Sony MDR 7550 review

[kensuguro]

I needed a portable monitoring situation so decided to get an IEM. I would have defaulted to etymotics er-4p but since I've already gone through a bunch of them (wire breaks after 1 year) I decided to look elsewhere. I was going to get the classic Sony MDR foldables, I checked out their website and to my surprise, they have IEMs now in their studio monitor lineup. Now, I'm perfectly aware there are other great IEM makers out there but I wasn't going to spend more than $300 or so.

I'm driving this with thinkpad's headphone out and focusrite sapphire usb 8, so my impressions are sort of the average of both. No fancy headphone amps here.
7550s have good bass. Like etymotics won't even compare. It has solid bass going down to 40hz, good amount of body to everything. Actually, it's a bit too low end heavy for me to consider them neutral. More bass even compared to my akg 240, and even more than my genelec 1030 speakers. So, that's getting to the "land of make believe" zone. But anyway, you won't be yearning for low end.

On the other hand, the top end is rather lacking. Maybe because of the slightly exaggerated bass, the top is getting masked. But it lacks some clarity so it's definitely not "plug and play" as much as other monitoring options. It's lacking in the super high end, like over 15k, so all the harmonic enhancers and details coming from that sort of stuff is kind of lost. Anything lower than 15k, it's fairly truthful. At least it's less fatigue I guess. (says the optimist) ER-4 is much better in this area, but it's not without drawbacks either, since it emphasizes 3-4k area and makes everything jump out at you. But I feel ER-4 has more treble "range" overall.

Response is about as good as any IEM I think. In my experience, you're really only going to get a certain amount of response for IEM and that's about it. Might be different if I used a $1000 preamp, or any high powered preamp, but I'm not about to carry tiny IEM AND a big box around just to monitor so that's not really a practical solution for me. So material definitely doesn't sound as punchy as they're supposed to be.

Stereo representation is fairly accurate, but again, because of the response, you don't quite get a good "depth" perception. In terms of getting stereo spread right or panning things here an there it'll be fine. I don't think anyone's too deep into doing mega panning tweaks for effects anyway.

Overall, I think they're a viable monitoring solution. You lose high end accuracy and punchy response, but you do get good bass representation down to sub bass area. But it's probably about as accurate as a "put it in your pocket" sort of thing is going to get. For anything critical, like if you need to EQ or comp or anything like that I'd still use headphones, but for auditioning material 7550s will get the job done. In terms of accuracy, I'd rate it as being barely past the lowest end of what I'd consider as "production level" mainly because of the 40-90hz range heaviness and inbalance compared to the 15k+ zone. I'm just surprised this thing even produces excessive low end.

[dawman]

Are they 2-4 or 6 way drivers...?

[kensuguro]

I believe it's a single neodymium driver. The catch is that it's like half an inch big, and located outside of the earpiece, which is why I guess it's able to produce excessive bass. I also later found that the treble cut was from a filter they put in the earpiece so surprisingly, it's by design.