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Woah!!! Stop the presses! Here’s a late entry in the race from Beyerdynamic to be a “World’s Best Headphone:” The T1. Even though we haven’t had time to measure it yet (I will soon, and will post results) there’s no doubt that this new headphone is not only the best that Beyer has ever produced, [...]

The AKG K701 makes the “World’s Best Headphones” list because that’s what they tried so hard to be, and though they didn’t quite succeed, they did manage to make some running room for competition, and they did take the blush of the Sennheiser HD 600/HD650 rose.

Until about a year ago, my mind had been made up for almost two decades: Sennheiser made the  worlds best headphone, and it came in the slowly evolving form of the HD 580, then HD 600, then HD650.

For a long time the sound quality available with closed headphones was quite poor. Then, a few years ago, Denon appeared with not one, or two, but a whole line of sealed headphones that smoked the competition at virtually every price point. At the top of their line are three of the world’s best sealed [...]

Simply put, the Sennheiser HD 800 is the best full-sized headphone I’ve ever heard. But that’s not a very interesting review, is it? We should get into this a little deeper.

Ultra high-end headphones are curious beasts and will often have a story to go along with the price tag; the Ultrasone Edition 8 is no exception … in fact it has two stories. We’ll start with the easy story: Meet the world’s best portable headphone.

Of course “World’s Best” is rightly a matter of opinion rather than an objective fact, but in all my time in Headphonedom I’ve never seen a can so universally acknowledged as a world-class performer.

When I visited Sennheiser four years ago, Axel Grell (their chief headphone engineer) was already hard at work developing these headphones. The iteration I saw then was just a 3D model on a computer and a whole bunch of data from their laser interferometer, but the work was imaginative, thorough, and compelling even early in the development process.