection between the ear
hook and the rest of the cable that's a little flimsy
um but the mmcx connectors do just fine
in holding the earbuds in place this is supposed to be the left earbud now I
like mmcx connectors I don't really care for two pin connectors because they
don't allow for the rotation of the earbud like an mmcx connector does and
there's like four different types of two pins that are like slightly further
apart than one another's and it makes shopping for spare cables kind of annoying mmcx every spare cable kind of
works together except for Sennheiser because what does
Sennheiser do they add this extra little lip it's on both of them they add this
extra little lip there's a little so there's the connector and then there's a
little cutout and then there's the rest of the thing and that little cutout
allows them to put this little cuff see how there's that depth between that and
the connector it allows for them to put that in which makes it so that your mmcx
cable that you might already own is not compatible you have to buy the
Sennheiser cable and do you know how much the improved Sennheiser cable costs
it costs like 99 Euro
the better Sennheiser cable that's like the price of this thing that's like a
whole other thing and the worst part is this Cable's noisiest it's in your ears
and everything that touches it goes directly into your ears you're wearing a
zipper these are unlistenable because of it it's an like it's an absolute
travesty but listen if these sound
pristine I could always buy a new cable right so how do they sound well they sound
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Newegg today I'm going to be taking a listen on my Theo audio player it's a
very nice high quality deck very powerful too can drive pretty much
anything it's a it's significantly better than the Sony Walkman that we
covered on this channel um well I don't know maybe not an audio
quality but in terms of it actually being able to drive headphones it's
substantially better sennheiser's whole idea behind this dual tuning thing is
that the second tuning mode will provide you with a more critical listening
experience so sometimes if you're an instrumentalist on stage you might want
to be able to hear some of the higher notes to make sure that you're playing
correctly it doesn't need to really sound nice for you it needs to sound
nice for the audience but you need to know exactly what you're trying to what
you're playing well Sennheiser is right it does change
the sound it is a different tuning but that tuning sounds like garbage do you
want your bass to sound anemic do you want your highs to be piercing and
brittle do you want exclusively detail and no oomph
well that's the tuning for you but when you push him in all the way they sound
so goddamn good incredible like there's
a nice Rumble to the sub bass that it's not totally overwhelming it doesn't
carry over or blur the mids when we move up into the base it's detailed it's very
detailed but not in a terribly fatiguing way some mixes on some songs I found it
to be a little much especially on very sibilant sounds like those s's and T's
coming from vocalists who may be over enunciate or on some metal tracks with
some poorly mixed double kicks things can sound a little wonky on these but
from my experience that's a failure of the recordings that I'm testing out
rather than a failure of the headphones these headphones don't add a ton of
color these don't really have like a signature sound like they don't go like
oh yeah you know that sounds like like focal has a nice tradition of laid back
highs these don't have that these are great for clinical listening they're
also fun like that sub bass Rumble is great I could see some people being a
little disappointed by the lack of mid base where things don't feel quite as
Lively or boomy but they never feel dead they always feel alive and thumping and
they sound great especially at the price so what does the machine say well
looking at our frequency response graph we can see that the ie200s the blue line
line up quite nicely with our Target curve we can see a Ryzen the base we
can see it following very nice through the mids a little bit of a dip in the
500 Hertz range but I never really found it perceptible maybe on occasion some
lower vocalists felt a little recessed but not really it does get a little bit
higher in the upper mids where at the 1
000 Hertz range we start to see it deviate and go a little bit above the
curve things can get a little shouty in that region I never noticed it on these
headphones again I think they sound great what I'm kind of surprised by is
I've always found our Target to not be super clinical and relatively laid back
and the only Spike I'm really seeing above our Target is at the 14 kilohertz
region which is like really at the edge of my
hearing I can only hear it around the 16 16 000 Hertz is where my hearing stops
and when you're really up in these really hide sounds it's hard to control it we tried to get the measurements in
the Dual tuned position but we couldn't see this in our testing apparatus
without pushing in the uh the ear tip all the way so you'll have to take my
word that it sounds like ass now at 150 what you are getting is
honestly just incredible sound if you're somebody who
wants to dip their toes into the world of um audio and want to understand what
people mean when they say like that neutral sound or critical listening
headphones these are a great place to start they're not going to be
off-putting they're very welcoming they're very easy to drive and they
sound amazing but they come with the
cable that's worth less than nothing so if you're somebody who doesn't want to
go with like you want to go with a established brand rather than a chai Phi
option chify meaning Chinese High Fidelity these are really really great
this is really really bad if you like this video why don't you
check out Linus's unboxing of their older brother the ie600s he loved them
so much he made me search for them for two hours
because he lost them