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Posted 20 hours ago

beyerdynamic DT 1990 PRO Open Studio Reference Headphones

£9.9£99Clearance
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ZTS2023
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One of the only downsides of the Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro is that its highs and bass overwhelm its mids at times. To clear some context, I looked up the definitionof "sibilant" and found that it meant creating a "hissing" sound like that of (ss) or (sh). At the same time, vocal and instrument timbre becomes a lot more correct and realistic to my ears - beating out the HD600 and Focal Clear. These cans job is to show every single aspect of what you gonna throw at them and they are very good at it. It doesn’t invite you to sit back and relax, it makes you sit up straight and think about what is happening, and this can get very fatiguing if it is not something you want to do at that moment.

The DT 1990 Pro would not be our first pick for jazz or vocal music, though they still sound very good.To my ears, dropping that 8kHz peak does make the signature slightly darker and losing the airy feel, but NOT at the expense of losing resolution nor making the head stage smaller. I thought that with the balanced pads the bass sounded a little bloated, and it also emphasized the upper bass elevation. With their high-quality materials and meticulous workmanship, these high-end headphones are a sound, long-term investment. The headphones are also open-back and show off that fact with intricate offset cuts into the side of each ear cup.

While we’re talking about the performance of the DT 1990 Pro, we should talk about its 250 ohm impedance and amp pairings. I don’t think there’s such case with 1990 Pro because to me it sounds like Beyerdynamic really cranked audio production aspect to 11.Now, there are those who say EQing the treble peak at 8kHz ruins the sound signature or other technical aspects of the DT1990 such as sound stage, resolution, etc. Luckily the DT 1990 actually takes really well to EQ, and they do not retain too much of its original characteristics in the treble.

They are all boosted in the high end, but the 990 has 3 peaks, the 900 Pro has a broad peak and the 1990 has a narrow peak (bit higher freq than the others). I feel it lags only by a hair when compared to my other planar headphones, but this point isn't very noticeable and better represented by an impulse response graph comparison. When I am listening to music for pleasure, I have an EQ preset in Foobar that is simply a a 8dB cut at 8. The only trouble is that the drivers sit flat and parallel to your head, and are not angled like the Beyerdynamic T1 or the Sennheiser HD800. If you prefer a pair that helps music being more sensible and more emotional, go look somewhere else.Given there's two pads with variations in the sonic signature, I will be distinguishing the Analytical pads (AP) to the Balanced pads (BP).

One point though, I find there is less masking effect with the 6kHz dip, so I can sort of determine micro-details slightly better on the BP than the AP. They’re not as comfortable as the Sennheiser HD 600, which are quite a bit lighter at 260 grams, but that’s because the Sennheisers are also made entirely out of plastic. As also I said above, turning down that treble peak removes the masking effect and presents micro-detail as good as even the Focal Clear - which is already an established resolving headphone. I have tried many options, started with TPA6120 but they wanted more as the loud peaks were not as nice as I would like to, so I ended with WCF E88CC OTL and that was it!For midrange, the DT1990 is more linear, while the M70X has this extra weight on upper-midrange that gives female vocals more body (once I EQ'd the treble down). You get two cables in the box, one 3-meter straight cable and another coiled cable that can reach 5 meters when stretched out. The main reason was to add a reference listening device to my home studio setup, and I must say I'm definitely amazed by the overall quality of the product.

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