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Yamaha YH-5000SE Flagship Headphone Review

Rate this headphone:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 214 93.4%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 13 5.7%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 2 0.9%

  • Total voters
    229
Yamaha fanboy here. With that said, to the Yamaha engineers.. I know how insular Japan can be as a culture. But this is a fuck up of severe magnitude. Absolute garbage product, be ashamed Yamaha, be ashamed.
 
5000$ for this or a Dan Clark E3 and a Audeze MM500 with some money leftover for nice Headphonestands and Cables.

I’m also a Yamaha Fanboy but oh boy …
 
Happy New Year from the people! Welcome to ASR.
Thank you! Happy new year to you too! I hope this year brings you even more faith to the ears of a 70 year old, non PHD electrical engineer.
And that you are not tempted by the devilish multi-PHD, hundreds of engineers specialized in acoustics at Yamaha!
 
Hi

In the moood to look for some reviews of this poor performing headphones..

From SoundStage Solo: Yamaha YH5000 Review
From Headfi, a mini Review

...

Both says it has bass... Lot of it. Sub-like bass...:rolleyes:

I guess, their reviews are based on Moh Expensive = Moh better

What a pile of B.S. Reviews and headphones

What were they thinking at Yamaha?

Peace
 
Hi

In the moood to look for some reviews of this poor performing headphones..

From SoundStage Solo: Yamaha YH5000 Review
From Headfi, a mini Review

...

Both says it has bass... Lot of it. Sub-like bass...:rolleyes:

I guess, their reviews are based on Moh Expensive = Moh better

What a pile of B.S. Reviews and headphones

What were they thinking at Yamaha?

Peace
Yeah, these damn Japanese are known for their low quality, non-researched products..Stax is even worse than the scammers at Yamaha!
 
Yeah, these damn Japanese are known for their low quality, non-researched products..Stax is even worse than the scammers at Yamaha!
Not really.. B.S. products come from any part of the world ... The list is too long to go into detail but It includes, the UK, The US, Romania, Poland, Korea, France, etc... The list is long... but one could say that the US may have the largest number of B.S. peddlers... UK could be second...


Peace.
 
Perhaps they just need burning-in:
 
Not really.. B.S. products come from any part of the world ... The list is too long to go into detail but It includes, the UK, The US, Romania, Poland, Korea, France, etc... The list is long... but one could say that the US may have the largest number of B.S. peddlers... UK could be second...


Peace.
I was being sarcastic lol..you actually believe Yamaha and Stax are scammers?:facepalm:
 
I was being sarcastic lol..you actually believe Yamaha and Stax are scammers?:facepalm:
Japanese multi PHDs were working on the 80 to 700hz response, marketing guys took over the rest. Also set the price.

1735699328170.png


Nice talking to you. Bye.
 
hahahhahah..you people crack me up

Well, better stated, they didn’t go for the low distortion target or even a smooth frequency response even if they chose not to follow the Harman target.

That said, people talk about subjective dynamics and spatial effects. That’s harder to see from these graphs and knowing what people say about tubes (and my own experience), some of the idiosyncrasies may be indeed by choice. It’s just not clear how predictable it will be preferred.


When I read this, it’s not as inspiring as I think Yamaha thought. They “learned” of something that was known from the 70’s which is less inspiring than a story about someone who knew about the vintage headphones and wanted the opportunity to remaster them.

It feels less inspiring to hear that the design team didn’t understand the old blueprints…

I am a big fan of Yamaha musical instruments and their CinemaDSP technology. I don’t have these headphones on my wish list though…
 
DCA is the only manufacturer that seems to get close to the Harman curve.

Real bosses are the cheap Chinese IEMs that seem to be able to get close to the IEM curve under $ 25.-

ASR does not have a 'Harman preference rating' bar graph but could if it were spewed out by an analyzer.:)
 
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I was being sarcastic lol..you actually believe Yamaha and Stax are scammers?:facepalm:
Nope…but every company seems to release a dud at some point, and well Yamaha seems to have outdone pretty much every other well-respected manufacturer in that department.

