headphones for home

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Created: Saturday, 29 July 2006 15:08

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Ever since there are very young little monsters living at home, I have to spend many of my hours listening to music late at night using headphones. The expensive speaker systems very often have to play back kid songs instead.

I am having two headphone systems for home use. I use the preamp outputs of my Bryston BP-25 and feed the signals into my headphone amplifier, the German made Corda HA-2. This is a nice headphone amp with two impedance selection and three modes of cross feed. I use the same headphone amp to drive my Sennheiser HD-650 and my AKG K-1000.

For listening to vocals no doubt HD-650 is the ideal choice. However this headphone is an all rounder and it serves well also for classical musics. I use an after market cable Clou-Red. This headphone cable is on the stiff side but if you are not moving around it is perfectly OK. This cable did not have the best review but I am quite happy with it.

Next come the very power hungry AKG K-1000, not really a pair of headphones, perhaps is better be described as a pair of ear-speaker. Very special in design and look, and unfortunately is already out of production. The Corda HA-2 is able to drive this pair of ear-speakers, with the help of BP-25, but the volumn still need to be turned to quite high. Musical presentation is quite different but very enjoyable. A bit on the hard side, the K-1000 is well suited for classical musics with full of details and for this type of music the bass is perfectly adequate and correct. However, for play back of vocal, I believe HD-650 has an edge over K-1000 in terms of smoothness. 

If you have not already aware that the K-1000 was designed to be driven by a small power amplifier! Thus the K-1000 was supplied with an adaptor with speaker connectors. The K-1000 is using a 4-pin balance type of connector. I used the speaker cables from Sonic Art and made a 4-pin to TRS adator cable for the HA-2.  

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