AUDIOTECHNICA ATH-MSR7

High-res audio headphones from the aural heavyweight

LIKE IT OR NOT, it’s not always possible to have your PC audio piped out from your glorious 5.1 surround sound setup. However awesome your taste in music, your room-mate or significant other may have different ( obviously worse) tastes, and might also not appreciate the sounds of your current fantasy realm/postapocalyptic nightmare of choice booming out at all hours of the day and night.

What are you to do? Get yourself a serious set of headphones in order to jealously guard your spectacular audio taste, and keep it from the ears of others. They simply don’t deserve it.

While a great many PC headsets are aimed at gamers, there is a rising tide of users eschewing gaming headsets’ overblown bass tones in favor of the more accurate audio of high-end headphones. Audio-Technica has a great heritage in that field—which has also lead it to create some impressive gaming headsets recently— and the ATH-MSR7 aims its sights squarely at the high-resolution audio arena.

High-resolution audio is essentially defined as anything above the standard CD-quality level, and with a bountiful specs list, the MSR7 cans ought to be a great match for that headphone amp you’ve always wanted to plug into your PC.

They’ve also obviously been designed for this post-Beats world, where it’s no longer weird to be seen walking around with a hefty set of headphones strapped to your braincase. The plush leather headband and ear cups, together with the aluminum-coated surrounds, help give the MSR7 headphones that high-end aesthetic. Though we have to admit, we’d rather have the less showy black option, as opposed to the gun-metal gray version we’ve been testing—the brown, gray, and red mix doesn’t really sit too well with us.

But these aren’t Beats headphones— the audio quality actually matters with the MSR7. And in that, it’s a fine set of cans. Though for $250, we’d have hoped for something a little more than just “fine.”

The tonal separation to the MSR7, though, is impressive, enabling you to pinpoint different audio notes, and in wellproduced songs, you get a great feeling of space to the instrument positioning. The fact it seems to have a relatively flat EQ is in itself not a problem; we’d rather have more accurate audio than unnecessarily over-emphasized bass response. The MSR7 does lack a little punch at the low end, but it remains detailed and controlled.

CHAIN REACTION

There is a certain lack of depth, though. When listening to proper 24-bit/96kHz high-res audio tracks, you’ve got all the aural data there to produce spine-tingling experiences, but we never seemed to hit those genuinely affecting heights. At the crescendo of Fleetwood Mac’s TheChain, we want the mix of driving bass and choral highs to make the hairs on our arms stand to attention, but Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie’s vocals tend toward harsh with the Audio-Technica headphones.

In-game, however, that tonal separation makes it a decent fit for your PC’s highend audio components. Running through a discrete high-quality soundcard, the MSR7 recreates game audio admirably, delivering a wide, detailed soundscape.

The difficulty for Audio-Technica is that there is a great deal of competition at this price point; from its own high-end gaming headsets, for one. The ATH-AG1X cans are detailed, expansive, and come with a highquality mic—the MSR7 headphones have to make do with a limited condenser mic on the detachable cables they come with. All told, Audio-Technica’s MSR7 headphones are a decent option for your audio, but they generally fall short of being anything more exciting than that. –DAVE JAMES