Sennheiser x Drop 6XX Review, Seven Years in the Making
[MSRP $199 at drop.com, occasionally on sale. Bought for $199.99 in September 2018.]
These continue to be my first recommendation for almost anyone interested in getting into audio, and will be my go to when people ask me if balanced makes a difference.]
Scores:
Cost-agnostic: 7 out of 10 Denalis
Cost-sensitive: 10 out of 10 Denalis
Intro. This was the first pair of “audiophile” grade headphones I ever bought, way back in September 2018. I’d had a couple of pairs of over-the-ears cans as a kid (one of which died because Dylan stepped on it while getting out of our truck, not that I’m still mad about that …), but they were inexpensive Sonys or Sennheisers that I mostly ran from a Discman or Walkman without much consideration of anything. I listened to the 6XX happily for several years before I eventually bought other pairs that I ultimately liked a lot more particularly once I upgraded my headphone listening station.
The 6XX are pretty well-regarded in the audiophile community for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is their price. They’re essentially a reskinned version of the Sennheiser HD650, in a unique color and at a better price. They’re also, in theory, a pretty flexible headphone. The earcups are connected to your source via separate cables, which lets you run either single-ended (what you probably think of as normal audio connections, either ¼” or 1/8” jacks) or, if you have the right cable, balanced (4.4 mm or 4-pin XLR connectors). I never bought into balanced mattering (at least at this general price point), so I never bothered to do anything but single-ended.
A few weeks ago I got a new set of Schiit components, a Modius DAC and a Jotunheim 2 amp. These are capable of balanced playback. As I was buying a set of XLR interconnects to connect the two devices, Amazon recommended a balanced cable for the Sennheiser 6XX (man, that algorithm has me down cold) for $20, so I decided to buy it for the hell of it. A week later, I snagged an inexpensive portable DAC/amp made by Moondrop Audio for $50 (the Dawn Pro) after reading some great reviews and thinking it would be nice to have a portable DAC that’s a little less cumbersome than the Dragonfly Red FrankenDAC that lives in my laptop bag. [Review is forthcoming. Spoiler: it’s a pretty damned nifty device and I will carry it a lot.] The Dawn Pro happens to have a 4.4 mm balanced jack, and figuring that I should test out the port to make sure it worked, and only having a compatible cable for the 6XX, I pulled them out and gave them a whirl.
It was, to say the least, a bit of a revelation. I heard a whole different side of these headphones that I’ve had for almost seven years. I’ve been listening to them a lot the last week or so, and it made me think I should probably write this review I’ve been intending to get to since I started this whole thing.
[Because most people’s use case will be single-ended (it’s a single-ended world, after all), this review is going to be from that perspective. That said, if you get a chance to try them out balanced … do it. Especially if you can try them on a Dawn Pro. ]
Sound. These are a really good, classic Sennheiser-sound headphone. They’re warm, vibrant, and beautiful on the mids, with … good but less impressive bass and clear, but not hyper-present treble. These are high-impedance headphones (300 ohms), and will require a fair amount of power to really drive (and you should be prepared to turn the volume up a lot higher than you may be used to with lower impedance headphones). If they’re not sufficiently powered (like running directly off a consumer electronic device) they can sound hollow and wimpy.
This will sound strange, but one of the most underrated strengths of the 6XX is silence. And I’m not talking about signal-to-noise or a noise floor. I mean that it’s really good at letting silence exist within a track; one note can end before the next begins cleanly, unlike some headphones in this general range that can be a little smeary or sloppy. "Garcia Counterpoint" from "Day of the Dead" is a great example; the whole track is a series of overlapping guitar and base lines, with rotating and shifting rhythms, and it's so beautifully clean and crisp through these headphones. They achieve this crispness without being overly technical the way some Hifimans or Beyerdynamics are.
The soundstage/stereo separation is pretty good, if not overwhelming. You get good separation between left and right, and you can hear things like the guitar line on “Love Can Damage Your Health (Laid Mix)” by Telepopmusik rotating around you in space. That said, the soundstage isn’t as wide as it is with some other headphones. Pretty good for this price point though.
The bass is good, but not exceptional or particularly punchy. You get really good, clean reproduction of most bass notes, though you start to get some muddiness in the bottom on things like the last minute of Dave Matthews Band’s “Out of my Hands” when the bass picks up, or the evolving bass riff in “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” by Janet Jackson. [The bass benefits immensely from running balanced, at least in my experience. It’s so much better from the Dawn Pro.]
Mid-range is a real strength. Like most Sennheisers, the 6XX reproduce human vocal range absolutely beautifully, whether it’s male vocals on tracks like Meshelle Ndegeocello’s “What Did I Do?” or Jill Scott’s vocals on “Calls” by Robert Glasper. I have substantially better headphones than these at this point, but this is the gold standard I measure vocal reproduction against.
Treble is good, not great. The … outer space noises (? I’m not sure how else to describe them?) at the beginning of “Love Can Damage Your Health” aren’t as clear or present on the 6XX as some other headphones. This can actually mellow out harsh treble lines like the synth and guitar parts in Vampire Weekend’s “2021”, though they are resolving enough to still show some of the poor mixing on that track (and some people will hate a headphone that isn’t “objective”).
