Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “These headphones require a STRONG NECK”.
Oh wow, my Venus, my fire, my desire, no we’re, not unboxing a waifu, but there is a beautiful waifu on the front of it. We’Re unboxing Moon drops Venus they’re planar magnetic headphones from from Moon drop. The lauded in-ear monitor producing company that came out of the scene in 2015 and has continually been shaking up the IEM world at pretty much every price point, by releasing lots of really really cool headphones at really really cheap prices like their 20 Moon drop shoes, which Are like okay, they’re, fine, but they’re still 20 for what you get. It’S a pretty good deal or their blessing too, which was a huge huge price proposition being at 330 dollars and was competing with like 600 700 iems, but now they’re trying to make their transition into headphones, which is not a transition that many companies have been the Most successful at you think that it should be pretty easy. If you can make a good earbud, then you can probably make a good headphone, but that’s not the case.
Look at Sennheiser Sennheiser is famous for making some of the best headphones of all time and they have like one good in-ear monitor what’s the deal well, it turns out that they’re actually a lot more different than they are the same, but that didn’t that didn’t scare Moon drop at all, because Moon drops actually releasing three different headphones they’re, releasing their lower end Moon drop void, a dynamic driver, headphone they’re also going to be releasing their high-end. Moon drop, zero, a electrostatic, headphone and they’re, releasing the Venus a planar magnetic headphone. But the question is: are these ones good? Today we didn’t even look at the Box, we didn’t look at the outside of the box. Let me don’t look here. Stop looking, I don’t know if you can like buy these in a storefront really so the box design is kind of interesting because usually gon na be shopping for expensive, headphones you’ll see the models out on the floor as opposed to like in their boxes, but they Do always go above and beyond when it comes to putting a girl on the Box on the back there’s this cool breakdown of the actual structure of the drivers. You can see, there’s a diaphragm.
This frames, the Staters for the magnets, as well as a frequency response graph that isn’t really the most easy to read or detailed, but they’re it’s cool that they’re actually reporting what they’ve measured it on as well as their response and then they just say Target, and We don’t know what they’re actually targeting they could have just been like hey. This is a target that’ll make our headphone look good, but it’s fairly harm and shaped the inputs to the headphones are 3.5 millimeters. I really appreciate that, because that means it’s easy to replace cables the plug, so the other end of it. They have a 3.5 millimeter single ended plug and a 4.4 millimeter balanced, plug six Hertz to 80 kilohertz. What they really mean is 20 kilohertz to 20 kilohertz, and even then they probably don’t go all the way down to 20 uh Hertz impedance is 18 ohms which isn’t the easiest to drive, but you should be fine with pretty much any audio player.
You might not be able to drive them at their full volume, but I didn’t have any issues driving these with basically any computer, I plugged them into. I plugged them into two different computers like a laptop or plugged them into my desktop at work. I didn’t plug them into an iPhone. I think that the iPhone adapter should be able to cover 18 ohms, it’s not too bad and then sensitivity. One decibel it’s cool.
Let’S get out of here and let’s get this in now. The Venus is competing with some fancy headphones, so I’m expecting a decent unboxing experience, not terrible. They got like some foam and some velvety material. We got qc005.
I don’t know if that means that we got the fifth ones. We probably didn’t we’re not that special to them for such a big box. Yeah, there’s nothing else in here, which is a bit disappointing uh. I would have liked to see, like maybe a carrying case or something maybe even just like a bag. Maybe this does this. Come out and makes a bag yo, it’s the Tesla logo, whoa um! No, this just comes out.
I guess before we talk about this. What’S in this inside, we have is like a tiny postcard. We got a manual, and here we have our ooh, a nice braided. Oh and they even have the uh the little twisties.
This is very much an IEM thing: the twisty cable uh. I like it. I think it looks nice, so we got our. We have our 3.5 millimeter adapter and then we have our our balanced output. It’S also doing that braided cable thing that I think looks really nice um, there’s a split right here in the middle to go to the two inputs. I kind of worry about the stress relief here. There’S not much in terms of strain relief. Kind of just goes into the plastic.
I would have liked to see more rubber coming out or more silicone coming out to actually uh. I don’t know relieve the stress, while the connector is quite large on the three and a half millimeter, the stress Leaf seems a little bit better, especially on this end, and as long as they don’t introduce too much sound, which we can check uh. They should be just fine and let’s look at these things.
