Headphone Heights

On the K501...

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This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

In Reply to: RE: Best headphones for classical music posted by Capt. Z on March 11, 2014 at 03:07:27

I used to own those headphones. They were my first serious pair of headphones. I eventually sold them off cheap, a few years before they became the collector's items that they are today. I guess I should have held on to them a little while longer?
To my ears, their strong points were clarity and openness and this is why they are most often touted as "jazz headphones". The slightly uptilted frequency response ("clarity") and wide soundstage ("openness") produced a clean and lean feeling that could be very flattering to many types of jazz recordings. They could also sound wonderful with female vocals - almost as good as the superb K1000s in this regard.
I never really felt that the K501s were outstanding headphones for classical music mostly because very deep, rumbling bass lines do exist in symphonic music. The K501s were simply too limited in the deep bass department, IMO.
Also, to my ears, the K501s had other serious flaws which made them too limited in their ability to portray music. They were a bit too "lean" sounding, and they also had problems when it came to creating a seamless and coherent sonic picture: Certain types of upper-frequency sounds would seem to "pop" out from the rest of the mix and these high-frequency discontinuities always seemed to bubble forth like tiny volcanoes from a single point inside the upper-front portion of the huge round earcups.
Nowadays, I like to think of my K701s as my newer, better "jazz headphones". The two headphones share a number of similarities but improvements over the K501 include a bigger, more seamless sound and slightly better bass - both of which help to make the K701 the more versatile pair of headphones. But it is true that the K501s had a special "crystalline" sonic quality that the K701s could never really replicate.
Some people claim that there are noticeable sonic differences between the "early" and "late" editions of K501 (early = better) but I was never able to tell the two apart.

Edits: 03/11/14

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