Technics isn’t as widely recognized a Japanese brand as Sony, but for those who know it, it carries a lot of fond memories of high-end audio equipment. It’s for that reason that the brand was revived by Panasonic a couple of years ago, primarily to serve as the glorious label on a new line of throwback turntables. But in among them, the company managed to fit in a very premium (and promising) pair of headphones, which it called the EAH-T700 and unveiled for the first time at IFA 2015. By the spring of this year, the T700s were out on sale and I had a review pair in my possession.
Some truly impressive engineering has been poured into these aluminum and leather cans
On my first encounter with the T700s at CES, I was wowed by the clarity, detail, and impact of the music produced by them. Carved out of solid aluminum, padded out with leather-clad memory foam, and featuring not one but two speakers per ear cup, these were instantly impressive headphones. A little over-engineered, perhaps, what with their diversity of adjustments — the headband can be adjusted forward and back as well as up and down — but they certainly conveyed the sense of something befitting their price. I wasn’t aware of their cost when I first tried them, which served to reinforce my conviction that I wasn’t just interpreting a high price to mean high performance.
But.
The trouble with the T700s is not something you can easily detect on first, or even second, listen. They really do have great precision and Panasonic’s claims about a resonance-dampened construction that eliminates distortion stand up to close scrutiny. But these headphones’ frequency response is all kinds of weird — and that weirdness is rarely of the pleasant kind. They don’t have subsonic bass extension like, for example, the Fostex TH-X00s, but they do have a bass bump. Listening to episodes of Game of Thrones, every male character has a deeper voice than he should, and thin and rickety doors slam with the aural heft of a giant gate. That’s where I favor these Technics cans: their added emphasis on thumps, thuds, and masculine roars enhances the atmosphere of the TV show and lends itself well to action movies, too.
Grid View
Technics EAH-T700 photos from CES 2016
I’m not going to pretend to be able to detect something as precise as, say, a peak in the frequency graph at 5kHz, but beside their exaggerated upper bass and lower mids, the Technics T700s also have overly strident response in the treble region. Those are not necessarily bad features, as Beats headphones have made abundantly clear with their tuning — which, while not particularly faithful or linear when drawn as a graph, is exceedingly pleasing to the ear. But in the case of the T700s, the particular spots where the headphones diverge from a neutral reproduction of the sound are mostly unpleasant when trying to enjoy music. It’s basically like a finely crafted plate of fine dining where the flavors are all wrong.