Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 32 ohm Limited Edition headphone review

Excellent review as always. I considered these and now feel I should have tested them. Are they your current beau Dale?

Perhaps you want to send to me for a 'test' in the UK?

Ha! That's good to see the interest. There are certain patterns I see in the Beyer product line, and I'm always impressed that they get the midrange right, right down to the £80 level or whatever their little DTX501p sells for. This DT770 LE isn't my ideal kind of headphone, which I prefer to be usable as a portable, meaning passable sound quality with iphone plus the physical things. This DT770 is strictly desktop stuff at the moment, but the sound seems to me to be closer to hi-fi than the Senn Momentum or (gasp!) v-moda M100 I've been enjoying for a few weeks. So I'm rediscovering some classics that I didn't get to with the other headphones. Who knows how long this will last?

How can you have any consistency in your reviews when you add EQ ?

It's a fair question. There are several ways to define consistency here. One is to play consistently without EQ, so that the sound is all over the place, little or none of which is pleasant to me, and (because of my descriptions and ratings) little or none of which would be interesting to my readers.

With judicious use of EQ (after describing the un-EQ'd sound of course), I can then report the underlying capability of the headphone with the biggest coloration suppressed, which is now interesting to me, and judging by the comments I get on some sites (especially youtube), also of interest to my readers. In fact, I've gotten a number of compliments on my consistency at youtube.

I don't know what the best answer is to post here - it's a complicated issue - but I know what I see and what I like, and I'm communicating that honestly to readers, which a lot of reviewers are not doing. If you want a classic example of twisting words until they have no meaning, read the B&W P3 review at headfonia.

Hey you managed to get your hands on these! It seems like you enjoyed them

Great review btw, although I haven't managed to see the video yet. Your comment about being careful if you are sensitive to high frequencies or sibilance I would have thought myself too, but my wife is extremely falls into that category and she liked this beyerdynamic. She usually complains about headphone sibilance when I am quite OK with it, but she liked the DT770 LE so much that she has stolen them and claimed them as her own.

I also found that the DT770 LE pairs very well with the Arcam rPAC and Audiolab M-DAC. 

I will be writing a full review of these headphones pretty soon as well.

Dael, I did test the DT770 80 Ohm version, loved the sound but there wasa distinct lack of volume. Has this been addressed with the 32 Ohm version?

Thank you.

I dialed that 6 db EQ at 7 khz back to 4 db, and 2 db at 5 and 10 khz to go with it (no adjustments besides those 3). But there are many graphs in the field that show a whopping peak for the 770 (including the LE 32), at Golden Ears for exanple. It's that very thing that kept me away from the T90, T70 etc.

The 32 does play with decent volume on an ipod oddly enough, and most tracks play with good volume on my Dragonfly and Audioengine D1, but some of the lower volume tracks I have (96k FLAC and WAV) are just not quite there on those mini-DACs. So it's about 5 db less efficient than a Senn Momentum, for instance. In Foobar I can set the volume up on some tracks, not others. It's a puzzle to me.

So many thoughts on this .... this DT770LE is much better than you-know-what. In fact, this is the first bass-heavy headphone I've heard that didn't need any bass treatment when played on my little DACs. I noted a change to my extreme treble reduction: -4 db did the job better with most tracks, although many of my symphonic recordings sound better with no EQ at all. It's probably one of the better deals out there. I'm also surprised that Beyer managed to get such detail into a non-Tesla headphone.

As I would be using indoors on a PC based system, via an Arcam rPac, would this present a problem? Thanks Dale.

It has 138 mw output at what ohms I don't know, but it's a good bet being USB-powered it would play as loud as the D1 or Dragonfly, and I got excellent volume with full bass support on my mini-DACs (excepting a couple of very low volume tracks).

Thanks chaps. Interestingly the DT770 80 Ohm version through the rPac reached the volume limit very quickly. I bought that model specifically over the 250 Ohm version too, for that reason.

OneBoxSystem wrote:

Thanks chaps. Interestingly the DT770 80 Ohm version through the rPac reached the volume limit very quickly. I bought that model specifically over the 250 Ohm version too, for that reason.

My understanding is Beyer did more than reduce the impedance. There may be some controversy about that, or even about whether all AE-32 versions are alike, but I don't know anything more about that - just something to look into.

Here's a spot of good news for those who took the 32 ohm and portable music player notion seriously. I was initially very disappointed by the DT770-32LE's performance (i.e. sound) with iPod and iPhone, since the bass was too boomy and highs too crispy. Using Foobar2000 on the computer with the Audioengine D1 mini-DAC and a 4 db treble reduction centered at 7 khz, the sound there was ideal. Now I find that the Apple i-device 'Piano' EQ setting matches the desktop signature very closely, and that setting carries through to the usual analog headphone amps. Looking at the shape of that EQ setting in desktop iTunes, I can't imagine how it works the way it does with the DT770-32LE and iPods, but I do know that the actual sound of certain named settings in desktop iTunes doesn't even come close to the sound of the same named settings on the i-devices. So while the 'Piano' EQ setting on desktop iTunes is irrelevant here, that setting on iPod or iPhone does the trick.