Sennheiser HD205 II, Closed over ear headphone with rotatable earcup

Product Information

And whereas the HD 428's lush highs tend to drop out and roll-off sooner, the HD 215's top end is much brighter and extends higher (albeit exhibiting sibilance on occasion).

Pretty much everything you'd want to know - that I could tell you - is at http://en-de.sennheiser.com/hd-215 Whereas the HD 212 Pro gives you an abundance of warm and boomy bass; the HD 215 offers you a balanced low end with fast, tight, and controlled bass. Despite being mostly plastic, the HD 215 exhibits excellent flex and torsion characteristics (see pic below). This may not mean a whole lot to audiophiles, but working DJs will appreciate this level of resilency in their gear. We still reap the benefits though, so a bonus for us.

Often compared with Sennheiser HD 205

I found these headphones to be a bit bassy when I first bought them, but at the same time, I feel now that the amount of bass is quite reasonable. Most devices will let you manually alter the levels these days anyway. Appearance-wise, the HD 215 shares many design elements with the HD 205 and the familial resemblance is hard to miss.

The HD 215 has slightly better bass extension, so you're going to hear lower frequencies with the HD 215 as it digs a little deeper. The HD 215's bass response is also tighter and better-controlled, so generally-speaking you're going to hear clearer and cleaner bass with the HD 215. I use it in pseudo headphone monitoring (because it is not a monitoring headphones far from it), on a Walkman and listen to a multimedia PC. To facilitate DJ usage, the HD 215 features a swing-away right ear cup for one-eared monitoring/cueing. This is essentially the same swing-away mechanism that the HD 205 employed. However, this time around Sennheiser made it much better (and a little worse).All testing was done with using my Zune 30 in an un-amped configuration. In this case, the output of the Zune was more than enough for my tastes, so no amp was necessary. Environments and surroundings include home, work (a quiet office), a commuter train, and public streets throughout Southern California.

In simplisitic terms, the HD 205 is going to sound like it has more bass. But the devil is in the details here... And yes, the title is true. I've gone through three pairs, and they're all broken. But more on that later.

Key specs

The HD 215's soundstage is neither wide nor deep. Oddly enough, it's also not particularly close or intimate. Again, there's a very middle-of-the-road (or room) approach applied here. Most of the differences in function, usability and comfort have already been covered in the main review above (where the HD 215 won hands down), so this comparison will concentrate largely on SQ.

And finally, if you're a noob and don't know what to get, ask around here for help, advice, and recommendations. If this might be the right model for you, then someone will mention it. This is a much tougher comparison because the HD 215 and the HD 428 actually sound similar in many ways. The main differences between them both deal with extension at the two ends of the spectrum: I think the sound is nice - don't get me wrong - but it is a bit of a stretch from Sennheiser's reference-quality headphones. I feel that the mids come out somewhat suppressed with these cans, but the quality of sound seems to have greatly improved since I've started using an E17 with WASAPI from my laptop playing lossless audio files. We used the HD 205 II headphones in conjunction with a Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q880 laptop (with Dolby Home Theater technology), an Onkyo TX-L5 receiver, and the Apple iPod Classic, Creative Zen: Vision M, and Zune HD MP3 players. With a 32-ohm impedance level, it takes little power to drive these headphones, so they're easy on the batteries in portable devices.These headphones are built great with a nifty rotating/swinging right ear cup. The 10ft cable- and screw on 1/4" adapter make this a great studio/DJ monitor set. However, if you are considering the HD 215 (especially as a pair of DJ headphones), you may want to look into these models as well (and in advance of my impressions). Sennheiser recommends both of these headphones for DJ applications.