đŸ”¶ Fostex T50rp

Yup, sadly.

On the subject of T50RPs, man, planars are hell of a drug. Lol. :ok_hand:

What’s your next planar going to be?? :thinking: You gotta fuel your addiction somehow

:sweat_smile: I don’t like kraft dinner enough to buy planars every two weeks, lol.

Dat planar bass/kick slam though, re-discovering old electronic music songs and holy shiiiiiiii- I think I don’t need coffee anymore.

They’re so effing dangerous for me though. I don’t know what does this and why, but, I cranked them to test my amps and I realized my “pain threshold” is like
 20dB higher with T50RPs than with my other headphones. Strange thing. But yeah, my amp needs to be at 50%-ish. Higher than that and it’s dangerous. Fun, but dangerous. Avoid.

They drink that power up and do magical things with it. With an insane amount of mods, you can get an insane amount of bass extension. Like sub bass appears in songs that you didn’t know existed.

I’m deep into the Open Alpha mod. Modified drivers, wave guides ect. I have two pairs of MK3’s that are just over the top and voiced very differently. One is a bass extension machine that is super fun to listen to. Clear but forgiving and fun without fatigue. The other is a microscope that draws a very defined line in the sand between good mixes and garbage recordings. Both of them take a lot of power to drive because they both have a lot of dampening to shape them into what they are.

The sound pressure on these cans with the volume knob on 9 is similar to my HD58X’s on 5. So just hard to drive really. One side effect of this hard to drive situation is that a lot of amps go up in THD with volume. I have a Valhalla 2 and when I want that tube sound I crank it, then use the preamp outs to a Magni 3 on high gain that can drive them much better and it sounds great. I have a FIIO e18k that struggles to drive them and when you crank it to 10, trying to drive these cans it just falls flat on its face. I can’t quite describe it, but it is almost like the louder bits are being flattened off because there is no headroom.

This gives you impressive detail, though (with stock T50RPs anyway). They just can’t “box” your ears with that planar kick slam, etc.

The little manual that came with it says “resistance to high level input peaks of up to 3000mW”, so, there you go, lol. Three watts!

I wrote, and re-wrote, and changed pads, and bent the headband, and un-bent the headband, and here’s my review, finally.

Fostex T50RP MK3 Review (with Shure 840 pads): Hard hitting, cold precision.

First: Way too much treble, stock. Shure 840 pads are mandatory if you want to hear bass/drum kicks, etc.

They’re my first planars. What are planars? With planars, let’s say the music hits, hard. And fast. And stops fast too. And not only the bass hits. Everything hits. The snares, the cymbals, etc. You know, when you listen to, let’s say, an uplifting 140bpm trance song, and then after a bit of silence, there’s the kick and you go “oof!” Well, prepare to clearly hear the silence (yes), and then go “oof” 140 times per minute with T50RPs. Lol. Fun stuff for cranks, haha. If you wanted to sit back and relax with scotch on the rocks and T50RPs, nope: You will be dancing on the carpet after 2 minutes. If you press play, that’s because you want to feel all the energy that was in the studio. And they’re really analytic. So smooth jazz will be as relaxing as being there
 lying right next to the drummer and the saxophonist. Because planars are relentless, and T50RPs can be really, really dynamic.

-Bass (again, with Shure 840 pads): I’ve never heard this much precise, strong and accurate bass and sub-bass. I already talked about the kicks/drum kicks, too. Skull shaking stuff. I even got nausea one evening after listening to electronic music at high volume. Just once, but still. I’ve listened to electronic music with HD280 Pros (they allegedly go to down to 7hz) for years, and never experienced this. Some people have the same problem with subwoofers, apparently. Well, it makes sense. T50RPs planar technology hits hard, and goes low. I mean, you can even hear the bass in Metallica - And Justice for All! :wink:
-Mids: They’re neutral, but they seem a bit V-shaped. That’s because the “high-mids” are all there, but
 not often. Maybe T50RPs are just “too dynamic” : There’s obviously no drum kicks, bass, snares or cymbals in the high-mids. But with violin strings, or when a girl screams, it’s glorious (uh, yeah, I’m still talking about music, guys
).
-Highs: They don’t extend all the way up to 20khz, but, huh, there’s not much there to hear, obviously. They sound really clear, because they have treble but lack “high-mids”. So, what the hell are “high-mids”, you say? Well, I’ll be more precise, I found a graph at Changstar: Just look at this hole from 2khz to 5khz (see below) compared to HD600s. I don’t have HD600s, but everytime I try to convince myself T50RPs are neutral all the way, I plug my HD58Xs and realize there’s something missing. This lack of “high-mids” can make 'em sound thin, or “cold”, especially combined with the precision of planar technology.

