Sennheiser HD 480 Pro review

As it says on the tin, these are Sennheiser ‘Pro’ headphones, which means they come from the part of Sennheiser which is still fully Sennheiser, designed in Wedemark, Germany, by Sennheiser’s pro-gear people, then hand-assembled in the company’s extensive manufacturing facilities in Romania.

The HD 480 Pros are, therefore, much differentiated from the consumer Sennheiser brand licensed (though currently up for divestment) by Swiss medical company Sonova, which manufactures its consumer lines like Momentum and Accentum noise-cancellers over in Ireland.

In pro circles, as in consumerland, Sennheiser is a respected brand regarded as providing both quality and reliability. And we often comment that there are bargains to be found in professional headphone ranges, as these haven’t faced quite the surge of raging competition that has marked the last couple of decades of consumer headphones. Not all the HD Pro headphones are priced like these 480s: the HD 280 Pro headphones, say, can be found for as little as £83 / $100 / AU$139. The HD 380 Pros are no longer available, but will be familiar workhorses to many; we use a pair as regular headgear for studio and radio work.

Now here’s the new HD 480 Pro, with quite the price differential from the workaday lower cans, but then these, along with the open-back HD 490 Pro, reside at the very top of the 400 series of purpose-built professional audio headphones. They are priced on Sennheiser's own international sites at £339 / $399 / AU$739, but we have already seen the Australian price significantly discounted.

However, we were supplied the slightly-superior HD 480 Pro ‘Plus’ version, raising the price to £369 / $439 / $819, although the ‘Plus’ bonus is entirely an upgrade from a mere carry bag to a hard travel case like the ones you’d get with upmarket noise-cancelling headphones; there is no change to the headphones themselves for the additional Plus pricing.

Design & facilities

As with the hard case of the Plus version, the exterior design of these closed-back cabled headphones veers towards a consumer look: plain oval headshell and pivoting yokes, rather like those used with increasing monotony in recent years on Sonova’s consumer headphones. Previous Pro models were different: the HD 380 Pro had a yoke design which cut right into the shell, while the yokes and cables on the HD 280 Pros almost entirely obscure the shell, stuck to the outer surface like face-huggers.

Here the oval shell is more like that of the Momentums – free, although significantly larger in size, and not flat-backed but interestingly concave, the smooth surface unadorned other than some almost-invisible writing in black on black, like Disaster Area’s spaceship in Hitchhikers’ Guide, reading ‘HD 480 Pro Professional Studio Headphones’ (image below).

The headband extension system is entirely different to consumer cans however, employing a wide flat steel slider with nicely firm ratchets to keep it at your preferred length on either side. The earcups are velour, for our money better than pleathers and their ilk for hot and heavy use, as well as being very comfortable, and easily replaced. And they include a Sennheiser-patented feature for fit, known as Special Axes Geometry, where the mechanical design is supposed to adapt to any shape of head, maintaining equal and comfortable contact pressure.

Their overall weight will certainly seem remarkably low to anyone used to carrying electronics in their earshells: despite being larger than Momentums they are lighter: 274g on our scale versus 295g for the Momentum 4s (Momentum 5 specs say 290g). You can feel a little added weight from the hanging cable, of course, which here connects via a mini-XLR 4-pin plug to a socket on the left headshell. But there’s a little rubber seal over a socket on the right headshell, which you can switch to the left, should you prefer right-sided cable entry. Super handy.

The cable is long and curly, and at the plugging-in end it has a minijack plug and 6.5mm (quarter-inch) adaptor. A coily cable structure can claim to block cable-borne noise for the wearer, but some studio technicians hate coily cables, because they hang down and make audible tapping noises hitting things as musicians nod their heads! Happily optional non-curly cables are available in 1.8m and 3m lengths. A cable for balanced 4.4mm sockets is also available.

As for the interiors, the HD 480 Pro have 38mm dynamic drivers backed by neodymium magnets, their voice coils described as “ultra-light” without any further detail. The shell design promises multiple stages of passive sound shielding, with the interior chambers designed, says Sennheiser, to eliminate unwanted vibration, reflections and distortion in what it calls a ‘Vibration Attenuation System’.

These models are said to be aimed at being versatile for applications in the studio and beyond, but especially for recording, mixing and production; increasing numbers of mixers and producers are now favouring open-backed models like the HD 490 Pro, but those spill sound, so can’t be used in recording rooms and booths where the privacy of closed shells works both ways.

With mixing and studio work in mind, Sennheiser is presumably targeting a neutral response. Its literature promotes two things in particular: long-term comfort, and tight, accurate bass reproduction.

“With closed-back headphones, a good reproduction of the low-end is usually difficult to achieve,” says Sennheiser. “This is where the HD 480 PRO excel… their low-end is super-accurate and realistic.” notes Jimmy R. Landry, Category Market Manager, Music Industry at Sennheiser.

They claim a response down to -10dB from 3Hz to 28,700Hz, and offer a nominal impedance of 130Ω at 1kHz, making them versatile enough to be driven by sources from professional mixing desks and audio interfaces to laptops and even mobile devices.

Listening sessions

Coily cable attached and the HD 480 Pros under the considered control of the excellent headphone output on Eversolo’s DAC-Z10, we settled in for some serious listening. For this we had the quarter-inch adaptor screwed on to the integrated minijack plug, though later we used the minijack alone into a 2026 MacBook Pro headphone output, which now has DC load detection and adaptive voltage output to suit the headphones plugged in. (The Eversolo conducts a similar analysis.)

