My experience with $749 Earphones, Sennheiser IE 500 Pro

by tyler | Jan 16, 2022 | Music

After many years and many earbuds, headphones, Bluetooth this and now I’ve purchased headphones that IMO are very expensive.

During the last few years, I’ve found they are selling “in ear headphones” or earbuds that offer awesome capability. Maybe not world class mastering or mixing capabilities but there’s this phase of music generation that I feel is relevant to teaching a wide audience about expensive earphones, and terms used in music.

I use my headphones for zoom calls mostly and it is a nice break from OVER/ON EAR headphones. Once you realize how many headphones you go through in six years all aggregated into one bucket, you realize you could have bought something nice a long time ago, and now you’re here guessing if this investment feels right.

The Sennheiser IE 500 Pro, MSRP $749 and $599 at sweetwater.

Mixing and mastering is the final stage of the music production chain. I’m not interested in mixing or mastering, I’m interested in being able to perform music live without large headphones or speakers because microphones pic up speakers and large headphones are heavy and squeeze your head. I think my head is just too big. It’s just massive. Like most people have little heads, my heads is much bigger than that size you’re imagining right now.

Because of that, hats suck, especially uniform hats in sports, those never felt good. I’m always on the last few notches, maybe my brain is swelling.

So my head is huge, kind big, in ear buds or headphones that cost a lot of money isn’t a flex, rather it’s an investment in my head not hurting while I speak to people on zoom calls. I listen to music all day and I can’t have speakers playing anymore because we have a new baby. Also, large speakers in a room that isn’t treated is a negative but they sell those things like hot cakes at guitar center with really no explanation of what’s needed in the room for those speakers to be functional.

Women wearing earbuds that appear to be apple.

When you have whatever big ass monitoring audio speakers in a room with no bass catches, you reverb the bass over and over, and everything reverbs and echos off the walls and your room bounces the audio over and over and bingo you’re making music to your room.

No matter what you do, unless you have a master of music whatever engineer come and make audio catches “bass catches” that catch the bass frequencies you’re always producing to your room.

So when you hear someone saying “flat” that means it doesn’t get loud in one area compared to another. The highs are super high, the lows don’t get amped, and there’s the attempt to add zero color to the audio. You want flat audio because that means you won’t sound bad on random speakers and other audio output. You won’t send it to someone who hears it on their phone speakers and they notice strange pops.

You need good mixing and mastering headphones if you want to hear the most natural sound in the audio and not produce to the audio waves coming from your room. I was producing to my room for awhile and never understood why my music sounded strange in the car or why my friend said he would hear pops on his speakers. It was always random complaints until I built bass catches but those are massive and I don’t want a lot of stuff on my walls right now. I enjoy the clear walls for now. So with the kiddo sleeping and need for no bass catches, here we are right now with this need to buy better headphones.

mixing and mastering, audio production

Mastering, a form of audio post production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master), the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). In recent years digital masters have become usual, although analog masters—such as audio tapes—are still being used by the manufacturing industry, particularly by a few engineers who specialize in analog mastering.^{[citation needed]}

Mastering requires critical listening; however, software tools exist to facilitate the process. Results depend upon the intent of the engineer, the skills of the engineer, the accuracy of the speaker monitors, and the listening environment. Mastering engineers often apply equalization and dynamic range compression in order to optimize sound translation on all playback systems.^[1] It is standard practice to make a copy of a master recording—known as a safety copy—in case the master is lost, damaged or stolen.

Audio post production is all stages of audio production relating to sound produced and synchronized with moving picture (film, television, or video). It involves sound design, sound effects, Foley, ADR, sound editing, audio mixing, mastering etc.

Earbuds over $500, I’m crazy I know…

Remember wearing big ass headphones all day hurts my head? I’m wearing $170 to $250 headphones and various brands to keep my ears, head, and skull from feeling funny. I swap them out often,

And I want headphones that last a long time. High end headphones have subtle places to “change” parts on the headphones and that means it has a longer lifetime of ownership. They come with nice cases, replace-able pieces and so-on and so-forth…

IF you look there’s way more than these headphones available for $500, and $500 is really where I felt most comfortable for headphones in this realm.

I’ve never experienced anything like $500 headphones, if you are not willing to play around you may not notice much, and so far I’ve enjoyed them for everything in the office life plus they are lightweight and refreshing while moving around in the studio making music too.

There’s a really nice consistency with these earbuds, and yes they go inside of your ear hole and not over you ears like these big honking clamps.

The sad part is you can’t really go try on ear buds and send them back, they don’t allow this process. That to me is mind blowing. You can’t return earbuds. You can buy them, and that’s all.

Earbuds or headphones that are able to do mastering means they can offer the entire range of high middle and low, and it’s flat enough to be considered mixing and mastering ear buds.

Sennheiser IE 500 PRO Monitor Earphones

I recently purchased a pair of in ear headphones called Sennheiser IE 500 PRO . These headphones, I’ll admit, do offer a lot of clarity across the entire range. They call them monitoring headphones, not exactly mixing and mastering headphone however how do we explain “flat headphones” without a little backing.

Sennheiser IE 500Pro, I’m always a little surprised by how well it appears in my ears. It always seems to throw me off guard because it’s not an expectation you would have with ear buds.

On my twitter, people found >$500 to be the last thing on their spending spree. I believe this goes to show the audience in my group and not so much the spending power. I believe they have the spending power but don’t know of headphones that can be good in this cost amount. A lot of people are in this belief system that headphones can be a certain amount and then that’s all she wrote. However I wonder if they understood that headphones can be at a certain point and be mind blowing or “decent” in their mind. Hard part is I can’t suggest this because if you don’t like them you have to keep them, period. Isn’t that an interesting market.

How much are you willing to spend on earbuds?

— tyler garrett💦 (@itylergarrett) January 14, 2022

Mostly, I feel I’ve used these to do zoom calls and that has been helpful because I can hear people with the same depth and punch as my large headphones, without the headache. I hope this helps you.

Check out my twitter for more random insights. Sennheiser headphones are rather cool, and I’m excited to do more live music with them in the future. Until then take care readers.