At work, my headphones were pretty damaged, and about to give up the ghost and just fall apart. Well that is what 3 or 4 years of daily usage do to a pair of 20€ headphones I guess. So I had to get some replacement.
At home, I have the Sennheiser HD598SE which are just awesome – best I’ve ever had, so I was thinking of Sennheiser again. But the ones at home are ‘open’, which means that they don’t isolate you from your surrounding, and they also won’t isolate your surrounding from you and whatever you’re listening to. So a comparable set as a ‘closed’ design would be much better for work – where the main purpose is to isolate myself against the office cacophonia (hear marmotte’s awesome title with that name).
Turns out the Sennheiser HD569 – a bit cheaper than my HD598SE – are exactly that:
They arrived today, and I compared them to the ones I had already. The result: if you just want or need the better pair of headphones and don’t mind a few extra Euros, get the HD598 (or now its successor, the HD599). But the HD569 is pretty good, and it really takes you out of your surrounding should you want or need that. I would call them ‘honest’, and although they lack the last tiny bit of deep bass or crisp highs which the HD598 will give you, they are really good for what they are.
I think I’ve made the right choice. Maybe I’ll write more about this after a few days at work.
Thanks for reading.