Oh hey, it's a bluetooth headphone!
Measurements were made using bluetooth mode, so in other words, this is using the built-in amp inside the headphone. God knows what Sony made the amp do to the headphone, but I hear audible hiss at high volume, so obviously something is amiss. Supposedly, there are quality "modes" that one can toggle via secret button presses, but I'm not gonna bother measuring the different modes because I don't think the headphone and the built-in amp is resolving enough to show the differences anyway...
Frequency response is LOL-worthy. Not because it's bad but because... I happen to find it quite... pleasing. Sort of a mini LCD-2 kinda signature. Rolled off very hard core on the top end, though. Much more so than the LCD-2. CSD is quite clean, but... since there wasn't even that much high frequency to begin with...
Bass is also surprisingly well-behaved as far as decay goes, as evident in spectrogram. I hear it that way subjectively as well.
There is a "bass boost" button.
I won't bother measuring that, as you can see that the stock frequency response is already way too bass-tilted. To be fair, I don't think extension is anything to write home about, so some may turn that bass boost on to compensate for this. Personally, I find this headphone quite... enjoyable with pop music in stock form. Highly moddable, though, so if you're into that kind of stuff, I think there is some potential here.
Valley at 300-400Hz is evidence of driver's weakness, which means it needs moar pressure in the back in order to reproduce dat bass hump. Also meaning... dat bass hump is a massive gob of distortion, so it's blurry, pillow-fight as freak. In fact, pillow-fight hits harder! I think this is like... 3"-tall teddy bear trying to hug you kind of bass. Soft, warm, cushy, kinda nice but not exciting or violent enough. <- another point where the "bass boost" function again may score points... if you want to fight distortions with even more distortions.
Overall, I'd say... not a complete pile of
. They at least got the frequency response almost right, and the spectrogram. Tuning this may potentially turn it into a decent walk-around headphone.
I think it's worth a look at $100, as I find that it sounds better than a lot of bluetooth headphones I have heard so far. But at MSRP of $199, I'd say... steer clear, unless you have absolutely no option whatsoever, or you would like to try your hands at some modding.
