베이어다이나믹 dt880 600옴 - beieodainamig dt880 600om

This is a review and detailed measurements of the 600 ohm version of the Beyerdynamic DT 880 "semi-open" headphone. It was kindly sent to me by a member and costs US $198 on Amazon including Prime shipping.

I am not a fan of the silver color on the pads but otherwise, this is a good looking headphone:

The sample I have has been modified to have independent 3.5mm mono jacks and was supplied with a balanced XLR cord. The original has non-removable cord.

The cups are round and have inside diameter of 65mm and rather shallow 15 mm depth.

These are light headphones considering their size:

So overall comfort is very good although I found the fabric a bit scratchy.

Note: The measurements you are about to see are made using a standardized Gras 45C. Headphone measurements by definition are approximate and variable so don't be surprised if other measurements even if performed with the same fixtures as mine, differ in end results. Protocols vary such as headband pressure and averaging (which I don't do). As you will see, I confirm the approximate accuracy of the measurements using Equalization and listening tests. Ultimately headphone measurements are less exact than speakers mostly in bass and above a few kilohertz so keep that in mind as you read these tests. If you think you have an exact idea of a headphone performance, you are likely wrong!

The large cups made an easy job of mounting them on my fixture and getting good measurements.

Beyerdynamic DT 880 600 ohm Measurements
Let's start with our usual frequency response measurements:

I was impressed by how closely the response hugs the preference curve from 500 Hz to 3 kHz. You can even extend that to 100 Hz as deviation is not large there. In my opinion, this is a very important region to get right as so much of music spectrum is concentrated there. Levels in music drop off rapidly outside of this region. Here is our relative measurements of the same:

These headphones definitely need bass boost but unfortunately we have a brick wall in front of us in fixing that:

We can see how the distortion is off the charts by 104 dBSPL. In absolute levels, we reach nearly 60 dBSPL at 20 Hz which is speaker level distortion, not headphone:

Group delay is not revealing of any problems:

Stated impedance is 600 ohm but in reality, response is even higher than that:

Bass is where we need power and here, we are above 720 ohm so you best have a headphone amplifier with very high output voltage. Forget about any portable device driving them especially when you include its low sensitivity:

Beyerdynamic DT 880 600 Ohm Listening Tests and Equalization
A casual look at the frequency response would say these are going to be "bright" but they don't come across too much in that regard. The reason is that we only have a couple of peaks in treble region before the response settles back down. The extra energy there accentuates spatial qualities which is very good out of the box. I would give it B+/A- in that regard. Bass response is poor as expected so I tried to fix that with EQ. While on bass light tracks I could get away with right amount of boost per frequency response measurements, with anything that had deep bass I was greeted with static in one or both cups.

Not only was distortion a problem, so was low sensitivity and high impedance. To avoid digital clipping, I had to pull levels down. This in turn put my RME ADI-2 DAC out of business as far as achieving proper loudness. I switched to Topping A9 and even there, I was almost at max volume in high gain. I reduced headroom but then that caused severe distortion. At the end, I had to pull out much of the bass EQ and wind up with this:

As you see I had to shut off Band 1. I also dropped Band 2 and still I could hear distortion at elevated levels with anything bass heavy.

Pulling down the upper bass/mid-range has a good but small effect in making the headphone "lighter on its feet" (less boomy) and the couple of high frequency fixes brought down the sharpness that was highlighting background hiss in the track. To give back some spatial qualities, I boosted the one dip.

Once there, with lighter music such as classical, orchestral, jazz and vocals, this was one good sounding headphone., The spatial qualities continued to jump out at me in a good way putting a smile on my face when they did.

Conclusions
I didn't think I would ever see a genre specific headphone or speaker but here we are. Due to low efficiency, high distortion and lack of bass, you need to limit your listening enjoyment to music that doesn't have much low frequency demands. Shame that we have to change our music listening to adapt to limitations of a design. But such is the story of this headphone. Feed it what it likes and with a bit of EQ and you have a very enjoyable headphone. Do otherwise and it produces garbage. And oh, you best have a super high output headphone amplifier. And drive it differentially as I did with this modded version.

Overall, I can't recommend the Beyerdynamic DT 880 600 ohm but if you choose to like it with the right music consumption, I won't be there to hound you.

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