First, off holy cow. Are these things ever heavy? It’S a hundred percent solid metal. There is the headband here is metal entire side of the ear cup is metal, and this texture is actually like.
It’S sharp. I run my fingers along and I’m worried. I’M gon na get like a paper cut, or I guess just a normal cut when it’s metal, but it looks really really cool. Also look at the size of the ear cups on these look inside.
Look at how much space you have in there you could live in there, you’d have to pay rent. If you wanted this much space in Vancouver roomy. This is a fake leather for sure this isn’t real leather same with on the headband. It’S two different. It’S different! Textures on the headband, though they go for elastic instead of a cushion, I find that this works pretty well. For me, I know that some people have complaints about this style of a headband, because, if you’re somebody who Wiggles around a lot or you have a smaller head, what it can do is that if it’s too tight, it kind of starts slowly like kind of moving Up your head and then it’s going to be bothering the bottom of your ears. I know Jake tyvee’s complained to me about that before. Even here we got like six hex screws.
These are built like a freaking tank six on each side. Just for this headband, I guess, if you really wanted, you could probably just replace the headband on these because there’s no wires or anything going through the top. I do feel like this kind of disrupts the look of them.
It’S just like it’s a beautiful Circle and oh, they also have like you can see on the inside of this ear cup, there’s like uh, some some breathing holes for that ear breath these are open back, so don’t expect any sort of isolation. You can basically see through them at this point the ear cups. They are hey. Look at that they’re removable, so funny story. I had these a little bit earlier and I dropped them and that’s how I found out that you can do this. You can just take them out. I was very worried when I dropped these, because this whole thing fell out and I thought that I had broken them for good, but then I realized that this is all the electronics you need. This is just a headband uh. You can see the diaphragm, the metal that just goes all the way around.
So here’s the thing this is a 100 a 100 millimeter driver. This whole thing is the driver. That’S the cool thing about planar magnetics. Is that, unlike a dynamic driver where you have a coil that you have a small coil, that’s surrounded by a magnet that then pushes a large diaphragm with planar magnetics? You have magnets that go along the entire plane of your diaphragm and then, when an electric charge is put on each side of it, it Wiggles the diaphragm and that produces a sound.
So, instead of having the sound Focus kind of from the center of the woofer at the back, you have this whole thing producing sound. So it’s like that, as opposed to like a cone, and part of that is what gives like their unique kind of sound. Like people often talk about like this speed or the Precision of the bass response in planar, magnetics uh, it’s not and that’s because you’re not trying to have one small magnet move a big diaphragm. You have all of this diaphragm.
All of these magnets working together to move a lot more air. On the other hand, that does tend to make these more expensive to manufacture than a typical Dynamic driver, also they’re, just not as popular so there’s less people focusing on making really cheap planar magnetics. But it’s getting better and better these days, if you’re interested in trying out the planar magnetic sound, but don’t think it’s like going to change your life. It’S not like wow.
I’Ve never heard my music like this before it’s like it’s minute differences, but I think it’s. I’M partial to planar magnetics myself other than that. There’S nothing on these there’s just the three and a half millimeter inputs, no buttons or any of that other fluff. This is pure audio uh. Let’S weigh them 572 grams um. I think they actually go over. I think they reported to be 600. yeah, maybe with the cable you’re right that could be 30 grams.
So if I go like 6 15 yeah, so I mean this part’s not going to be whole carrying too much weight. But that’s a lot. That’S half a kilogram! That’S like a jar of peanut butter. Putting on your head, it’s a weird reference point, but if you know you know – and you know who does know or our sponsor manscaped, this video is brought to you by manscaped.
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Now, as I said, these are open back headphones, there’s something about planar magnetics. That makes them particularly bad as open back headphones because it takes very little to make them very Audible. I don’t know, can you guys hear it yeah, it’s it’s surprisingly, not loud, but the thing about these planar magnets is that they leak so much of those really high-end frequencies that it makes it very noticeable for anyone around you.
This is not an office headphone. Also, when you don’t have music playing, you can basically hear the whole world. What that does do is it provides them with a little bit of a Better Sound Stage, though I’m not Amazed by this headphone Sound Stage.
I find that it is adequate. I find that these these headphones sound, tend to sound, very clear, they’re a little a little bright. I don’t find it to be an issue, but you could argue that they’re on the brighter side like willing to scat when listening to scatman’s World by Scatman John, you really do hear those like high-pitched high hats, Colin now from Scotland, and they can be a little Peaky um, I found it listening to Asia by Steely Dan. You can really hear this like kind of bell or TR.
