So I originally had some Sony XM3's I got for work due to the machines being exceedingly noisy. Not needing ear protection, not really, but close, so I bought those and used them for over a year, the ANC was great. The sound was definitely too bassy. Comfort was excellent. Eventually I started having issues with the 3.5mm connection, and without bothering to understand it was my cable gone bad, I went into looking for something new.
I've always been a Sennheiser headphone guy, since I got the Sennheiser PC350's in 2010. For a gaming headset, it was excellent, I even used Hero's Mod, for anyone who knows what that is. Eventually I purchased a pair of dedicated HD598SE when I saw an excellent sale. They were great for the uses I have for headphones. Comfort was kind of awkward honestly, but the sound was so good you just don't really care.
So naturally I thought to see if there were any ANC Headphones for Sennheiser, I had naturally went Sony due to both price and a lot of people at work having them. I saw the Momentum 3's and saw a decent discount(at the time, though still more expensive than the XM series).
They took abit of getting used to. Clamping force was harsh, and yet would also slide along the top of my head when I bent down to pick something up. I mainly used them for listening to music near the machines or gaming on my laptop / handheld device while on break.
For some reason USB-C was never really useable with the M3s. There were two separate volumes, the headphone volume and the desktop volume, and moving one, moved both, despite being at different levels, it was very difficult to find an appropriate volume level and they usually ended up sounding weirdly robotic this way. Fuzzy. 3.5mm worked fine, which my laptop had, two separate volumes but I could operate them independently thankfully, so I could settle on a sweet spot. Wirelessly to my phone or Steam Deck was great, because they supported AptX-LL.
The ANC waas a noticeable step down from Sony's though, and while a little frustrating, they sounded a lot better overall.
I looked into the M4's eventually but didn't seem like a worthy upgrade, so I was gonna hold out for the M5's and hopefully some of my nitpicks would be fixed.
Enter the HBD 630s, randomly mentioned in the #audio channel of one of my Discords. I start watching videos and looking them up almost immediately. The price is high but I have been working a lot of hours and wanted something new. I'd heard HD6xx series thrown a lot in terms of audio quality, and was interested. So with only a few days of flip-flopping, I bought a pair. They arrived last Friday.
They felt premium, and a hard case was a nice change over the soft case of the M3's. The included Dongle was a good plus as well, though my phone supports AptX Adaptive and other such codecs. I may find a use for it some day. I guess on my Steam Deck, since AptX-LL support is gone from the 630s, sadly. Doesn't work on the Switch 2 as far as I could see.
As for the sound, fantastic. They do remind me of the HD600s, which I also own and love, except with more bass and obviously not as wide a a soundstage due to being closed back. For ANC headphones on the go? That's incredible. The ANC is better than the M3s by a decent amount, but I'd say the XM3's might even still be better in that regard. A trade-off for incredible wireless sound quality.
Of note, the USB-C connection works pretty great on my laptop, though it's weird how I only need the volume exceedingly low to get ear-splitting levels, like 20-25% to get near to the level you can cause hearing damage, making my question what the hell the other 75% is for. But it's very useable this way and you get 24/96khz, so not bad.
Sadly the 3.5mm connection is completely useless, I have no idea what they did, but when connecting it to my laptop, everything sounds like it's using SBC Bluetooth or something, it just sounds incredibly artificial. I am annoyed at this, given the price of the headphones...but it's honestly a minor gripe. I wonder why even bother including it, when every review I've also seen mentions it sounding bad?
Overall, I am pretty happy, low clamping force, great ANC, amazing sound, and awesome battery life. Comfortable out of the box, unlike many headphones. As for the price, 499$ is steep. I got a slight discount, but even so, I imagine in 2-3 years when these are 300-350$ range, they will see an exceedingly high boost in sales. I have the money to spare though.
A very worthwhile upgrade over the M3's, I would say their soundstage seems weirdly smaller though. I highly recommend if you got the money.
headfonics.com
Was written "in stock" in my search feeds, but yeah, it is only available for preorder. Fnac says they have it in two days. HCS, plan stocks for November 25. But on the other hand, even Sennheiser store announce "within two weeks".
