Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
Relative to a truly difficult to drive planar like the HE6, these are cake. Relative to a Grado, these things are horrible. Without an amp that spews power, these are sort of hard to drive, but the "planars are hard to drive" claim is not true so much as it used to be. With the tech being focused on so much more heavily, it's definitely come closer to your average large dynamic.
With a competent amplifier that can cope with higher end headphones needing weird amounts of power, you should be able to drive a lot of planars fine.
You have two amplifiers per channel in "balanced" operation, where "unbalanced" amplifiers only need one. "Balanced" is frankly a dumb name for it. It's differential amplification. You run a signal and an inverted signal simultaneously, which apparently equates to "balanced." The purpose is noise rejection, but some claim it helps sound. It can mean more power than another amp, it can mean lower distortion than another amp, it can sound better than another amp, but none of these are automatically true just because it's used.
Personally, I don't believe it helps, but I have nothing against its use. I just think it's worth knowing what's going on if you decide to go that route.
The Phonitor Mini and Jotunheim drive them the best out of my amps though some of them are higher end. The V200 is pretty damn close though. The balanced drive of the Jotunheim delivers a lot more power to the planars and it can be heard. Single ended operation on the Jotunheim is no slouch either in delivering power. The Phonitor Mini is a colder amp but offers a more detailed or analytical sound. I like the more detailed sound but the power of the Jotunheim really makes a difference with the bass on the HE-4XX.
Heck, even my Audio-GD ROC sounds really nice with them, but low end control is a tad lacking. It's not entirely the amps fault though. The HE-4XX may be low impedance and easy to drive, but feeding them more power really makes them shine. The power output of the ROC is't quite enough to make these shine.