Everybody who knows me personally and knows me well makes fun of me. I have more sets of headphones than some audio stores. Since moving into this house and having to deal with lifeforms that are less evolved on the evolutionary scale (i.e. don’t share my taste in music) I can no longer blare the speakers at all hours of the day. Thus, my quest began a couple years ago to find the perfect set of headphones to replace the function of my somewhat pricey (and loud) B&W stereo speakers when needed.
Over time I have bought several Sennheiser products and commented about them on this blog. Not all the comments have been positive, in fact, I can think of none that were truly “glowing”. That in itself has been somewhat of a shock to me because I was always under the impression that Sennheiser kicked butt. At least you’d believe that talking to some friends of mine and so-called audio “experts”. Maybe I hadn’t reached far enough up their product line. Until now.
I’ve wanted a set of Sennheiser PX100’s for a long time. The guys over at goodcans.com seem to like them a lot. They’re a headphone of a more traditional design, at least when they’re unfolded. The beauty of them is that they do fold up which makes them a little easier to throw in a (larger) jacket pocket if you’re on the go. They even come with a semi-attractive semi-tacky hard plastic case with a cord caddy. I’m not sure I’ve mastered the hieroglyphics on the back of the case that instructs you how to retract the cord. I just know I got it to work.
So I discovered yesterday morning that my good friends at the local Best Buy had the PX100’s on sale for $15 off. Not a huge deal, but enough of a discount to make it tempting. I had some other stuff to do out-of-town yesterday so I went to do that and figured I’d make the purchase on the way home. Oh if life was only that simple.
When I got to the store, there were none there, despite the fact that the online inventory check on the website said they had a number of them in stock. I stood there - like an idiot - for close to 15 minutes waiting for someone to ask if I needed anything. When you need someone at these places they avoid you. But when you just want to look around you have to beat them off you with a nerf bat. I finally went to the supervisor’s desk at the front door and made my supplication. I explained that there were no PX100’s on display, but there was no empty peg either. This store seems to excel at putting merchandise on display in areas where customers aren’t allowed to go, so I theorized this might be the case here. Mr. Manager went to his computer and looked on the website to find the stock number and we noticed… the sale was over. How could the sale be over since I checked the site in the morning? “It’s only fifteen bucks…”, I kept saying to myself over and over and over again trying to convince myself to buy them but I was starting to get irritated with them, so I told him not to bother looking for them and went across the street to “the other Satan” - Future Shop.
They had ‘em in stock all right. And on display - at a higher price. But only in white. Of the many pairs of headphones I have bought over the years, I have only bought a white pair once - the JVC in-ears - and I learned my lesson - never again. After widening my search radius to make sure there were no black pairs nearby, I got back in the car and went across the road to save $13.
I walked in the front door and Mr. Manager (from before) was gone and my “friend manager” who is usually so helpful to me was there, along with the other “stand there and stare” employee they always have at the front desk. I explained the whole situation to “the Best Buy gnome” as I call her, (she’s kinda short) and figured she’d go back to the warehouse and look for them. Instead, she paged the doofus from before and we had to wait for him to answer the page. I followed him as far as I could go and waited in the camera section thinking I’d look at that new Lumix ultra-zoom if they had it - they didn’t.
He emerged from the stock room with a set of white PX100’s in his hands. “They may look black on the website, but they’re actually white”, he tried to tell me. “They’re not white on the Sennheiser website”, I answered. He went back into the warehouse to look again and re-emerged with the same pair. I apologized semi-sincerely for wasting his time and did what I should have done from the get-go. I went to see Amanda at The Source.
Amanda is the glue that holds that store in the Oshawa Center together. She sometimes puts on a ditzy act so she doesn’t intimidate the other employees, but there is nobody else I will deal with there and yesterday I brushed off three other salespeople to give her the sale, waiting for her to finish writing up a mp3 player, or something, I don’t remember. It just seemed like it took forever. I told her the whole story about “the two Satans” and she laughed. She had the PX100’s in stock, in the right colour. They were $3 more than the “regular” price at Best Buy. I wasn’t going to make them price match three bucks, I just wanted to go home.
And now… the part of the blog entry you actually want to read.
Although the audio amp in my Nano doesn’t push them has hard as I’d like them to, the PX100’s are awesome. The “Latin” EQ curve I was using with the Panasonic in-ear headphones was too much and I went back to flat and it sounded great. The bass won’t make your skull vibrate but the resolution and fidelity are absolutely mind-blowing. As is the usual case with Sennheiser, the mids were absolutely orgasmic in their warmth and detail. Hammond organ parts that I didn’t even notice before were clear and warm. Vocal passages that were bordering on unintelligible were easy to understand. And when I set the EQ to bass boost, the headphones didn’t complain, depending on the song. The headphones will kick if you push them, but if the bass is “too low” (in frequency) it can start getting mushy. And as my friend Ken who I know is reading this is thinking: Mushy bass is not good.
Leave a Reply