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IFA 2005: Introduction - AKG - Beyerdynamic - Sennheiser - van den Hul
German public radio

My first visit was at the Sennheiser booth which was easy to find from the entrance I used. They seemed to have at least 30 people working at their show presentation.

Besides their headphones they used a dozen or so I-Pods as their major audio sources. The separately built High End cabin looked differently more like an aquarium from the outside at first sight.

The cabin itself had an open top. I was told that otherwise air condition and fire prevention would have caused a tremendous effort. Inside they had a setup with a DVD player with a Norah Jones live performance playing a surround amplifier by T&A, a nice Flatscreen and Klein & Hummel (K&H) surround speakers. As you might know Sennheiser aquired K&H a well known studio monitor manufacturer to widen their portfolio as far as the studio installtion market is concerned. During the time I was there the speakers remained silent for different reasons. One of the reasons was of course that people wanted to listen to headphones inside the cabin and not to speakers. The other reason... more on that later.

There were the three dynamic headphones (HD595, HD600 ad HD650) each powered by a Black Cube Linear. Guenter Hitz from Sennheiser demonstrated that you could easily find your favorite pair of dynamic headphones. In fact all three of them are rather similar technically but differ in some details. So it's up to the listener's tastes or needs which model to choose.

Sennheiser also had an Orpheus in the High End cabin with two headphones connected. This was a pleasure for ears and eyes. Guenter Hitz explained that Sennheiser is not allowed to produce these products because they promised the strict limitation to a production number of 300 units worldwide to their original customers. As a consequence the complete Orpheus setups are most wanted (and paid for) on the used market. During the time I was there one Sennheiser customer showed up and told that he bought two Orpheus when they were new just to have a backup in case his main unit needed service... Lucky man!

Of course Sennheiser presented a number of new headphones which had not been on display before as they told me. Among them were the PMX100 and the PMX200 which can both be seen in the lower left corner of the picture. I have seen the current models PX100 and PX200 being on display in white.

There were also a number of other headphones for those who don't want to spend the money for the high end headphones. Pictures below are self explanatory.

Now the other reason why the speakers remained silent was the DJ setup. From time to time there was a DJ (DJ Lodown) performing on a special stage. In front of that stage there were all the Sennheiser DJ headphone models hanging allowing people to directly listen to the mix and compare the sound. Nice idea. Well, inside the High End cabin and at the rest of the booth you could hardly listen to headphones during that time not to speak of speakers. He was performing very professional at least...