18 February 2009
Launching a flagship product is always GREAT fun. Here at Sennheiser, every launch is met with child-like excitement, but few have exceeded the overall anticipation of the HD 800 spectacle that took place in early 2009 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada in the USA.
Publicly unveiled for the first time at CES, the HD 800 delivered a response that we are actually proud to say has a lot of “buzz”. To further play on the term “frequency response” (in the scientific sense, the total measured tonal bandwidth of a headphone speaker system), the public and press response of the HD 800 announcement has indeed been quite frequent. Thanks to the rapid delivery of internet content, news of the HD 800 spread through the hi-fi community in just moments, taking the launch from the middle of the Nevada desert to every continent of the globe. A defacto source for headphone news, Head-Fi broke the official story with first impressions, pictures and up-to-the-minute input from the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The flurry of continuous coverage from trusted media outlets like Stereophile and Home Theater Magazine, CNET.com, Sound & Vision validates what Head-Fi found out in the Sennheiser CES listening booth: that the HD 800 is not only a new headphone, but a groundbreaking achievement in acoustics.
The results?
A response so overwhelmingly positive that in a matter of days, the HD 800 first impressions thread on Head-Fi became the 5th most popular thread (and counting) in all of Head-Fi history. In fact, just hours before this writing, the aforementioned thread was the 4th most popular of all-time at Head-Fi.
A viral effect so potent and contagious that Head-Fi founder Jude Mansilla’s Flikr account (the first to show public pictures of the HD 800) expanded from about 60 views per day to over 30,000 per day during the launch.
A response so wide (just like the HD 800’s ring shaped transducer) that “occasional” hi-fi enthusiasts have visited the above blogs and forums with great “frequency”, even in remote areas of the world.
Now, when we speak of the HD 800’s frequency response (an astounding 6 Hz to 51,000 Hz) we must consider the truth behind the numbers; the incredible audible coverage of this acoustical masterpiece resounds in the community it serves far beyond what was ever expected out of a headphone.
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- Audio Connoisseur
- About this blog
- Lossless Audio & Digital Audio Formats
- The many flavors of wireless are all delicious
Tags: 6 Hz to 51000 Hz | acoustics | bandwidth | CES | Consumer Electronics Show | Frequency | Frequency Response | groundbreaking | HD 600 | HD 650 | HD 800 | Head-Fi | Hi-Fi | hi-fi enthusiasts | ring shaped transducer
Is this a Sennheiser employee secret online hideout that I found? Am I even allowed in here?
Nice post, Eric.
Yes, whether the HD 800 was awesome or a dud, it was bound to be the biggest story so far in the history of Head-Fi.org, as the community has been waiting for a bona fide successor and upgrade to the HD 580/600/650 for several years now. (Thankfully, the HD 800 is, in fact, awesome.) Frankly, the level of response in the community, as a result of the pent up excitement for such a headphone, isn’t surprising to me at all.
Though I know of no headphones coming down the pike likely to make as much of a splash in the Head-Fi.org community as the HD 800 has, it seems there are some other headphone manufacturers now interested in similar launch activity (first announcing on Head-Fi.org) for some future products, based on how things went with the HD 800 announcement there. Yes, I am obviously biased, but I can’t think of a better place to launch a higher-end headphone online than Head-Fi.org.
I agree that the HD 800 is very good indeed.