Sennheiser IE8 Earphones

MP3 Testing

Track 1 – Pop/Rock: Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know from Hopes and Fears

Keane’s first album featured a very stripped back sound with a limited number of instruments in use throughout. This track makes use of piano, synthesiser, bass guitar, drums/percussion and vocals. Our 320Kbps rip was taken directly from the original CD release.

As stated earlier we found a slight increase in bass setting was desirable on the IE8 but for this track we had to revert to the minimum setting as it was a little overpowering in the early stages of the song.  It is therefore advisable to take the tweaking tool when on the move to ensure the earpieces can be fine tuned as required.

Overall the quality of the audio on this song was good with the vocals once again proving to be a high point. The bass was a little muddy however, even when fine tuned, and this detracted from the overall enjoyment of the track as the lack of instruments made it more noticeable. We were also very aware of the sound being flat and lifeless once again. It also seems that the IE8 were showing up the limitations of the source material in the closing stages of the song as the reproduction of the piano sound was a little disappointing, especially in the high end.

Track 2 – Electronic: Moby’s Porcelain from the album Play

Porcelain features piano string samples, a strong bass line and sporadic vocals. Once again our 320Kbps rip was taken from the original CD album and converted to MP3 by CD-DA Extractor.

As the song begins the synth sound is reproduced well by these earphones but as the drum track enters it lacks a little definition in the lower end. The bass when it enters is very deep but lacks clarity and the piano has a sombre tone which is rather surprising after previous plays with other partnering equipment do not show the same characteristics. The backing vocal at 1.00 onwards is very clear and at 2.10 the female vocal sounds excellent. As the song progresses there is nothing much to fault or praise about the overall sound, other than to say it feels a little flat again.