Little bit of story time before going to the actual review.
I've had my AKG K-271 Studio for 8 year and a half now. I've changed the cable twice, and the pads recently. They are still sounding great, but I'm afraid that they might die at any moment. And with the model not existing anymore, and the Mark II not getting reviews as good as the original, I've been trying to find something else to replace them. I'm getting worried that I'll never find anything... but I'll keep looking!
So with this mindset, I went to the Angler fish Festival (a festival in Oarai, that's heavily Girls Und Panzer based) and Onkyo was demoing their new Girls Und Panzer Collaboration headphones, the SE-MHR5.
I tried the headphones there and from the short amount of time I tried them, they sounded really great. The GUP collabo version was 30000 yen, but I though they were worth it. When they made us try them, the headphones were plugged into Pioneer's XDP-300R audio player (I think, it might have been the Grand Beat too, They didn't give info about the device itself at the event.).
When i came back home I found out the non Collabo version of these headphones is 14000 yen at Bic Camera, so I bought them immediately. I'm not a big enough GUP fan to pay 160$ more for a pair of headphones.
Now the review!
The look:
The headphones look pretty normal... They are all made of plastic, and while they don't feel cheap, they also don't feel premium to the touch. The don't have an especially good look. I think the Collabo version might have actually had metal on them? But I'm not sure... Obviously the collabo version looks better because of the GUP panels, but I got the non-collabo version, so the panel is just the Pioneer logo on a black background with a vinil disk feel.
The headphones came with a nice small transport case, which is pretty nice.
As you can see on the last picture, the headphones can be folded to fit into the transport pouch. You can also maybe see on the right side, there's a second cable in the pouch, but this is not an extra cable in case your first one dies. It's a special cable for usage with Pioneer's own device, that provides "balanced output", basically the pin has 4 channels instead of 3, so each side gets 2, and there's no shared channel. As I don't have any device that can take this cable, I couldn't try it.
Comfort:
This is actually probably the most disappointing point of these headphones. When I tried them at the event, I only wore them for 5 minute so I didn't notice, but they are not comfortable for long periods of listening time.
The cups, while being bigger than the ones on the SONY mdr-zx600, are still too small to completely go over the ear, so they are still very On Ear, and not over the hear headphones, and it shows after a while, because they clamp more on your head than the Sony ones.
So far my limit has been about 2 hours, which is very low.
Now onto the important part, how do they sound?
Like last time I did the comparison with a pair of AKG K-271 Studio (~250$) and a pair of cheaper Sony mdr-zx600 for on the go music (~40$).
Once again, a disclaimer: I'm a big music fan, I love listening to music, and I'm a bit crazy about the sound, but I still don't think I qualify as an Audiophile. I love a pure sound, and I want what I listen to, to be as close as possible as what the arranger probably wanted me to ear. So this whole review will be based on that principle.
Disclaimer #2: Because I don't have the pioneer devices with the balanced output headphone plug, I may not be able to use the headphones at their maximum quality.
The test I did wasn't scientific at all, I just played 5 songs, which are pretty different from each others, all repeated a lot with the different headsets, trying to pick up the sound difference, what make each of them sound better or worse.
The songs were:
- fripSide - Sister's Noise
- EGOIST - Fallen
- Kimino-Museum - ラストリモート
- Kimino-Museum - Last Paradise
- Kimino-Museum - Plotted tragedy
First thing, they sound a lot better than the Axent Wear sounded during that last review, so this time there's no real disappointment.
The AKG headphones, at double the price, still perform a lot better though.
The sound of the Pioneers is pretty bass heavy, just a bit heavier than the SONY ones, and this is something I failed to notice when I was at the event. The bass while being pretty loud doesn't hide other sounds too much, but it feels like the sound is a lot better on the low then than the high end of the spectrum.
During Fallen, some of the more subtle piano notes get lost a bit, hidden by the strong bass. Once again the sony strangely perform pretty bad on this song, so the Pioneer sounded better than the sony ones on this song.
The biggest problem I found with the sound of the Pioneer was with song with a lot of spacial sounds. And by this I mean songs with a lot of music sources (instruments, voices) coming from different directions in the song. With the AKG, you can pinpoint every instrument in your head, every voice, you can follow traveling sound, and you can easily concentrate on any instrument at any time and isolate it. That's where the Pioneers lost some points. Because while they aren't bad, they are not great at it either. Instruments can get lost behind the strong bass. The piano in Lost paradise was really hard to isolate with them. And high pitched sounds were a bit harder to notice compared to low sounds (like the hi-hat abuse that Tymizz does in any Kimino-museum song) sounds a bit disappointing.
So while they were better overall that the sony, the 100$ difference feels a bit hard to justify, because once again the sony did very good in all these tests. I'm still surprised at how good these 40$ headphones are...
If you're the kind of person who like bass, these headphones would be pretty good because the sound is actually good while still boosting bass.
For me they'll be a good second pair I guess, but the hunt for the AKG K-271 is not over yet.
Note: when i did my Axent Wear review 2 years ago, the Sony headphones were listed at 40$ somewhere, since I wrote that price down, but they are now listed at 90$ on amazon japan. So at this price point their quality makes more sense.
