Today at CamJam 2016 in London we got the chance to experience first hand the absolute beauty of the new Sennheiser HE-1 headphones. Oh boy, what a treat. It’s not everday you get the chance to sling a pair of €50,000 headphones around your lug holes. I say sling, more like carefully placed into position while holding my breath to make sure there were no sudden movements when handling the beauties.
Now you’re probably thinking that €50,000 is expensive, but get this. They’ve already shifted 130 of them during their preorder stage which is absolutely amazing. Especially at this price. But were they any good or just a marketing gimmick?
Sennheiser invited us into their private room where the HE-1 model was sat, in all its glory. We were promted to pick a track to listen to. Any track of our choice. I selected a few track from the Dark Side Of The Moon vinyl by Pink Floyd album. Thankfully the valves on the amp were already warm as they were glowing. They need to heat up to create an optimum listening experience, like any valve amp has to.
Now we’re no audiophiles here at TechNuovo but we can tell good headphones from bad and wow, these were nothing like we’d ever heard before. The mixture of tones within each track I listened to was absolutely spot on. With Sennheiser advertising a frequency range from as low as 8Hz to welll over 100Hz, there is enough room for even the smallest of high-hat sounds to shine. We were able to have a play with the volume too and even at the highest of volumes, distortion was absolutely non existant. Hard to believe but it’s true.
Now I can’t deny that the price is all about sound, it’s not. The materials used must’ve taken up a huge chunk of manufacturing funds. Inside the actuall headphones can find a Class A MOS-FET amplifier in each earcup to help drive sound. Also in Sennheisers words are “electrical and acoustical performance is ensured through gold-vaporised ceramic transducers, while 99.9 % silver-plated OFC cables are used for optimal conductivity”. All cables are 99.9% silver-plated to ensure optimal connectivity all around the system. And above all, the HE-1s were extremely comfortable to wear.
Now Sennheiser are following in the footsteps of their older Orpheus models that have held their value on the market surprisingly well for resellers. I wonder if their optimism to bring headphones of this value back into the spotlight will end up in only a few hundred models being made before cutting manufacturing. We’ll have to see. But anyway, I digress. The Sennheiser HE-1 headphones are here, they sound absolutely astounding and are definitely one to try if you get the chance.
