Divine Noise - 1/4 Inch Curly Cable Reviews

Beyerdynamic DT 250-80 headphones

Review date: half dozen December 2004.
Last modified 03-Dec-2011 .

Total-sized headphones take an image trouble.

Non to put too fine a point on it, you tend to look like a fleck of a tit when you're wearing them.

Now, I look like a bit of a tit most of the time, then issues similar this usually become over my black-plastic-encrusted head. Other people generally demand to tell me when something's actually ugly. I honestly didn't think at all about what I looked like wearing these until my girlfriend clued me in.

I made a conscious endeavour, therefore, to recollect nearly what Beyerdynamic'south DT 250-80 headphones looked like when I outset got them out of the box.

Then far as I can determine, they look pretty inoffensive by full-sized headphone standards, though certainly not sleek and stylish and ultramodern. And they've got one rather peculiar feature that you may already take noticed. More on that in a moment.

At a glance, you'd call back these headphones could take been designed 30 years agone. Only when yous wait a bit closer exercise you see that they're mainly made out of tough, lightweight plastic that probably didn't exist dorsum then - plus a steel headband leap, lurking nether the removable cushion.

There were plastic headphones back in the 70s, just they were big and clunky, or fragile, or both. These Beyers are most every bit slim as full-sized circumaural (around-the-ears) headphones can be, merely they're nevertheless, as far as I tin can see, as tough equally old boots.

Similar a lot of total-sized headphones, the DT 250s are billed as a professional high accuracy transparent studio monitor digital reference laboratory analysis 'phones. Unlike most headphones so described, the 250s are actually suitable for such a job.

For a start, they're "closed" headphones; their earpieces seal confronting your head to block exterior noise, which also means not much sound leaks out from them. This is a good thing for studio use, but also for noisy computer rooms, offices, public transport (if you've the courage to wear big blackness headphones on a jitney) and so on.

The 250s also accept an old school curly cord cable, which is another plus for many studio and DJ applications. Curly cords let you lot motion away from your decks or mixer or workstation, without leaving you with a long tangly cablevision all over the identify when you come back.

The cable's about ane.3 metres long unstretched (four feet, 3 inches), and maybe two metres (half-dozen feet vi inches) at a reasonable level of extension.

If you don't dig the curly cord, though, yous could have a bit of a problem, because of the peculiar feature I mentioned higher up.

In case you lot oasis't spotted information technology yet, the DT 250 cable plugs into the headphones. That'southward a standard feature of many quality 'phones these days, and it's a good thing; it makes it like shooting fish in a barrel to swap out a cable that'southward gotten mangled, and information technology also reduces the risk of cable impairment. The plug'll just pop out of the headphones if the wire pulls taut.

This cablevision, though, hooks upwards to the headphones not with a simple standard plug, but with a bizarrely enormous connector.

Yes, that affair's got vii pins on it.

The torso of the plug's a practiced four centimetres (one.half-dozen inches) long, plus more than for the rubber strain relief boot on the end. It looks every bit if the pins are silverish plated, as well.

You could power a computer through a plug like this. Using it for the meagre three conductors and tens of milliwatts that a pair of headphones needs seems just a tad over the peak to me.

There's some method to Beyer's madness, here. The extra pins on the connector are for a microphone hookup, in improver to the stereo pair. Y'all tin can't actually buy an addition microphone for the DT 250s, but there are a few mic-equipped headsets in Beyer's 200-serial, and they're simply economising on components. There'southward fifty-fifty a single-sided DT 252, aimed at the DJ market; it uses even fewer of those 7 pins.

Cables should be interchangeable between all of the dissimilar kinds of DT 2xx 'phones, though I doubt many people are going to find that very useful. If you experience like a chip of headphone hacking, though, the pinout for the connector is in the 2xx-series manual that y'all can download in PDF format from the DT 250 product folio.

The plug on the other end of the DT 250 cable, by the way, is a standard 1/8th inch stereo unit, with a screw thread on it so you tin can firmly attach the supplied threaded quarter-inch adapter if yous like. If yous lose the supplied adapter, whatsoever normal plug-in adapter will also piece of work.

Oh, and if y'all don't want the headphone end of the cablevision to be unpluggable, in that location's a screw hole through it that lets you fix it to the ear-cup.

Price

HeadRoom in the USA sell the Hard disk 250-80 for $US179 plus shipping. This puts them well to a higher place what a lot of people will countenance paying for headphones, but they're simply in the middle range of headphones-that-audiophiles-can-tolerate. And, of form, by speaker standards, they're dirt cheap.