Amplifier compatibility. This is the part that I’m just now figuring out. I don’t think these headphones like anything Schiit makes, but especially not their higher-end amps. Schiit is my go-to recommendation, too, and I have more than a half dozen of their headphone amplifiers. They’re fine with lower-end Schiit gear (Magni, Vali 2, etc.), and fine with things like the PS Audio Sprout 100, but they really shine with the $50 Moondrop Dawn Pro or the built-in, high-impedance headphone jack in most modern Macs. They’re also pretty nice even from Apple’s basic little lightning/USB-C-to-aux dongle (a dongle DAC I’m surprisingly enthusiastic about for $9).
Seriously though. I think I’m mostly going to listen to them now using the Dawn Pro, running balanced. For $270, the 6XX/Dawn Pro/Youkamoo cable presents a REALLY damned compelling listening system.
Noise canceling. Lol. These are the most open of open-backs, other than maybe something like a Hifiman Arya Stealth. I can hear the not-super-clicky Mac keyboard I’m typing this on despite music playing at a respectable volume.
Spatial audio. Nope!
Controls. None. These are passive open-backed headphones.
Connectivity. The 6XX ship with a basic, rubber-coated single-ended cable terminating in a normal 1/8” audio jack (the bog standard connector on 95% of consumer electronics), along with a normal ¼” adapter. The cable attaches to the ear cups separately via a proprietary Sennheiser connector. The black rubberized cable is a little prone to twisting. For $20, you can get a (weirdly?) nicer braided balanced cable terminating in a 4.4 mm balanced headphone, and for another $20 you can get a 4.4 mm to XLR adapter. [I’m not going to tell you that a cable makes a night-and-day difference. I will tell you that the braided cable is waaay less of a hassle to deal with, as I’ve been coiling and uncoiling a bunch of them over the last week while doing a lot of A/B testing. But also, genuinely, this is a headphone that seems to really benefit from balanced input.]
Comfort. They’re pretty comfortable. Back when I first got them the pads were a little stiffer and didn’t feel amazing with an old pair of glasses, but generally the clamping force and the top pads make them feel firmly, but comfortably attached to your head. They’re also quite light, and well-suited to long listening (or work) sessions.
Construction. They’re made of a light-weight plastic, with metal arms for the adjustable sections of the headband. The drivers are protected by thin, perforated metal covers, and they’re still in near-perfect condition after almost seven years of me dropping them, kicking them, sitting on them, etc. They’re really well made, even if they might feel a little cheap when you first pick them up. There are also a lot of aftermarket parts for the 6XX/HD650, if you want to swap out pads or make other physical adjustments.
Appearance. They’re pretty normal looking over-the-ear headphones. I like the color which looks black to me, though Drop insists is “deep midnight blue.”
Value/Comparisons. The obvious comparisons in my collection are the Beyerdynamic DT770 (open) and DT990 Pro (open), and the Meze x Drop 99 Noir (closed).
DT990 Pro. For most amps, I would put the DT990 Pro on par with the 6XX. Back in March of 2023, I remarked in my review that I thought the DT990 had dethroned the 6XX in my listening heirarchy; turns out, that’s not true when you put balanced amps on the table. This is the clearest direct comparison, and honestly you aren’t going wrong either way. The DT990 is definitely far more flexible, (and man, does it sound good with my Bifrost/Asgard 2 stack), but if you’re picking a DAC/amp to pair with the 6XX, you can make them sound better pretty easily.
DT770 Pro. I … still really don’t like the DT770. They’re just too harsh for me in the treble, and I find them really uncomfortable after only a few minutes of listening. If you really want closed backs … yeah, I’m still going to point you to the 99 Noir. Skip these ones, even if they’re a little cheaper. [I should give the DT770 Pro another try with Roon’s built in auto-EQ feature someday, but I just don’t want to.]
99 Noir. The 99 Noir have been my favorite closed back as long as I’ve had them (to be clear, I only have two pairs of closed-back audiophile headphones and I REALLY dislike the DT770 Pro). My comment in their review was that I really liked them, but that Drop may be the victim of its own success with the 6XX being a better headphone for not a lot more money. Nothing in this review changes that opinion, and in fact the price is even closer now with the 6XX only $20 more than the 99 Noir. The 99 Noir are MUCH easier to drive than the 6XX (30 ohm vs. 300 ohm), but as discussed above the 6XX are easier to drive than you might expect. [While typing this out I also noticed that there’s an audible hum in quiet sections with the 99 Noir, though it seems to go away when I swap over to a balanced cable. More to come on this.] If you want noise isolation, I’d steer you to the 99 Noir. If you don’t, the 6XX is the better sounding headphone for roughly the same money. [But also, damn. These are really nice headphones and I should listen to them on a proper system on a regular basis.]
Overall. The 6XX continue to be a really, really good introductory level audiophile headphone. I definitely own other things that I like more at this point (the Meze 109 Pro and the Arya Stealth), but you have to spend a lot more money to get a headphone that’s a substantial improvement on them overall. Even more so now that I know how much they benefit from a balanced connection, these will still be my recommendation to audio newbies asking me where they should start.
#reviews #headphones #sennheiser #6XX #anc #spatialaudio #meh #2025 #99noir #meze #sunglasses #overear #cans
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