sennheiser cx 300 review

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Picture courtesy of Gaffer74.

Average Ratings

Sound Quality	8/10
Comfort Level	7.9/10
Value for Money	8.5/10
Reviewer Rating	8.1/10
Overall Rating	8.6/10

79% Recommended11 out of 14 Reviews

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By martinus on 6th Jan 2007

martinus's Ratings

Time Headphones Owned	Between 1 - 4 Weeks
Sound Quality	8/10
Comfort Level	7/10
Value for money	9/10
Overall value	8/10
martinus's recommendation

Good Points

Musical, revealing.

Bad Points

Mechanical noise 'transmitted' by wires. Dome needs damping.

General Comments

Like all in-ear phones the CX300s are flawed but these are easily the best I have heard. When I first got them, I sat down to listen to the headphones and soon realised I was listening to the music instead - praise indeed! Within their obvious limitations, they provide a genuinely musical experience and are revealing enough to easily differentiate between a bass guitar and a bass drum or a flute and a clarinet etc etc. They enable you to pick out separate voices in a group of singers without difficulty. The downside of this is that they also reveal any tape noise with great clarity but I don't think it fair to blame that on Sennheiser. They also show up the shortcomings of the MP3 format prompting me to change all my PMP recordings to FLAC format which has in turn shown me that my iAudio X5 is a much better player that I thought it was. Thanks Sennheiser.

Although I am very satisfied with the sound, they are not perfect. Certain atmospheric recordings seem to elude the CX300s. For example, if you listen to Paul Simon's 'Homeless' (Gracelands), it should sound as if it was recorded in a church or similar room. Although you can hear a certain spaciousness on the CX300s you certainly can not form a mental picture of the room and the decay of the sounds is nothing like as clear as it can be. This is perhaps a bit unfair as my Hi Fi system did cost about two hundred times more than I paid for the CX300s.

Sennheiser provide three different size rubber surrounds and it is crucial that you select the right ones. I started with 'medium' and found the sound excellent but they sealed my ear canal so well that I was also hearing mechanical contact noises such as the wire brushing against my cheek. I could also hear myself breathing, rather more that I wanted to. Changing to the smaller rubber surrounds stopped the spurious noises fairly effectively by providing a bit of leakage but the sound quality simply collapsed. The bass had completely disappeared and other things sounded distorted as well. I changed back to the 'medium' surrounds and have continued happily with those ever since.

A few things could be improved, probably very cheaply, by Sennheiser. The leads are fairly stiff and transmit 'mechanical' noise along the wire to the ear-piece. The slightest tap on the wire or brushing it against my clothes or stubble can be heard clearly which certainly interferes with my listening pleasure. I presume a softer wire would cure this (Winter now - may be better in warm weather). Another slightly disappointing finding was that they sound noticeably better if you press, just lightly, in on the ear-pieces. I presume this is stopping the plastic dome resonating; so maybe a bit of sealant inside would help.

Comfort is fairly good. If I could live with the degraded performance of using the small rubber surrounds I would have said it was excellent (It has always puzzled me why someone doesn't make ear-pieces like they used to. I have a Sony in-ear Mono ear-piece that came with a pocket radio around 1975 and I can wear that for hours in complete comfort).

With the few reservations mentioned I would heartily recommend the CX300s for travelling convenience but if I needed to listen to head-phones at home or work then I would choose something that does not fit in my ear and does not make a noise when I move my head.

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