(HeadRoom also sell the DT 250-250, for the same toll. That's essentially the same affair merely with higher impedance; 250 ohms versus, wait for information technology, fourscore ohms for the 250-fourscore. The two models are basically identical, as far equally I can meet; most people volition prefer the 80 ohm version, considering it gives y'all more than volume from a given headphone socket output voltage. Many headphone sockets won't be able to drive the 250 ohm 'phones to respectable volume.)

Comfort

You have to make allowances, comfort-wise, when you're evaluating airtight headphones.

Open-backed headphones don't have to seal confronting your skull, and so unless they're designed to stay put while you jog, they can float on your caput. Some companies manage to make circumaural open headphones that're uncomfortable, but information technology takes considerable ingenuity.

Closed 'phones need a seal to work properly, and then they have to clench your caput somewhat. This usually isn't a problem in the short term, but as the hours wearable on most sealed headphones become less and less pleasant to live with.

The DT 250s, still, are quite comfy. I was worried that their earpieces wouldn't quite fit around my ears, because the pigsty in the middle of the ear cushions is only nearly vi by 3.5cm (2.four by 1.4 inches)in size, merely they actually snuggled onto my ears neatly. If you lot've got unusually large or sticky-out ears then these probably aren't the 'phones for you, but they should fit about people well.

The 250s' caput pressure isn't very high past sealed-'phone standards, and they've got fuzzy ear cushions instead of the popular "pleather". I found them quite tolerable subsequently I'd been wearing them for a few hours. Not wonderful, just as good as I think I've any right to expect from sealed 'phones.

Role of the reason for the DT 250s' comfortableness is that the earpieces have a few degrees of fore-and-aft swivel. The swivel articulation is very solidly built; the steel inner headband continues downward to that indicate, and a simple spiral holds it all together.

That's the design philosophy all through these headphones. No space age super-lightweight prune-together funkitude, just proficient old fashioned screws, and hidden metal where it's needed.

The DT 250s aren't very heavy, though. Without their cable, they weigh a perfectly acceptable 244 grams (8.6 ounces). That's pretty much on par for full-sized headphones these days.

Listening

The much-abused "studio monitor" term actually does have a meaning. Monitor speakers and headphones are meant to requite every bit uncoloured a view of the sound world as possible.

This isn't the goal of all sound systems, specially not consumer models. A lot of people like a bit of bass emphasis, for instance. Some people like a lot. And there'south a whole manufacture based around the "sweetness" baloney of valve amplifiers.

My usual everyday headphones for some years now have been a pair of Sennheiser HD 590s, which are not dead flat "monitor" units. Headphone aficionados don't generally like the 590s much; they complain about their somewhat muted midrange and peaky treble response.

I like them just fine, though, not least because they remain comfortable even when worn for many sequent hours. They as well accept a plug-in cable, which has saved itself from yanking damage more than times than I care to remember, and they're calorie-free, and tough, and look pretty cool as well.

I ran through my usual stone, pop, classical and jazz test tracks, and noted that the DT 250s sound significantly less "blusterous" than the Hard disk drive 590s, and accept noticeably less low bass. They don't have unduly low bass, though, or peculiarly muted treble, or all but the lightest dose of the plastic-cup midrange distortion that'south feature of many sealed headphones, especially cheap ones.

The 250s also seem to deliver a quite wide stereo soundstage, which tells me that they're accurately reproducing the tricky stage and frequency rest differences that the brain uses to form a stereo image.

And, when I used the 250s in my estimator-fan-infested office while writing this review, I was pleased past the fact that the fans didn't invade my awareness nearly equally much equally they do when I'm wearing the open-backed 590s. Despite the DT 250s' dainty and comfy low head pressure, their isolation - blocking of exterior noise - is really pretty expert. About the same equally diverse other full-sized sealed 'phones, if you ask me.

Moving on, every bit usual, to shuffle-fashion playing of anything and everything, I noted that the DT 250s entirely successfully allowed me to hear every layer of an intricate samplefest, and delivered equally smooth a rendition of roughly recorded work past some obscure Star Trek actor or other equally you could expect, merely still managed an accordingly ear-piercing rendition of something that's meant to audio as if it'south passed through at to the lowest degree four "loudness" filters on the way to the listener.

More than jazz went down well, the Interminable Mix of "Welcome To The Pleasuredome" was as not-boring as I've e'er heard information technology, and I could also hear the sibilance of Brian Wilson'southward mic 40 years ago.

I didn't really want to hear that, to tell you the truth, simply that'south the deal with proper "monitor" speakers or headphones; they let y'all hear the music warts and all, and do nothing to hide the defects of the performers, the recording technology, or your lousy MP3 encoder.

