Sennheiser - HD 800 S

Seen Kill Bill? Remember Thurman’s sword? Hattori Hanza steel! The way it slices legs, torso and scalp. The sharpness, the shine! That is HD 800S for you! Sharp as a Hattori Hanza blade, it cleaves through every possible form of music, revealing every tune with crystal clarity. No dust, no grain, no veil, just the sparkle of sound, as the world around you stills, and you are transported to the world of music, glistening as on the first day of creation!

Of course, you would not race a Persian thoroughbred stallion through lanes and trenches, you would not feed it coarse fodder! Remember, this headphone is water, it takes the shape of the vessel. Feed it dehydrated MP3s, through a bloated DAC, power it through an anemic amp, and you get a sound which you could have got through a thousand rupee headphone. A paper knife! But feed it MQA/DSD/FLAC through a competent resolving DAC and a muscular amp, and feel the magic of a Hattori Hanza blade, the growl of a crouching tiger and the menace of a hidden dragon!

People with thin audio palette may find the sharpness fatiguing, the detail retrieval overwhelming, but if you prefer the open sky to an embellished dome, and a live performance to a recorded one, go for it, because HD 800S will take you there.

The Headphones are truly well made and sound excellent , The Packing & shipping left a lot to be desired as the product case was torn and damaged plus the case that was meant to protect the phones was also damaged and the phones had come loose from their slot . Obviously this was not treated as a fragile item and was thrown around .

Sennheiser - HD 800 S

Goes toe to toe with my much-loved LCD-X and comes out unbruised.
The sound is crisp, Bass is tight though not as punchy as the LCD-X..
Together they make a great pair for almost any genre of music out there.

These Sennheiser - HD 800 S cans are phenomenal and worth investing in if you care about hi fidelity sound.

Asowm sound.. Out of the world

Some online reviews had me thinking that this might have some sort of unnatural and strange soundstage with piercing treble, while others had glowing reviews. Ofcourse, the only way to know how something sounds to "you" is to try them out. So, i bought these and the first time i put them on and started playing music i was taken in by the way it presented music. I played one track after another and they all sounded great - irrespective of the music genre. Then i played a DVD recording of a live concert and to me that was a game changer: the music playing through these headphones made me feel like i was in the concert hall clearly outclassed my LCD-X here. These headphones have a highly refined sound that would appeal to keen listeners looking for an unhyped, uncoloured and accurate sound presentation. Technical performance is TOTL, but these are not as fun (wonky) and punchy sounding as say the Lcd-X. However,

the tonality/timbre sounds off to me: it works for certain kind of music but the thin and bright sound combined with a lack of grunt means that it can be anywhere from unflattering to somewhat annoying depending on the music. Needless to say AMP/DAC and source quality and pairing are crucial. Listening to Spotify 320kbps on my Gungnir multibit DAC and Topping A90 (balanced on mid gain) sounds great for the most part, except that the characteristics of this amp doesn't help counteract the weaknesses of the HD800, which i imagine higher end tube amps or certain solid state amps would.The comfort while wearing these headphones is exceptional. I found that i need to set the headband to a certain position then the fit was perfect and not sitting loosely on my head. Build quality is great but these need to be handled carefully, escpecially the large exposed metal mesh. Sennheiser in India sells at a price premium but they appear to have high reliability and don't have a record of driver failure issues like some other flagships (which is totally unacceptable IMO). If well maintained, headphones should last a decade or more. So while it ain't cheap the improvement over midfi gear is substantial and i would say it's worth the money (even factoring in the additional cost of a good DAC & AMP). For 2x the price the Utopia could be a better choice.