Last week, a post by Marco Arment showed up in my RSS feed with the headline “The new headphone king: B&O H6 (2nd generation).” The content of said post was B&O Play BeoPlay’s second generation of high-end [consumer] headphones, the H6:
And even though the first-generation Bang & Olufsen BeoPlay H6 had been my top pick for a long time, I’d lost faith in their recent headphone efforts, having been very disappointed by the H6 DJ Khaled Edition, wireless H7, and on-ear wireless H8.
But the new H6, distinguished simply by “H6 (2nd generation)” on the box, blew me away [emphasis added].
Upon any physical inspection between the first and second H6, you’ll think nothing has changed.
Until you hear them. They sound, quite simply, awesome [emphasis added].
The original H6 also sounded awesome, with only a few caveats: the bass was a bit light, the midrange was a bit bumpy, and they needed an amp to sound their best at higher volumes.
The H6 “2nd generation” has solved every shortcoming of the original H6 [emphasis added]
Before I could even finish the article, I had another Safari tab open, this one focused on the Amazon page for those cans. (I also linked to his post.)
I purchased the H6’s immediately, happy the delivery date quoted was going to be two days in the future.[1]
Well, Thursday came (a day before previously quoted delivery date), and no shipping notification from Amazon.[2] Concerned that my precious headphones weren’t going to arrive by the weekend, I checked the order history, which said they weren’t going to be delivered until Tuesday. Somewhat perturbed, I then spent about an hour chatting with an Amazon rep several Amazon rep’s, each of which told me that not only were the H6’s not going to be delivered by Saturday, they also weren’t going to be delivered by Tuesday (what the Order History section said). In fact, they probably wouldn’t ship for at least 1-4 more weeks.
Fast-forward to this past Tuesday, and by some miracle, I finally got those H6’s.
And you know what?
Marco was right.
These are noticeably different from the first generation.
It still sounds like a `treble-head` set of headphones, but unlike the first generation, there’s more bass.[3]
Is it Beats-level bass? No! (That’s a good thing.)
While the H6 was always well-balanced, it’s relatively straight-forward treble response occasionally left me wanting in the bass department. If I had to chose, I would choose treble over bass, because I like hearing treble detail.
But now I don’t have to choose.
The 1975’s latest effort makes for a nice testing bed for these new cans.
You can see about the new H6’s for yourself.
Thanks Prime.
“Two days in the future” fell on a Friday—a perfect start to the weekend, right?
Keep reading. ↩
If you’re of those people who—like me—scoffs when privileged first-world people complain about first-world problems, you might want to skip the next few paragraphs. ↩
I sometimes thought to myself that the first generation H6 had less bass than EarPods, which, if true, would be crazy. ↩