(The crowbar also sounded as it should.)

Numbers

The DT 250s are declared past Beyerdynamic to have a frequency response stretching from 10-30,000Hz.

That'due south a lot.

Human hearing is usually quoted every bit extending from 20 to 20,000Hz, but few adults can hear to a higher place fourteen,000Hz, and there's not much program material that stretches that far upwards either. You won't often hear bass below 20Hz in music, either; actually, even the rumbles and explosions in activity movies aren't probable to have much energy style down at that place.

Getting real 10Hz response out of headphone transducers is non easy, but lots of cheap headphones nonetheless have specs that say they can go downwardly that far, if not farther.

Those specs are invariably true merely for suitably pocket-size values of "true". The 'phones exercise accept response at those extremes, only it's and so far down compared with their loudness at other frequencies that there'south no way you could always hear information technology when listening to normal programme material.

Quality headphones similar these Beyers, on the other paw, are less misleadingly specified. The response extremes may even so be a footling exaggerated, but shouldn't be far from the -3dB standard for audio gear - when the response plot drops 3dB beneath its typical effigy, and doesn't come dorsum, that's the end.

When HeadRoom fabricated numbers on the DT 250, they found existent response downward to, oh, almost 40Hz, allowing a charitable -5dB cutoff point. And so, 10Hz bass response? Not true. Not true by rather more than than an octave. Simply 40Hz is perfectly OK; lots of excellent headphones only really get that far down.

HeadRoom measured the DT 250s' treble response as being all wiggy (a technical term), as is common for headphones in general and sealed headphones in particular. Simply there's not actually much to mutter about there, either; fake-head testing devices like the i HeadRoom uses simulate the oddness imposed upon high frequencies by human heads, so a wiggly line that seems to suggest no very useful response above 10000Hz is not, actually, cause for business concern.

(Though y'all tin fake cracking and august wisdom quite effectively by pointing to such a graph as an explanation for why a crummy pair of headphones sound so bad.)

But, still: 30kHz treble response? No. About the same fib factor as for the treble response figure, I'm afraid.

More relevantly, HeadRoom constitute that the 250s' distortion graph has the lofty resonance peaks in it that merely black magic tin foreclose in sealed 'phones, but is otherwise well behaved. These headphones' alleged fourscore ohm impedance is too, obviously, really more than like 100. Impedance is the only specification I can even attempt to mensurate with my plebeian collection of test gear here; I got nigh an 89 ohm DC impedance, which is where the HeadRoom graph is at its 20Hz end, closest to DC.

HeadRoom too found, every bit I did in my listening tests, that the DT 250s' isolation is about the same as that of various other sealed 'phones. The Sennheiser HD 280s I reviewed a while agone, and the very inexpensive Koss UR20s I reviewed a little later on, for example; compare the graphs and you can come across that there'south really non much in it at all.

I've thrown the Etymotic ER-4S canalphones I reviewed, um, even earlier, into that comparison graph too, so you can see how really high isolation 'phones perform. Those things literally plug your ears, though; you can't just pop 'em on and off like normal headphones.

Servicing

You tin take apart all good headphones. The DT 250 ear pads use the common groove-lock retention method, so y'all don't have to popular off the plates underneath to remove them. But it's easier to get the pads dorsum on again if you remove the plate and slide it into them first.

Beyer sell headband and ear cushions for the 200-serial headphones every bit spare parts. You tin can even go PVC ear cushions to replace the material ones, if y'all similar.

And you can get replacement cables, but no different kinds of cable; it's curly string or nothing, I'thousand afraid.

Overall

I was pleasantly surprised by the DT 250s. Sealed headphones - including some quite expensive ones - often sound quite underwhelming. These, however, don't.

You can go better-sounding 'phones than these for less money, but I can't recall encountering any sealed headphones with this good a package of features, at this cost.

Of the sealed headphones I've reviewed, Beyer's own DT 660s aren't hugely more expensive than the DT 250s and sound very good, but most people will find them uncomfortable. The Sennheiser Hard disk drive 280s are, arguably, ameliorate value for coin than the DT 250s, but the 250s comfortably outclass the cheaper Sennheisers sonically. If $US70 is not, for you, the deviation betwixt having a identify to live and being evicted, and then drop that much extra for the better-sounding Beyers is not at all a bad idea.

OK, the DT 250s don't expect very exciting, and they've got that curly cord with that big-donkey plug on the end of it. Every bit drawbacks go, though, those aren't very serious ones.

I like these headphones a lot. Highly recommended.

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Review headphones kindly provided by HeadRoom.

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Source: http://dansdata.com/dt250.htm

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