Beats By Dre Solo Hd Headphones

There are virtually no specifications given with these headphones. Not even the obvious things like sensitivity (how loud it will go with a given amount of power) and impedance. It was clear that the former was quite high and the latter quite low. We measured the nominal impedance of these headphones at around 16ohm, which is about as low as headphones go. The advantage of the low impedance is that it draws the maximum amount of power from the low-voltage output (typically around one volt, maximum) of portable players.

The disadvantage is that these players more readily drive into heavy distortion at low output loads.

But these headphones produce so much output that there was no danger of this. We were able to listen to Eminem’s early collaborative effort with Dr Dre (The Slim Shady LP) at ridiculous levels with no undue distortion. You’d do damage to your hearing fairly quickly at these levels, though.

Despite these virtues, we really did not like the sound of these headphones. For all their pretensions of allowing you “to hear what the artists hear”, they coloured it quite noticeably by mucking around with the frequency balance. In short, it was as though a gentle filter had been applied to the music, lowering the output the higher the frequency. We were half expecting there to be a boost in the bass, but this was more an attenuation of the treble.

There was a surprising amount of detail despite this, but the results varied wildly, depending on what was playing. Eminem sounded excellent, but The Who’s Who’s Next, when played loud, lost the clarity that normally marks this remastered album, creating a sort of mushy confusion. Switched on Bach sounded great, with very well extended and clean bass. The male voice on podcasts, and even the female one, were harder to understand because of the reduced levels of the harmonics in their voices, so we found that we had to turn the volume up higher than usual, which resulted in a strange kind of dynamic compression in the fundamental register of the male voice. It was all very strange.

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