Depending on who you talk to, Sony is either a good or bad headphone company. Their most popular headphone is the V6 and the variations of it but aside from that, most of their offerings I would say are tuned for the typical music listener’s ears and not really for audiophiles (i.e. lots of ‘oomph’ on the sound signature). However, not a lot of people realize that Sony made some expensive headphones as well with the MDR R10 and even Sony Qualia which both cost well over $1000. Both headphones have been discontinued since.
Then there’s the Sony MDR-1R line.
Sony Philippines was nice enough to promise us a loan of the Sony MDR-1R and while it’s not in our hands yet, I can’t help but become excited with it as we saw how people praise this headphone. For the meantime, here are some pictures fetched from the internet:
Sony MDR-1R is being marketed to the headphone enthusiasts market as a premium portable headphone. It costs $300 and the price currently fluctuates a bit around that figure online.
MDR stands for “music deserves respect” and to most people it seems these cans have done a decent job to merit that description. There’s a good competition though for this type of headphone as there are a lot of competitive portable headphones on the same price range. The competition includes the following headphones:
- Audio-Technica ATH-M50
- Sennheiser Momentum/Momentum on-ear
- Beyerdynamic DT 1350
- V-Moda M80
- Sennheiser Amperior/HD 25 1-II
- Shure SRH 840
- NAD Viso HP 50
Among those list, only the Sennheiser Momentum over-ear is the more expensive headphone based on the current street price and I would say they’re pretty tough to beat even at that price range. Old timers such as the Audio-Technica M50, Shure 840, V-Moda M80 are the cheapest while the DT1350 and Amperior have the biggest drop off in price relative to their MSRP’s. And finally the new NAD Viso HP50 is also getting praise from the community.
So where does the MDR-1R stack against those headphones mentioned? Obviously we cannot subjectively answer that right now as we haven’t heard the Sony cans on an extended period of time but I have a good feeling that they would fair well against those headphones mentioned.
Sorry to keep you hanging but that’s it for now. We’ll do an unboxing and a review as soon as possible once we get our hands on it. But until then, we can’t really speak that much about the sonic characteristics of the headphone. :p