Sennheiser PXC 250 Consumer Headphones

I must say that I'm a big fan on sennheiser: those are actually my 4th pair. I've got some wireless a very cheap vintage pair and a pretty good 490.

I just bought those, and it's the first time I had such a good feeling right after buying a pair of cans. No break-in needed at all. It's probably because of the very small and lightweight membrane used in them.

I bought those because I listen to more and more podcast on my daily commute (go TWiT!) and I was very tired too boost the volume to listen to some participants to have my ear-drum later on be blown away by other people who were sitting closer to the microphone or with better recording equipments. And on that front, they delivered amazingly: the noise cancelling is quite astounding! I work close to a big 2-cpu database server and even with no music; the sound of all its fans and hard-drive is substantially muffled out.

The sound quality is above anything that portable you can find, at least with the NC circuit turned on: I'm pretty sure there's a small amp built-in and without it they tend to sound dull and muddy.

The sound reproduction is quite on par with other sennheisers and is quite laid back and not bright at all. Which is good for mp3s, because the encoding tend to screw up anything high-pitched (cymbals and such). I would say they sound a bit British.

The comfort is about average, at least to me. Their closed circum-aural design means I don't sweat in them as much as with supra-aural cans. And they don't hurt like some in-ear model do after a while. I haven't tested them for more then 2 hours stretch and I don't really plan to (darn meetings).

The 2 only drawbacks would be the somewhat complex folding operation and the fact that they didn't ship with batteries: come on, my 20$ wireless mouse came with them, so why not a pair of 170$ cans?