But it makes the Sennheiser IE 800 somewhat less easy to live with.The Sennheiser IE 800 mid-range is beautifully textured and tonally superb. Just make sure this is a personality you can get on with before shelling out £600.We found the Sennheiser IE 800 fairly easy to fit, and quite comfortable. The earpieces weigh just 8g, and they use a similar fit to Sennheiser’s lower-end earphones, resting optimally at the entrance to your ear canal rather than burrowing deep into it. While the IE 800 S time reasonably well, there is a lack of emphasis or punch that renders their performance inoffensive, but rather underwhelming. The Sennheiser IE 800s are superbly made, brilliantly accomplished in-ear headphones. And although the bass response is hands-down impressive and applause-worthy, it’s not going to be for everyone. By. So the Sennheiser IE800s improves on its predecessor by tweaking the XWB single driver. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.After a suitable period of running in, we place the Sennheisers in our ears. Again, and again. Some may be bemused at how little attention has been paid to the Sennheiser IE 800’s long-term survival chances, though. Someone willing to pay £600 for them.In comparison, the Sennheiser IE 800’s use of single dynamic 7mm drivers seems like madness.
It’s good news for people who don’t like terribly invasive IEM earphones, although you need to use the right tip or they’ll work their way out of your ears.All of Sennheiser’s earphones use dynamic drivers, but it is the IE 800 that prove Sennheiser is truly the master of the form. It’s a smart design, but one we’re glad isn’t generally reproduced in lower-quality earphones – without very careful construction this would be an obvious failure point.There is one way to tame the earphones’ top end – pair it with a nice warm-sounding headphone amplifier – but despite the price these still feel like portable earphones, rather than an in-ear alternative to big open-back headphones.It is enough to ensure you don’t have to replace the earphones should the end jack connector fail, and means you can buy a fairly cheap extension cable for at-home use. Needless to say, Sennheiser has put a lot of thought into building these in-ears. This single dynamic driver earphone delivers a resolving, coherent … Just about all other earphones makers at this sort of high-end level use multi-driver balanced armature setups, where each pair of micro-drivers is responsible for a different part of the frequency spectrum.What we’re somewhat less convinced about is that Sennheiser’s admittedly-impressive reimagining of the dynamic driver is really better than the multi armature/dynamic driver combo used by rivals. At £870, this new version has a lot to live up to. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. People often think you need superhuman ears to tell the difference – you don’t.Still, it’s perhaps not as good as the normal kind of removable cable. The first thing we notice is the detail – this kind of clarity and insight is simply not available in less costly headphones – and the impressive amount of space in which it is delivered.It is overall a quite fine presentation, but at this price we want to be moved and, despite the upturn in detail with these Sennheisers, the best in-ears at even a quarter of the price do that better. They cost £600, making them terrifyingly pricey for most people.While very well integrated, like a subwoofer that fits perfectly into a home cinema system, it does give the Sennheiser IE 800 a tone that some may not expect. It’s nowhere near as warm-sounding and easy-going as the lower-end Sennheiser IE8, with not a single extra inch of flab to caress your ears in the way, for example, Bowers & Wilkins’s headphones do, but it’s fab.However, the mid-range does tend to get overpowered by the treble and bass, which are at times a bit too keen to show off quite how high and low they can go. It’s a pure oxygen-free copper cable reinforced with kevlar, and feels a lot tougher than most cables of its thickness.It’s because the Sennheiser IE 800 use a single dynamic driver per earpiece where other high-end sets tend to use a bunch – as much as four drivers per ear. There’s no chance of being able to replace a single earpiece should it fail, and the 2.5mm plug’s terminal is an unfortunate weight on these otherwise super-light earphones.There are some treble spikes in the IE 800 too, in the higher registers.