Believe me, I wanted to love this headphone. I love the way it looks and feels in the hand. The comfort is to die for and there was a hope that Yamaha could sweep me off my feet like some of their old planars did…but nope. Once I actually listened to a pair of these, I wanted to run for the hills. They sound awful!
This is a planar magnetic flagship that sounds like a Grado; rolled off subbass, massive peak in the uppermids and about the most unrefined treble I’ve ever listened to.
It’s unbearably shouty yet also has the hallmark of sounding cavernous at the same time. Yamaha should be ashamed of themselves. I’m not saying that because it doesn’t conform perfectly to the Harman target, no, I’m saying that because whatever tuning they went for, they didn’t succeed. If you want me to appreciate any new sonic presentation, you better make it convincingly smooth and refined…not consisting of peaks and troughs from the uppermids and upwards.
 
More context is here..

The part that is frustrating is that by the measurements, the original HP1 is better.
1735734964906.png


So maybe there is a challenge of modern production and the HP1 would need to be $10,000 in the present day approach. Or the lost R&D made it $5000 instead of $2000 if they didn’t have to go through 1000 iterations.

The other way to think about it is that these measurements can also be seen as a way to quantify what the YH-5100SE should upgrade over the YH-5000SE. How do they make it better? Work to smoothen the HF response without losing the perception of speed.

Everyone has different ears, and maybe like the Lexus or BMW front grille which is polarizing, the Yamaha sound is equally polarizing as well.

It’s an expensive and rare headphone but even going to popular Japanese review sites, you can see two versus five stars.

Compare that to:

Which at least has very low distortion.


Even looking at the other flagship from Yamaha, the NS-5000 which is voiced with a HF bump, looks like a speaker that has good measurements.

Post in thread 'Yamaha NS-5000'
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/yamaha-ns-5000.1118/post-1362966
 
but even going to popular Japanese review sites, you can see two versus five stars.
I see five people giving 5 stars and 2 people 2 stars for an average of 3.5. In any case, hardly representative.
That's not my point though. My point is that the "muh audio scientists" here, trust the entirely subjective opinion
of a 70 y.o. who can't hear past 8kHz probably, like it's the gospel.
Which is hilarious to me.
 
I see five people giving 5 stars and 2 people 2 stars for an average of 3.5. In any case, hardly representative.
That's not my point though. My point is that the "muh audio scientists" here, trust the entirely subjective opinion
of a 70 y.o. who can't hear past 8kHz probably, like it's the gospel.
Which is hilarious to me.

But that is exactly what the science predicts. When things follow the expected Harman curve, you would expect the vast majority of consumers to find the audio pleasant.

When an engineered product chooses to deviate from standard targets, it probably becomes polarizing. It may be a “6 star” product for some and a “2 star” product for others whereas the “measurement focused” product is probably a more solid 4 to 5 stars for everyone. For a company like Harman, they want to sell in volume. For a product like Yamaha, they can afford to have the majority of consumers hating their product since it’s really about the people who do love the product and making sure the ROI is there.

You are trying to find conflict when there really isn’t. It’s perfectly reasonable to trust your ears and the science and perfectly reasonable to find the sound from these headphones to be the “best-ever” despite the measurements not hitting the “most commonly preferred” targets.

Most popular car in the U.S. in most years is the Ford F150. I personally don’t want one. The science/factual based data is the total units sold. The science/factual data is 0-60 times, fuel economy, passenger space, towing capacity, etc. It’s a well engineered truck that is loved by the majority of new vehicle buying public in the U.S. It’s perfectly reasonable that I would prefer something that isn’t the most popular.
 
I see five people giving 5 stars and 2 people 2 stars for an average of 3.5. In any case, hardly representative.
That's not my point though. My point is that the "muh audio scientists" here, trust the entirely subjective opinion
of a 70 y.o. who can't hear past 8kHz probably, like it's the gospel.
Which is hilarious to me.
Which entirely subjective opinion? The listening tests are most definitely subjective but informed by the measurements of a very oddly tuned and very high distortion pair of headphones.

Do you have anything to actually add to the discussion? If not, move along please.
 
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