New headphones I really like - Sennheiser 560s
I bought some new Sennheiser 560s headphones and absolutely love them for playing Battlefield. I can clearly hear where all the footsteps are coming from with these headphones. It's like a 3D sphere of sound is surrounding my head. The soundstage and imaging of these headphones is impressive.
Sennheiser 560s
Their positional audio is quite a bit better than the purple Audio-Technica 700AD headphones I was using and vastly better than the Beyerdynamic 900 Pro X headphones I bought but ended up returning because I couldn't hear a single footstep with them.
The 560s headphone drivers are angled slightly, which helps reflect sound into the ear pinna at a more natural angle. This helps open up the soundstage so it sounds like audio is coming from outside the headphones instead of right next to your ear.
They're also 120-ohm which helps produce tight bass. I've learned higher ohm headphones usually have tighter bass response due to increased driver damping.
Damping is basically the amplifier's ability to control the driver's diaphragm movements as it vibrates back and forth. Higher impedance headphones allow for high voltage, low current loads which is ideal for driver damping. Compared to the low voltage, high current loads with low impedance headphones.
A higher impedance also allows for thinner and lighter voice coil wire to be wound around the diaphragm more times to produce a stronger magnetic field compared to ticker and heavier voice coils in low impedance headphones.
Interview with Beyerdynamic's Senior Product Manager Gunter Weidemann, explaining why high impedance headphones generally perform better.
Just wanted to share my experience with these 3 headphones and some of the things I learned along the way. I also learned the Sennheiser 800s drivers are hollow in the middle. It uses 'ring drivers' and it's these donut shaped drivers which allows it to produce such a wide soundstage. Having a hole in the middle of the driver allows it to project a flat wavefront. This flat wavefront mimics the shape of distant sound waves when they travel over longer distances to reach our ears. It's also why planar driver headphones tend to have larger soundstages than dynamic driver headphones, due to their perfectly flat drivers.
Sennheiser 800s ring driver
Flat wavefront vs round spherical wavefront
Unfortunately, the Sennheiser 800s is outside my budget, but I'm enjoying the 560s headphones and would recommend them to anyone looking for some new gaming headphones with excellent footstep positional audio and pleasing soundstage.
