Headphones are always a singular pursuit. Nothing beats slipping on a pair and leaving the distractions behind and being transported to another audio realm. B&O Beoplay H6 are a high end and expensive headset, which offers a glimpse of audio heaven in a compact and well-designed package. Steven Ambrose spent hours listening to the B&O Beoplay H6
The Hardware
The sound
Music is one of those unquantifiable things that everybody experiences in a very different way. There are very few products that have the ability to captivate and entertain no matter what the source material instantly.
The Beoplay H6 is one of these rare products. This ability is a combination of tonal accuracy, timbre, timing, and dynamic range. The blend of all of these is what the Beoplay H6 gets so right.
The bass extends in a deep solid and satisfying way. The Beoplay H6’s sound muscular without resorting to overemphasis. The midrange also blends seamlessly from the underpinning of the base. Vocals sound rich full and warm, with just the right amount of bite when needed. All of this could be killed by bright sharp and overmatched high frequencies, which the Beoplay H6 completely avoids without softness or dullness.
The Beoplay H6 offers highs that are silky smooth yet bright and sharp. There is no fatigue or overemphasis in any part of the sound spectrum from lows to highs. No matter how loud, to a point, I went with the Beoplay H6; they stayed controlled, clear, and never became distorted, muddled or shrill.
The Beoplay H6 blends accurate tonal qualities with another key element to music, and that is great timing and space. Music of all genres has a powerful rhythm and pace which makes everything you listen to engaging and often very exciting. It is rare to find, and many other fine-sounding headphones just don’t get this aspect of music right.
The net result is that the Beoplay H6 can convey the emotion and energy of music in an engaging and exciting way. Classical and acoustic jazz sounded spacious with the instruments filling a palpable acoustic space while electronic music had pace and punch. No genre did not sound right with the H6’s.
That said the Beoplay H6 remains accurate and slightly softer in their overall presentation. The Beoplay H6 treads a satisfying middle ground, all the time erring on the side of accuracy, some headsets flatter particular genres.
There is one caveat in all this, and that was the source. On massively compressed MP3’s and other low-grade streaming or downloaded content. The Beoplay H6 accurately conveyed the flattened somewhat grey quality of the source. The accuracy of the headphones made the lack of source fidelity truly apparent. With uncompressed source material from high-quality CD’s or with the Tidal music tidal.com/za streaming service, in HiFi, mode, the real ability of the Beoplay H6 shone through.
