well.. gave my HD800 a good listen for 2 weeks now and I have to say that these sound absolutely amazing. I owned a pair of hd650s before and have listened to the dt990s (600ohm) which I don't feel are really headphones that I can fairly compare with the hd800s. My listening was done with little dot dac / hrt music streamer ii + little dot mk iv se with of course flac (16/44.1) files / wasapi mode on foobar.
There were lots of things that struck me right away when I listened to these headphones for the first time and it still keeps me amazed. The soundstage on this thing is amazing. if you really close your eyes it feels like you are there. I love listening mostly to classical and I have NEVER heard the Martha Argerich's legendary 1965 recording in the way I did with the 800s. Then there is the imaging? I am not sure if I am using the term correctly but with the hd800s it is very obvious where the sound is coming from. if the mic for the orchestra was positioned in the middle then you can very easily hear X and Y instruments coming from left / right side depending on where they are positioned. Even with non classical pieces, I have never heard many of my songs the way I did with the hd800s (Norah Jone's come away with me album comes to mind). I have read that the hd800s are a technological masterpiece and it really sounds just like that. It sounds like an extremely smart headphone. I could prob go on for a lot longer but the last thing I want to comment on is the bass. The bass with these phones are very clean and what surprised me the most was HOW the bass sounded. It almost sounded "3D" . the bass seemed to be multi layered and this is something I couldn't hear with the 650s that I had before. Again, the fact that these headphones are so "smart" is extremely apparent here. I posted pictures on the other thread (
http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=33293.0) so I won't bother posting them here again.
Was reading through the last few pages of this thread and I found the cable discussion pretty interesting haha. I am a sucker for these things and have recabled all of my audio equipment (did not recable my hd800s yet but I will be purchasing moon audio's black dragon cable soon). I purchased a van den hul optical cable, jenna ultra's cryo treated copper rca interconnects, hospital grade power cables, monster clean power surge, and i recabled my hd650s with the oracles from enigma audio. Now I personally think I have pretty good ears when it comes to listening to music considering that I was born perfect pitch and learned / played piano for 15 years+ of my life. But I also know the placebo effect is VERY VERY real . Each time I got my new cables, I felt like I heard slight differences in the sound but after awhile I came to believe it was probably mostly / entirely just a placebo effect but even if I had the hindsight to see this, I would have bought the cables for aesthetic reasons alone. Dem cryo copper cables are sexy
