Halfway up, halfway down
On the face of it, Sennheiser’s HD 450BT offers a nice bargain — the full combination of wireless Bluetooth operation and active noisecancellation offered by the company’s
$599 flagship Momentum Wireless model, yet at half the price. This design builds on the previous HD 4.50BTNC — the NC disappears from the name but not from the headphones (as noted in our Momentum Wireless review, Sennheiser now seems to consider NC so ubiquitous as not to merit inclusion in the headline). The new model upgrades to USB-C charging, extends battery life to an impressive 30hrs, and has a new white option available as an alternative to the deep-grey/black of our review pair.
They are solidly if purposefully built, in sturdy plastic with synthetic leather earpads and soft silicone rubber under the headband; they hinge closed very compactly to fit into the included small soft cloth bag.
The HD 450BT’s Bluetooth 5.0 implementation includes the AAC Bluetooth codec to improve audio from Apple devices; Android devices which are compatible can take advantage of the only slightly lossy aptX options, including aptX Low Latency which reduces the delay of Bluetooth to as little as 40ms, so assisting sync if you’re using the headphones with a TV or for watching, say, videos on a tablet. The headphones can maintain multiple Bluetooth connections and once we’d connected them to both our phone and tablet they would automatically reconnect to both devices on power up.
The control buttons become fairly intuitive once you’re accustomed to the layout — power up/down is usefully out of the way at the very front of the row of buttons on the right earcup, and a short press on this will toggle the noise-cancelling on and off — unusually without comment from the voice prompt system, which is nicely reserved on this model. The noise-cancelling is effective without being too intrusive, and has only a small effect on the music quality — it’s slightly improved in clarity with noise-cancelling off.
On the other side of the USB-C charging slot and cable socket is an easily feelable pair of volume up and down buttons (every step accompanied by an unnecessary bleep), and beyond those an excellent slider which slides up for next track, down for last track and push for pause; this also accepts or rejects calls, for which the Sennheiser has two mikes. The final button on the right earcup summons your smart device’s voice assistant, and also provides a useful way to get a temporary ambient mode where you can hear what’s going on outside (for that ‘beef or chicken’ plane moment, say).
With all this, then, what distinguishes these headphones from the twice-the-price Momentum Wireless? The most obvious initial answer is the comfort; they are remarkably tight to the head around the ears (or were for us), to the point of feeling slightly claustrophobic; this single factor prevented them from being our casual headphone of choice, as visiting Sennheisers usually become.
Then there’s the sound; the company is so infallibly on target with its tuning that we listened in disbelief to the soft lifeless sound, the flabby bass emerging via Bluetooth from iPhone and iPad. We couldn’t initially EQ this, as on their arrival the Smart Control app hadn’t been updated for this model, but once that happened we linked the app to the 450BT and headed to Sennheiser’s new floaty EQ option (the only thing the app offers for this model). There are no EQ presets, and it gives you a single point with which to adjust EQ. Want treble? Then you can’t have bass. Want more bass? Then it rolls off the treble. We knew (and disliked) this approach from the otherwise excellent Momentum Wireless mkIII, though there its limitation made little difference because the default balance was so spot on.
Could we correct the 450BT’s deficiencies with such a blunt tool? Turns out, yes, we could, if not to the precision we’d prefer.
We overadjusted on the first effort — good for one song but not overall. Our second attempt was more successful (pictured), and finally we were able to enjoy music somewhere close to the quality we had expected from Sennheiser. The bass was now notably less flabby, and the tendency to thump a little too prominently was reduced — Aphrodite’s Child’s The Beast from ‘666’ has kickdrums panned left and right, and these had showed up a tendency to flab at the bottom, as did anything with a strong central bass pedal. Now it was thumpy but not dominant, while the central piano and guitar had additional edge to cut through.
The saviour of some headphones is to switch to cabled use, which here also has the advantage of using no power, so it’s a fallback for a battery crisis, as well as essential for in-flight use. And yes, the sound was significantly better, with greater clarity and far better tone inherent to its sound, since the EQ doesn’t affect the wired sound. Jeff Lynne’s Losing You had a rich spread rather than what had seemed an overloaded thickness of sound via Bluetooth, though overall they still lacked detail in the detail or any sense of airiness. And the fit remained tight, further discouraging long listening. Besides, if you’re happy using cables rather than wireless listening, Sennheiser has better sound than this available for the price from other models.
Overall then the feature count is very good for the price, but the HD 450BT gets a mere pass grade for sound. Which is a rare verdict indeed on a Sennheiser headphone.
One last note on privacy — if you visit Sennheiser’s website below, take the time to click on the ‘find out more’ button when it requests you accept cookies. We lost count of the number of tracking options it was attempting to implement, and spent a full five minutes turning stuff off. Sure, everyone does it, but this seemed particularly invasive.
When compared to other Fiio DAPs like the M9, the M11 is thicker and heavier, but diving into its parts explains why. Socketry is generous: it has two microSD slots, so with 2TB cards able to carry a possible 4TB of high-res music, along with 32GB of internal storage (26GB actually usable).
There’s a standard 3.5mm minijack headphone output but also 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced outputs, and USB-C for both charging and playback. The minijack can operate at line level and is actually a combo digital connector (adaptor provided), so you can plug the M11 into a full hi-fi several ways. And the 5.15-inch IPS display has 720p resolution, putting it in HD territory, higher than previous M-series models. Size notwithstanding, its brighter sharper images are good enough even for video.
Inside the M11 runs on a Samsung Exynos 7872 processor, a mid-range chipset as used in some smartphones in 2018, with dual AK4493EQ DACs doing the audio conversion.
The M11 supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi signals, and with AirPlay enabled the M11 becomes a receiver to playback audio from an iOS device or Mac computer. There’s Bluetooth in as well, covering aptX, aptX HD and LDAC. There’s no AAC Bluetooth (so use AirPlay), but AAC is supported from card or DLNA/UPnP network streaming. There’s also Bluetooth out for wireless headphones or speakers.
The M11 runs on Android 7.0 Nougat, albeit in a slightly neutered form because, as with other Fiios, there is no Google Play Store from which to download apps. Instead, Fiio has its own market which includes several popular music and streaming apps: Tidal, Spotify, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Deezer and TuneIn, also Qobuz, though that’s not yet available here. The Android experience also extends to a choice between something classic and something modern. For instance, by default, the M11 had soft keys at the bottom for back, home and multitasking. We could turn those off in favour of gesture controls in settings, as in the M9.
There’s a preinstalled Chrome browser, via which we played videos from YouTube and Netflix. It’s a small screen, for sure, and Netflix wouldn’t deliver HD, but it worked!
Fiio has also at last included over-the-air firmware updates; no longer do you need to copy them to a memory card to install.
Format support is comprehensive indeed, with PCM in WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless or up to 32-bit/384kHz and DSD to DSD512. And audio quality was excellent, as we find even on Fiio’s lowest levels of player, and here with the drive to handle even difficult headphones, while in line-out mode distortion is a vanishingly low 0.001%.
Even with the larger battery made possible by the M11’s size, there’s still only 13 hours available on the clock, and that’s when you’re using wired headphones. Go wireless, use the screen on high brightness, or use the conversion to DSD function and you get rather less: around 10 hours was our norm with wireless headphones. But given this is a player capable of use at home and away, with great sound, features and networking, the value is clear.