First up there was an amount of surprise at the amount of extra equipment this chap has associated with his 650's, there was a headphone amp from musical fidelity because cans of this quality need riving properly, they aren't the sort of thing you just plug into a CD walkman. Then there was a separate power supply which was filtered to power the headphone amp and like any good audiophile only the best quality interconnects are used.

The first word of advice with the Sennheiser HD650 headphones is that they take a bit of breaking in, in fact they sound a little muffled until they have around 80 hours use, this often puts off those who audition a new pair, fir us this wasn't an issue as the pair we tried had many thousands of hours on them and were nice and loose.

So to some listening and our first taste of high end headphones, paying over £200 for the 650's means they'd have to be something special to spend our own cash on but the first pass of a deep funk CD almost convinced us at a stroke. Playing LP's favourite funky bass tracks was a revelation not since we tried some Castle loudspeakers had we heard bass so well balanced with the rest of the range and with such weighted power. Moving through many familiar tracks the 650's you start to discover subtle parts to tracks that you've listened to so many times before and the clarity of sound means you can hear the artists fingers plucking at strings and the breath before they sing.

This is most noticeable on acoustic tracks which are frankly a revelation on the 650's with a good headphone amp like the musical fidelity one in use here. Of course there are downside to this accuracy, MP3 tracks sound very poor when anything under 192kbits is used as the encoding rate and you can still hear the loss of definition on anything less than CD quality audio.

Then we get to form factor, while we quite liked the styling of the 650's and they are a very comfortable fit for long listening sessions, they are really not portable, not even in the category of wearing them and looking silly. They are just too big to being to be portable and you can't really take the headphone amp walkies either!

The Sennheiser range is more of an investment than some of their cheaper competition and this is shown the range of replacement parts available, from new ear pads to replacement cable, in fact you can even upgrade the stock cable to more expensive (read better) 3rd party cables.

In summary we have to admit to being quite overwhelmed by the experience of listening to good music through the 650's they really are worthy of their price tag, however they do move you into that bracket of audiophile listening and then the bills start for a headphone amp and the other trappings of high end HiFi. If you want better sounds out of your iPod these are not for you all they will do is show up every flaw in a modern compression system and even in a moderate HiFi system.

The Sennheiser HD 650 headphones are possibly the best headphones we've had the pleasure of trying and in the right hands and paired with the right equipment they are easily worth the £215 you'll part with to become an owner.

Published - 18/08/2005

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