Both of these put the headphone socket on our left, but we’d been warming them up with use at a radio studio which had the socket on the right; for this we simply detached the cable from the left headshell, moved the rubber grommet and reattached the cables to the right. This is a very convenient system, and sturdily connected with a four-pin miniDIN using a release tab. We would note, though, that it will get heavy use for those moving the headphones around in the hard shell case which comes with the ‘Plus’ version of these headphones, as you have to detach the cable each time you stow them in that case.

The HD 480 Pros achieve excellent relative accuracy for use in studio and mixing scenarios; bass elements in particular are toned and tight, full but not pumped up. Yet they don’t lack emotion; they’re also a very enjoyable listening when you’re simply there to enjoy the music, for their insight especially – we found ourselves analysing the vocal lines on the Madonna/Kylie Love Sensation, listening to separate Mags from Kyls. The HD 480 Pros easily distinguished between the Madonna vocal line, treated and slightly raspy with age, and the subsequent sexier (and better phrased) Kylie lines. Compare Kylie’s kitten version of the line “It’s more than love… yeh!” with an emotionless Madonna-only version (on the third track of the EP release) to hear one queen of pop very much schooling the other… Kylie wins! We didn’t think too much of the song, but these headphones certainly laid out its pumped-up beats and swirly production tricks to their best advantage.

We used Roon to play Nick Drake’s ‘Bryer Later’ at 24-bit/96kHz, the delicacy of the delicious folk-and-strings instrumental Introduction, then the surprisingly rocky Hazey Jane II, driven along by the chugging guitar of Richard Thompson and the solidity of a Pegg/Mattacks rhythm section from Fairport Convention. Even with levels high, everything held solid here, the bass sufficiently present while nimble and clear in pitch and tone, with the drum work almost entirely tucked in a little pocket behind Drake’s unique vocal, while the horn arrangement sit at far left and right extremes.

It’s a joy to sit under a mix like this under headphones of this clarity; it’s not pumpy, it’s not enthusiastic, it’s just on the money. You’d have to go electrostatic or planar magnetic to hope for more in the way of detail, but here you gain the airshifting power of a conventional dynamic driver to underpin it all.

From our MacBook Pro hard-drive we played Pete Townshend’s 2026 ‘remake’ remixes of the 2019 album ‘Who’. Every element of Ball and Chain was laid clear: the opening guitar intro, the crisp piano motif, the distant soaring guitars joined by close-up acoustic plucking, until Daltrey arrives central and strong, rich and more gravelly even than Madonna, though his energy gives little betrayal of the fact he was 74 when he recorded it.

In addition to giving free access to each element in the mix, the headphones presented the track as a cohesive whole, and it was all tonally spot on from the transducers in their geometrically-angled positions, from Daltrey down to the running bass lines that were delivered at full strength from top to bottom.

We played a lossless Apple Music Classical Session by Max Richter, new arrangements of bits from the ‘Hamnet’ soundtrack. See things that others don’t begins with piano so very gentle that its presence is almost outweighed by the sense of an audience trying not to cough or rustle their programmes around the hall acoustic – which was very successfully created by the Sennheisers, then washed through by the entry of simple mournful strings in a kind of well-tempered version of Pärt-style sadness. It’s a short piece, but made beautiful by the HD 480 Pros.

They loved an open mix, so that while slamming home most of the new Stones album, the relaxed country shuffle of Ringing Hollow had the space to again enjoy each element individually, as well as the song as a whole. Steve Jordan’s drums got the space to shuffle, with the kick drum as only the gentlest of underpinning bass taps, but the snare rim shots snapping through.

This album, which is mastered at quite a high level, did occasionally get a little shouty through the Sennheisers when we took the level above their comfort levels. While the sweet spot was plenty loud enough, those liking even more might find there’s a limit to their smooth delivery.

It was similar with Amy Shark’s It’s Kinda Hot (the chorus sounding very Alex The Astronaut): beautifully handled up to the last few stops, then a little overwhelmed by the combination of complexity and sheer level.

We doublechecked these from the Eversolo DAC’s headphone output and found the same effect, also something odd, where the bass pedal imparted about the same energy all the time even as everything else was turned up, as if the pedal just wasn’t going to push any more no matter where we went. In an all-in-one speaker we might think this to be algorithmic speaker feedback limiting output short of distortion, but here it may just be the physical limit of the phones to give that element any more energy.

We found them impeccably comfortable despite their significant size, although we never quite got the hang of putting glasses on while wearing them, despite a special ‘soft zone’ for this purpose, and Gunnar Dirks, Senior Product Manager for professional headphones, saying specifically that they fit every head precisely and comfortably even if you’re wearing glasses. Not that he's wearing glasses on his LinkedIn photo.

These were very small notes against many hours of listening delight. We used them for at least 12 hours during radio broadcasts, and they proved perfect cans for the studio as the closed shells prevented feedback while the sound all came through at their ‘studio’ monitoring quality. We’ll leave the engineers to complain if the curly cable is tapping on the desk…

Verdict

The HD 480 Pros are extremely high-quality headphones, suited to both studio use via their good passive isolation and relative accuracy, and to music listening, where their high frequencies open up a mix to examination and appreciation, while the bass is tight and full but never swampy. They are quite large but super-comfy, so well-suited to long sessions whether making or enjoying music.

No noise-cancelling, no app, no messing with endless EQ options; we found it all rather relaxing, as well as a reminder that if it’s cabled headphones you’re after, then there are two Sennheisers to choose from, and you certainly shouldn’t ignore the Professionals.

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