Annoying distortion with Beyerdynamic Amiron Home only on Interstellar soundtrack

[oalmali]

Hello hive mind,

I would like to tell you about my love&hate relationship with my one week old Beyerdynamic Amiron Home. It sounds really nice! I love to listen vocals, acoustics, pop, rock and anything that I have used to listen before and I am able to hear some details that I was not aware that exists. It was all great.

Until! Until I listen Hans Zimmer's Mountains from Interstellar Soundtrack. The song that I love, that inspires me that makes me happy and productive and etc. turned into a nightmare. It's like having your favorite meal and suddenly right in the middle seeing a giant dead bug . Forgive me for that unnecessary analogy but I've had to express my frustration.

So the actual problem is that there is this distortion, choppy sound or maybe even clipping? It exactly happens between 3:15 and 3:17 and also couple more times before than that I think. I used to listen with my modest Fiio E10k and yes I know it's not powerful enough for 250 ohm headphones and that is why today I received my JDS Labs Atom (thanks to this forum and still happy for that ) and used Fiio only as dac and voila problem still remains. It's audible when you listen them loud, can not measure the actual db but starts when Atom's volume is turned on more than half way, on low gain.

You will laugh at me because before I buy these headphones I went to Heilbronn Beyerdynamics HQ and listened some of my favorite songs except Mountains and only listened it when I got them from Amazon. I tried to reproduce it with different sort of headphones but I only have closed back ones and could not reproduce.

Can someone with another open back headphone maybe try this and tell me if same thing also happens to them? Or should I just return these because they are faulty? But is not it strange that this is the only song that I experience such thing? Sorry for the length of the post but really frustrated about it.

 

[suttondesign]

The guy at DIY measured high distortion from those cans beginning at 4.5khz. I used to have T1's that had high distortion at about 1.5-2k and would audibly break up with some choral music. May be a design flaw.

 

[WLVCA]

I purchased the Amiron Home and did not like the sound quality at all and returned them. I don't recall hearing distortion but to me the sound was very muffled and flat.

I bought the Beyerdynamic DT1990 to replace them and have been very pleased with the 1990.

Of course, YMMV. I should note that is my subjective opinion.

 

[Silou]

I will give it a try with my Amirons tomorrow. I do not really like them without Frans passive filter or any equalizer though.

Edit: I can not hear anything special at 3.15-3.17.

 

[MC_RME]

Start some analyzer to check if the 'distortion' is caused by very low frequency sound/signal. It would be intermodulation distortion then. And it should go away when reducing volume or applying a high pass filter.

 

[oalmali]

Thanks everyone for your replies so far.

Today I wanted to dig even deeper and also tried to analyze the song with Sonic Visualizer it seems like there are peaks with very low frequencies. To tackle that I've installed eq2mac and that rattling sound seems to be almost gone. EQ looks like:

I was also able to compare it to Sennheiser 660s's and able to hear similar rattling sound but it was less than the Amiron. However, overall Amiron sounded better to me, more open a bit clearer and everything sounded a bit more separated.

So next thing to do will be going to Beyerdynamic HQ on Monday and making sure that I have a normal copy. I also again want to compare it to 1990's. When I first listened them they sounded more dull and flat compared to Amiron but maybe that was because they had the analytical pads on them.

 

[Silou]

You could try oratory1990s EQ settings.