Sennheiser HD424

I looked for a post on these cans and didn’t see one. So figured I would share some thoughts.


Bought these on a whim on eBay after I read something about them online. I immediately recognized them as the headphones my grandfather had growing up. Loved them back then. Those yellow pads!

They came without pads, these were easy to get online and I believe they are authentic. The cable was the original cable, which sounded totally crap. Lucky me, they use the same cable as my HD650, so I grabbed an extra cable from those and viola. Ready to jam.

First up, these are amazingly comfortable. I think they win for most comfy headphones I’ve ever worn. The pads are the slightest bit scratchy, but I think that will get better over time. They are so light and don’t clamp at all. They really just don’t feel like anything. It’s great. Mostly I’m using LCD2 or ZMF Auteur (in blackwood) so anything vaguely light is so refreshing.

Onto the sound. The sound is very good. Is it up there with modern TOTL headphones? No. But it is still very good and very enjoyable. Great separation and imaging. Soundstage is decent but not great. Definitely has all the benefits of open cans. To my ears they sound very “natural.” Great mids, decent treble extension. They’re really missing on the low end, but what is there sounds pretty good.

The most descriptive words that come to mind are “clear” and “fun”

They require a decent amount of power to get jamming, but they’ve sounded pretty great with all the pairings I tried.

Amps used:

Mjolnir 2 (balanced): this was a very good combo. The mjolnir has the juice to get these rocking.

Woo WA2: this amp is just great with high impedance phones (these are 2000 ohms). Another good pairing. With the tubes I have in there now I got a lil more bass and lots of nice spacing and separation. Very nice.

Headphone out on my Mcintosh C29: love this combo just Bc it is so period correct! But also sounded great. The MC puts out a good amount of power from it headout and sounded great. Very meaty, gave the 424s some chutzpah they lack with a lot of amps.

Asgard 2: the Asgard is lil underpowered for these, but this is actually the pairing I settled on. Primarily because of convenience, where it’s setup in house etc. I could do for more head room, but the class A power sounds nice with these.

I’m still not good at writing about this stuff. Did my best.

I hope some better writers here have these and chime in.

Bottom line: for $75 this things are pretty great. Very comfortable. Sound good. I’ve been listening to Zepplin on them all morning. Pretending it’s the ‘70s. Fun stuff.

Next project: build a custom cable to wire these directly to my MC225, which was apparently the cool thing to do back in the day.

 

Pictures!

 

I built myself a little adapter to connect these to my speaker taps on my Yamaha A-S3000.

Wow!

These things sound SO. AWESOME.

I think the key really just giving them enough juice. The soundstage is huge and the stereo imaging is phenomenal. Instrument separation is great as well.

The bass still does not dig super deep, but the quality is much better with proper amplification.

Like they say, no replacement for displacement.

I’m currently building a Pass ACA amp from DIYaudio to use a dedicated head amp for these. 8 watts of Nelson Pass designed class A power should be fun!

 

Any further impressions here, two years on? Comparisons to other benchmarks -- HD650, LCD2C, Grado RS2, etc -- would be particularly welcome.

I ask because I just spotted a pair on my local craigslist ...