Oh, and ignore the -5dB @ 20hz: It’s definitely fixed with Shure 840 pads.

The precision of planar technology.

I probably shouldn’t confound “thinness” and “precision”, but I’ll say that anyway: these planars can sound “thin”. T50RPs are the exact opposite of my HD58Xs, in which everything sounds “fuller” and “warmer”. And with overdubbed, compressed songs destroyed by the “loudness war”, they can even sound like you’re listening to exploded speakers. Yup, that’s what compression sounds like. And, in my opinion, that’s all what T50RPs are meant to be. It’s just “the price to pay” for precision. As I already said here, I got 5/6 on this test (.mp3 320kbs vs .wav files). Everything is there. Everything is detailed. Everything jumps at you. You just don’t hear “reverb” or “soundstage” when there isn’t.

So, no graph could have predicted that, not even CSD graphs, but I now have two “complementary” but neutral(-ish), studio-ready headphones. Between T50RPs and HD58X, I was just expecting “more of the same”. Boy I was wrong. I really can hear this planar technology. I’m really lucky!

And now, with a smartphone:

“Too dynamic” doesn’t sound fun for some, but I only said they can be “too dynamic”. Yup, T50RPs can sound thin, even mechanical
 Try giving these LESS power (!). With lower power, like with a smartphone, T50RPs suddenly become smooth, low-volume critical listening beasts! Detailed, analytical. Way less dynamics, exchanged for way more detail. Behold T50RP, the Japanese mech engineered to devastate all your bad studio mixes
 with your damn smartphone.

I don’t have a 1 watt yeet cannon (copyright Zeos), so I don’t know if they’d be the same with a lot of power. All I know is, my jaw dropped when I heard a ton of unheard details and hiss, with what most – well, especially Zeos, would call “not enough” power.

P.S.: No “planar crinkle” even with beard and long hair. I still don’t know what “planar crinkle” is (they’re a tiny bit “open-back”, though, and I heard it was something about pressure – not a problem here).

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Nice review :+1:

The driver is fairly small compared to other planars and there is some venting, so that shouldn’t be an issue

Also just get a basx a100 already lol

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Headphone output of my AVR is 200 mV/47 kΩ. I don’t know what it means in mW?
But that’s enough for me
 otherwise I’ll go deaf fast, lol.

Feeding the fostex more power doesn’t only give more volume :wink:

Well, giving these less power gave me more discernible detail so I don’t know what to think about 1 watt yeet cannons. :stuck_out_tongue:

One day, one day.

So you do like more treble lol. Under powering them makes them a bit more lean and compressed imo

Definitely not haha (except for speakers, maybe! I have Fluance SX6s).
Anyway, yeah, I’m already searching for solutions.

Also, what does “compressed” means? Lacking dynamics?

The dynamics are kind of squished (in this way I am using it). It reduces the dynamic range, and makes quieter sounds easier to hear and louder sounds quieter, and reduces the gaps between the quieter and louder sounds. This can make it easier to hear detail, but less natural sounding with a strange sound imo. There are more naturally compressed sounding headphones like the mrspeakers aeon and ether, but some like that sound and some don’t

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Nice, thanks. “Compressed” for me only made me think about compressed mp3s. Different compression, heh.

Today I learned: Most people agree, Schiit stuff sounds constipated.

sorry. :stuck_out_tongue:

Was that part of their business plan??? Thats a really good way to put it lol

Hahaha :sweat_smile:
Sorry Schiit users lol. The joke was just too easy.

Maybe I can explain better than others. Compression is taking the loud stuff and making is less volume. That allows for more volume so you push the quieter stuff closer to the highest volume relative to the squashed louder stuff. Definitely watch a youtube video about it, its probably too vague without images.

Edit:
My audio engineering degree, gotta flex you know!

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It also depends on what you are talking about regarding compression, as compression is different in the sense of what you are talking about, like dynamic range compression, audio file compression, gain compression, power compression, etc

also have some audio engineering training too lol

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I got my t50rp mk3 in mid June and they sound terrible, and what I heard from metal571 and others, I might sell them. I can’t stand the distortion, I don’t listen to them at all with Shure 840 or alcantara pads. I’m thinking of selling them, and not taking them to modhouse to be converted to argons.