Senneiser CX-550 Headphone Review

Posted on 23/03/2010 by Craig

Cross-posted from various forum threads, but thought I might as well post this here in my blog

Background

So, my venerable Sennheiser CX-300s bit the dust a week ago (it’s actually just the 3.5mm jack, I’ll probably get it repaired at some point) and I was looking for some replacements.

After asking around for alternatives on some message forums (WCUK and AnythingButiPod), I decided to try the CX-550s, as I had seen them on PlayTrade on Play.com for around £24 – which seemed to be a bargain, seeing as they retail for around double that.

Purchase

I wouldn’t normally discuss the purchasing in a review, however when I had ordered from Play.com I discovered why I had paid £24. The CX-550s I received were fakes. After emailing backwards and forwards with the supplier, he reeled off a sob-story about a second supplier and offered to replace the fakes with genuine Sennheisers.

I accepted the offer, as I did actually want my headphones. I’ve just (as in 30 minutes ago – I’m using them right now) got the replacements, and they are genuine Sennheiser ‘phones. Result – albeit with more hassle than necessary.

The Headphones

Right, no onto the meat of the review. I’ve not written one of these before, so bear with me. I mainly bought the 550s as a replacement (and upgrade) for my 300s, and they are just that. I only have the 300s as a comparison point, so I can really only reference those.

After first listening with the standard silicone ear-pieces, I switched over to the double-flanged ear-pieces supplied with the 550s – and they make so much difference in the high- and mid-ranges.

The first thing I did when plugging the 550s into my Zen was turn off the bass boost I had enabled for the 300s, as they seemed to lack “punch” on the bass – no such lack here. The bass is definitely present, but with that lovely, crisp “punch” rather than a flabby “boom”.

My Zen ran out of juice at this point, so I switched over to my desktop PC sound rig.

The other thing is the relative clarity in comparison to the 300s. There is a lot more of the high-end; crash cymbals sound crisper and guitars have a lot more “mid” and “squeal”, but at the same time sound more concentrated.

In terms of EQ, I’m using about +2dB of 80Hz and +1dB of 2.5KHz on my Benhringer Xenyx 802 mini-mixer, and no software EQ. Sound source is 320kbps mp3 played through AmaroK on Fedora 12 Linux, with an ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card.

Conclusion

It seems like the 550s have been discontinued by Sennheiser, which is a real shame. The best alternative I can see on their website are the CX-870/880 range, which are a good deal more expensive than the 550s, even at retail.

If you decide to buy them from a non-mainstream re-seller, be prepared for the worst. I found this forum post extremely useful, and there was also a comparison image (I can’t find the URL now ) detailing how to tell the difference between fakes and genuines. The differences as far as I can remember are:

Cone-shaped driver mesh (genuines should have straight)
1mm gap between driver head and main IEM body
No cable-clip in packaging
Relatively unprofessional packaging (cables just stuffed into the bottom pouch rather than being cable-tied)
No flanged ear-pieces

My advice – if you can get them, these are fantastic headphones and a worthy upgrade to CX-300s for a reasonable price.

A Very Belated Update

Posted on 28/09/2008 by Craig

So where has the last six months gone??

It seems like only yesterday I was packing my gear in Aberystwyth. Since then, I’ve moved back to Essex, packed in a fair few We Will Rock You shows, redesigned this website, played bass in a variety show concert started a new job and and built a brand new desktop PC – so it’s been “all go”!

The new desktop PC has been about a month in progress but it’s finally completed and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it’s turned out. More details are on the Computers section of this site, so I won’t bore people with techncial specifications here, but it’s safe to say that it was definitely worth the effort!

September 20th saw a parial change of cast for We Will Rock You at the Dominion. Among those to leave were Julian Littman, Lain Gray and Lucy Sinclar who play Pop, Vic and Meat respectively. I have yet to see the new cast, but I’m sure they will be brilliant.

I’m now working at Colchester Sixth Form College as an IT Technician as part of my degree course’s Year in Industry. It started pretty slowly, then sped up quite a bit as staff and students were off for the summer, freeing up the servers and network for maintenance. Hopefully it’s calming down slightly now!

The aforementioned variety show was the brainchild of Hans Montanana, the former head of music at Rickstones School who I’ve kept in contact with over the years. I actually came out of semi-retirement as a bassist to play the concert, not having played seriously for over three or four years! It was definitely a challenge going back to basics and reading from chord charts again but hopefully I’m now back into the swing of it and the next one (if there actually is a “next” one) will be a bit easier!

Last of all, I’ve given this website a bit of a revamp and redesign, and added a new section dedicated to the building of my new desktop PC. The theme of the redesign was partially inspired by the recent events at CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, I’m still not 100% happy with the design so there may be a few further tweaks in the next few weeks!

Anyway, that’s your lot, apologies for not updating over the last 5 months but it has been pretty action-packed!

Up the ‘kin Irons!
Craig

Decem-whatnow?

