There is one thing that I cannot do at home, and that’s play games, movies and music at loud volumes. Given my neighbors, that’s just not an option, so since about 10 years I have been using headphones. I started with some crap made by Philips, then switched over to Sony MDR-V700DJs, which had lots and lots of the boom I wanted back in those times, and then later – as I started to also want to hear some high and mid ranges too – I switched to Sennheiser HD-25, which were low-Ω mobile phones. Lacking bass and having some harmonic distortions in the high ranges made this still a nice headphone, but nowhere near perfect.
Then, I did some real research for many months, discovering the [Beyerdynamic DT770 Edition 2005] as a result. Now, for the first time I understood what a “wide audio stage” (for a closed headphone) and “well-defined instruments” really meant! It did break after a few years though, and I have to admit, I didn’t really treat it that well, so it’s probably my own fault. Since there was no more warranty left, I went back to the HD-25, using them for about a year now. Since going back to the HD-25 I thought about the Beyerdynamic MMX300 headset, which basically features the DT770 drivers plus an electret capacitor microphone that operates in the 1.5V-9V range and can even be connected to a regular sound cards microphone jack (Thanks go to the steno-s & gaming manager Bastian Ziebart from Beyerdynamic who told me this upon inquiry)! Plus, you can have this thing [customized] to your liking, even engraved if you want.
Bottom line: I got myself that custom-built Beyerdynamic MMX300 headset now, no more Sennheiser HD-25 and no more cheap 10€ microphone. As I already own a Lake People G93 headphone amplifier, I picked the high-impedance 600Ω version, which is supposed to feature a more linear frequency spectrum than the mobile-ready 32Ω version:
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- Lake People G93 output
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- Lake People G93 input
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- Beyerdynamic MMX300 600Ω
Again, going from the supra-aural Sennheisers to the circum-aural MMX300, i noticed the wider, more spacious sound stage immediately. Surprisingly, the sound from the MMX300 was also a lot softer and warmer than expected, this will need some getting used to. It’s been a relatively long time since I’ve been using the DT770, no I’m no longer used to that I guess. As I hooked it up to my G93, I connected the capacitor microphone directly to my Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, and it worked just fine, so there is enough volume as long as the cards mic boost is on.
Needless to say, the quality of the microphone is quite a lot better than my previous one, which was just a piece of cheap plastic crap. Also, having velours earpads instead of faux leather, I can once again experience the superior wearing comfort of the Beyerdynamics, as the best audio is worthless if you’re not feeling comfortable wearing your headphones. The big plus of those velours pads is, that you simply won’t start sweating like it can happen with faux leather. Plus, the isolation from outside noise is still pretty good.
Now I’m still waiting for my Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 card that has higher quality capacitors, Pre-Amps and most importantly DACs than my lowly X-Fi XtremeMusic. I wonder if I can lose some of the electric noise that my system causes for the sound card with that Auzentech. Especially when the graphics cards are working, this is quite bad as my sound card is sandwiched between [those two high-power EVGA cards]. When I have that card up and running, my audio subsystem will finally be whole again. 
The Beyerdynamic MMX300 headset © 2013 by The GAT at XIN.at is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
