PaulieDC
Too much gear, not enough composing. Oy vey.
For over half a year I have been preparing to spend the cash on the NDH 30s, and when they announced the black edition recently, I was even more sold. Afterall, the marketing says they are the best in class, right? Your review is phenomenal, I found it recently, and it solidified my devotion to getting the NDH 30s especially to go with my Neumann 2.1 KH80/750 monitors. And, glad to know you're on VI-C as well! I just sold my HD650s on eBay and added that to Christmas Amazon gift cards, and I was just ready to purchase. And I DID just that 3 days ago:Great review. I mostly agree with your observations. It is definitively one of the better cans for work/analytical/critical listening. One thing I would add though, is that in my experience it's not just the "position of the earcup in relation to the ear" that wildly affects the frequency response but also the head size/width. With wider/bigger heads obviously there is more clamping force. That's completely normal, but as a result of this, the NDH 30’s padding squashes more than eg. the padding of the DT880, DT1990, HD650 or HD800. In the case of the NDH30 this "earpad compression" creates unusually big frequency response deviations, way bigger than how big deviations I heard on the above mentioned other cans.
I talk about this issue in detail in my pretty lengthy review I posted on GearSlutz a good year ago. It is an NDH30 vs Sennheiser HD800 (and DT880, HD650, DT1990) direct comparison. If anyone is interested, here is the link:
https://gearspace.com/board/showpost.php?p=16257434&postcount=324
I bought DT 1990s.
There are a BUNCH of reasons why I jumped ship last minute, I am totally happy, and now that @Pier did this excellent review (which ALMOST made me think again) for the NDH 30 team, and your review is perfect for the HD800 team, I will get some thoughts together on the DT 1990s, to coincide with these two excellent reviews, because I know there are some out there loving on the 1990s and wondering what the deal really is (much you covered but I have some 1990 tests to add).
I'll say this: if I was forced to plunk down about $600 and was told at gunpoint to flip a coin for 1990s or NDH 30s, it'd be win-win because I'd be perfectly happy with either. Given that, I want to expound a bit more on the 1990s. More to come.