Sennheiser HD595 Review

During last summer I purchased a set of Sennheiser HD595’s - a great product for Audiophiles. I have to say for someone who constantly listens to a lot of music - good headphones like these are a must. They are expensive for sure, but Sennheiser do seem to have a great durability and solid build quality. This is my first set of such high quality headphones, so bear that in mind - I can’t speak for other manufacturers in this space.

The greatest and most valuable aspect is the wear time of these headphones. Any other cheap headphones I’ve bought, I’d always feel after 20-30 minutes my ears would be burning. It’s easy to forget these long periods of wear until you have a very long Skype call. You start to wish the call was over to rest your poor ears! The selling point of this particular model is that they are faithful to the sound that’s meant to be heard. Surely that’s what you want to hear? For some people that’s not the case and you’ll find them buying Dr. Dre or Skullcandies finest set of headphones and to be honest more power to them! But for myself, I want faithful reproduction and not headphones targeted at a certain genre - HD595’s prove a good fit.

To compensate for the lack of targeting of genres, I’ve found it necessary to use an equalizer once or twice - but mainly to satisfy my need for bass or drum cymbals and reinforce the beat of a song that’s probably on too loud for my own good anyway. Normal people shouldn’t be this fussy, but then again most people don’t spend this amount of coin on headphones (as one work colleague remarked to me: Your mad! - after hearing the cost, he liked the ‘phones though). The benchmark song I usually use is the Robert Miles classic “Children”. I think if you can hear all the fine intricacies of that song, your getting fairly good sound reproduction, in my humble opinion.

In the end all I really wanted was a portable alternative to my Creative 7.1 surround sound system (which I reviewed here a few years back) but having said that I was under no illusion headphones could replace a very-powerful, room oriented acoustics. HD595’s do the best job I could have ask of them - but one major gripe is the are not portable music player friendly. Why? 6.3mm as the default jack with a clumsy 6.3 to 3.5mm jack and the extremely long cord included in the pack. It’s great to dock at a desk and with the included dock adaptor it’s more clearly aimed at this type of market. Or maybe Guitar players with the jack size? I imagine it’s probably good for electric guitar players, but I wouldn’t know being allergic to instruments unfortunately. The openear design (it has holes to allow sound escape at the side of your ears) certainly improves listening, but will annoy anyone near enough to hear it, so please forget these for commuting!! Overall a great buy if you plan to use them as much as I have and will.