Mixdown’s Picks: Sennheiser HD 300 Pro Headphones
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Mixdown’s Picks: Sennheiser HD 300 Pro Headphones

Today, we kick off proceedings with one of the staples of the modern recording climate and in many ways, a product group that has a much bigger influence on production quality than most probably realise – the humble studio headphone.

 

Sennheiser HD 300 Pro Closed Back Headphones

Distributed by: Sennheiser Australia | Expect to pay: $369

 

Key Features: An incredibly practical headphone for the modern studio, the Sennheiser HD 300 Pro marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for the beloved German Audio Haus. Building on the brand’s already stellar legacy, the HD 300 Pro offers the same high quality, incredibly detailed reproduction as one has come to expect from the HD series, but with some radical, new design features, destined to catapult the relatively affordable cans to the very top tier of studio performance. 

 

Adding an additional +10dB at the output stage (for a max SPL of 163db @ 1 Khz!), the HD 300 Pro headphones are positioned as some of the loudest on the market, perfect for live in-room tracking or for making real time microphone adjustments in noisy environments. This extra headroom also bears the added advantage of extracting some very impressive low-end out of its 38mm drivers, which along with their incredibly low distortion properties (0.1% @ 100dB), combine to make the HD 300 Pro a balanced and trustworthy choice for minor mix decisions, or as a reference headphone for tweaking sounds on the fly.

 

Their circumaural design provides a tight seal over the ear, translating to 32dB of passive noise cancellation and in turn, giving the HD 300 Pro with some of the best isolation properties of any headphone in its class, decoupling monitored source from outside noise and keeping headphone spill to an absolute minimum. It’s for this reason that the HD 300 Pro is such a natural fit for the drum room or vocal booth (or any application where a performer is situated in close proximity to a live condenser mic).

 

Mixdown Says: One of the best tracking headphones out there, the massive output and incredible noise cancellation properties found on the Sennheiser HD 300 make them a perfect workhorse for the current recording climate. 

 

Their ability to always have a little more left in the tank-volume wise, as well as their impressive isolation properties make the HD 300 Pro an absolute no-brainer for engineers lacking a dedicated control room or for anybody involved in live tracking or field recording of any kind.

 

This tendency for high output also makes the HD 300 Pro’s particularly adept at dealing with the kind of underpowered headphone outs often found on consumer level interfaces and practice amps – a characteristic that is sure to pay dividends among the army of bedroom producers and budding musicians getting around at the present.

 

Overall: For those familiar with the ‘Sennheiser Sound’ these cans will provide a very translatable mix experience, with their newly enhanced low end capabilities and genuinely high output allowing for all kinds of fletcher-munson cross-examination.

 

Get in touch with Sennheiser to find out more today.

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