Posted on 03/12/2007 by Craig

So….where the hell have the last two months gone? Well, university work has really picked up,but I’m now just two weeks away from being back at home for Christmas and some well-deserved (or at least I think so) rest, so I’m really looking forward to getting back. I’ve also got my first We Will Rock You show (and 50th overall – I miscounted by one in September) booked, so I’m also looking forward to that – it should be interesting to see a refreshing take on the show from the new cast – from what I’ve been told, they really do the show justice.

Backtracking slightly to university work, I’ve just finished a programming assignment which involved coding a program in Java to decrypt a variety of ciphers – namely the Caesar, substitution and Vigenère ciphers. Not really being much of a programmer, I only managed to implement the Caesar cipher decryption, but I’m still pretty proud to get it working that much.

The other assignment that was handed in a week ago (26th November) was Formula 1 results analysis using the C programming language. I’m quite a keen follower of F1 – and have been since the Michael Schumacher/Damon Hill battles of the 1995 and 1996 seasons – so even though the assignment itself was a hell of a lot of work, I half-enjoyed it because it was on a subject I actually knew something about! In the end, I over-engineered the assignment slightly, getting a bit carried away and going above and beyond the original specification! I’ll probably end up putting my source code for both assignments on my University Webspace at some point.

As well as all of these assignments, I’ve also had to start actively job-seeking for my Industrial Year placement, which runs from July 2008 through to September 2009. I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what type of job I would like to do and where I’d like to be – network/systems administration in the Essex/London area. Ever since leaving my job at Rickstones in August 2006, I’ve wanted to go into the network/technical support area because it’s something I’m interested in and also something I enjoy. So – if there are any prospective employers out there, check out my CV and drop me an e-mail!

Away from university work, Liverpool are now almost through to the knock-out stages of the Champions League after thrashing Besiktas and Porto 8 – 0 and 4 – 1 respectively at Anfield. I watched the 8 – 0 drubbing live on ITV and it was one of the most beautiful games of football I have ever seen. Also, staying on the note of football, England are now out of Euro 2008. The night of the fateful match against Croatia it was a flatmate’s birthday so we held a surprise party for her, so it took quite a lot of the disappointment out of the defeat!

In music news, Iron Maiden have announced that they will play Twickenham Rugby Stadium on 5th July 2008 – just four days before my 21st birthday. As a Maiden fan club member, I got exclusive pre-order for one day, so I booked up along with a friend and his brother. I’m really, really looking forward to the gig – it’s Maiden’s only date announced in the UK on their entire Somewhere Back In Time tour, which reprises tracks from the band’s biggest albums – Somewhere In Time, Powerslave and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son as well as all of the classics and also includes their legendary “pyramid” stage-set. It should be an awesome show!

So I guess that’s your lot, cheers for reading and up the ‘kin Irons!

Craig

New University Term

Posted on 09/10/2007 by Craig

Evening all,

Well, having been offline for the best part of a month, I figured I’d better fill you lovely people in on what’s been happening in an insanely busy month and a half. The reason for being offline is a combination of BT screwing up royally with getting our phone line up and running (due to a “system glitch” our original order was lost, so we had to do it all again) and Orange springing the surprise that the “upto 8meg for £5 a month” offer was only available to customers starting a new contract. The upshot is that I had to upgrade my phone with an upgrade fee of £100 or keep my current handset for another 15 months. While I do like the Samsung D900 (my current phone) I wasn’t too keen on being tied to it for 15 more months, so I upgraded through gritted teeth, but at least I now have Internet!

As you may have guessed by now, I’m now safely back in Aberystwyth and into the third week of the new university term, the term itself is going pretty well, but I’m sure that will change when the assignments start rolling in. I’ve also started developing my own Content Management System, called (aptly) Sonica CMS in PHP, to try and forward my knowldge of the PHP lanaguage. More on the CMS is at www.sonicadesign.com/scms. I’m hoping to have beta (test) versions of the software available in the next month or two, depending on university workload.

Away from such geekery, my vinyl collection is slowly growing (click on the link for a phot of the collection), just bought Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell as well as Iron Maiden’s eponymous album, both are in the post, so they should arrive in the next few days – strikes permitting of course. I’ve just finished a couple of freelance web projects for Colin Charles, who has just left the cast of We Will Rock You after playing the role of Britney for the last few years – AD Agency and Impact International Management (a link to Impact will be coming very soon, the site should be live in the next few days).

We Will Rock You itself has had a few major changes in the past month as well, with five new principal actors and a host of scene and script changes. I haven’t had a chance to see the new cast myself due to the fairly obvious fact that I’m at university in the depths of Wales, but I have it on very good authority that they’re awesome, which is just what the show deserves and needs. These changes are also wrapped in an amount of sadness, because I really do respect the outgoing cast – they’re an amazing bunch of people (and extremely talented vocalists and actors).

Anyway, that’s your lot, cheers for reading.

Up the ‘kin Irons!
Craig