Indeed it is.

That works if you have a smaller/leaner head. For bigger heads nothing helps. I tried bending both the plastic and metal parts, stretched over books and even used a heatgun to melt the headband in an effort to widen it. It didn't help. All this on a second hand HD 600, so it was already "broken-in".

> As a giant head myself, Sennheiser were nice

I see you haven't tried the HD 600 (and others with the same chassis like the 580, 650, etc) headphones. They are a torture device for us mellon heads.

It has nothing to do with file format, you are just listening to harmful volume levels. I suggest you lower it because you are going to get hearing damage or even worse, tinnitus.

>I don't really get all of the assumption that the HD600 are hard to drive.

Because they were ...once upon a time.

The HD 600 was released all the way back in 1997 and at that time, many computers didn't have any built-in audio. Those which did, usually had something that was awful and was barely enough to power off-the-shelf 16/32 ohm, 100+ db/mW headphones. Back in those days, you really needed an external audio card or at least an amp in order to get the HD 600 to a decent volume level without any distortion and ground noise from the spinning hard drives. Audio has come a long way since then but the idea that the HD 600 are "hard to drive, you need a powerful amp" has stuck around and many are unfortunately just repeating it over and over.

You don't necessarily need an external amp, the one built-in into your PC may be enough, depending on what motherboard you have. A lot of modern laptops, desktops and phones have plenty of power to drive the HD 600 just fine. The more likely suspect here is that you may have some "audio enhancement" bloatware installed like MaxxAudio and it's applying some EQ profile automatically. See if there is anything like that installed. Another reason may be that you are simply not used to them. When you have two pairs of headphones that have a very different sound signature, there's going to be an adjustment period after going from one to the other. The third option is that you may not like how the HD 600 sounds and that's fine. If you still don't like them after a few days of use and you need headphones which you can use for mixing, then consider returning them and getting the HD 560S instead.

ASR - Good for measurements but you shouldn't read too much into his conclusions/opinions as "Everything that isn't Harman is bad!" is pretty much the default for him.

> can't hear the difference between 80 and 130 SINAD

Between 80 and 120? You most probably will. Between 90 and 120, not so much. Remember, our hearing isn't linear.

Most Superlux models, Grado SR60, Sennheiser HD 202 II and MX 475.

Ultrasonic master race

Yeah, the 600 caused me a lot of pain and nausea just from a few minutes of wearing. Dekoni pads are thicker but they will not solve the issue with the clamp force (if you experience that one as well). In my case, nothing I did fixed the issue, so I ended up selling them.