It’S not a triangle. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know percussion instruments all that well, there’s like a really really high, pitched like thing that is just so noticeable on these headphones, but in terms of Timbre, these things sound, awesome uh, especially with like string instruments.
I find that like acoustic guitar violins, all sound, really really lifelike, like tamakun by uh Rodrigo y, Gabriella and Mac, sounds so good on here. It’S Immaculate, it’s like you. I could like see the guitar strings vibrating, even though I’m just listening in terms of bass response at the very very low end. It’S a little bit lacking, there’s a little bit of a roll-off, but you still have that kind of precision that you get from a planar magnetic headphone. That makes things like uh double kicks and metal sound, really really Punchy and precise and tracks like born in Winter or from the sky by Gojira uh.
The base kicks feel powerful, but also like not muddied they’re, not ruined. It’S really really great. This is a funny enough. This solid metal headphone is a solid metal headphone, but we got labs to measure them, so we can take a more objective. Look at what they actually sound like on our fancy new head. Here we go in a previous video about the focal Batiste we talked about frequency response.
One thing to note is that that graph and that video is not going to be comparable to the one that we have here today, because it’s measured on a different system. It was measured in a different location and we’re measuring on our brand new B and k5128. It’S the kind of the gold standard, but it means that things like the harm and Target are less relevant because the harman Target was researched on different equipment. And so it’s not directly applicable we’re working on developing our own Target that will be used as a simple, very low level guide as to is this headphone generally good, so use the measurement for the Venus in the green.
That’S the measurement of this headphone. The dotted line is our Target. It’S not finalized or anything. It could change in the future.
But, as you can see, the bass response, especially the very low base below 40 kilohertz, is a little bit lacking. It’S a about seven or eight decibels, lower than where our Target is the mids. It follows the line pretty well, it’s pretty close and we can see a pretty steady bump over in the upper mids and the treble. But here’s where you can see kind of some of the Peaks like look at that Peak way at the top right around the 14 kilohertz region – that’s just like really high sibilance, so stuff like S’s and T’s, can get a little bit out of hand. I found it only in very specific scenarios to be a little too much other than that. It’S not a terribly bright headphone.
So if you’re somebody who doesn’t like really bright, detailed, sound uh you’re not going to be overwhelmed by these now we can compare them to say the HD 800 s’s. You can see that this has more bass presence than the HD 800s’s and it tends to be less bright and the five to eight kilohertz region. The hd800s tend to be a lot more louder, so there’s a little bit more brightness to them. Some people find it a little fatiguing.
It tends to be a little bit less peaky. You can see that there’s fewer lows and highs, and it’s more kind of controlled in this steady curve, but that’s also a headphone that is literally triple the price of these, and that’s where these are really interesting is that this is a 600 dollar headphone which puts It in an interesting place in terms of headphone pricing, there’s a weird Chasm between the Enthusiast headphones where you see stuff like Sennheiser hd600s, the like Flagship where you see like 1800 headphones like the HD 800 s’s. These are kind of going somewhere in the middle There.
For Better or For Worse, that’s a good thing, because in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to like build quality, these things are built like a tank. But then you have to think about like what can you get for a better price that has a very similar performance? And while these are, I think, great, sounding headphones. There’S a lot of competition, even within the planar magnetic space, you have the Hi-Fi man sundara, which are planar magnetics and have rightfully earned their place as a great Enthusiast, planar headphone they’re, like half the price and they also sound pretty dang good.
I don’t think they look as good. I found that when I listened to these, when I spent some time with these, the weight didn’t bother me, but it is something you really have to consider if you’re going to be sensitive to heavy headphones. These are very heavy. Personally, I had no issue because it’s a circle and it’s not a crazy, crazy size. It leaves you open to options of getting custom, ear, pads or replacement ear pads, which can change the sound drastically. Especially, if you go for something that’s more open, you can lose the bass or, if you go for something that’s thicker, you can really enhance the bass response on these.
It’S a admirable entry and I think, a really really good first attempt, which makes me very excited to see where Moon drop takes their headphone line up from here. If somebody decided to purchase these headphones, they would be absolutely happy with them. I think it’s a great product so well done they’re a great product just be aware that there’s other options that exist for slightly cheaper. You can do that with them and you can subscribe to Short Circuit.
If you like this video, why don’t you watch my video about the focal Batiste another really great pair of headphones? That are, you know, within Striking Distance of the same price, but they’re Wireless .