The Audeze MM-500 doesn’t break the bank and you in return get a headphone which you can use in both the studio use as well as for normal listening. The MM-500 is not the most refined monitor for mixing, as Audeze has the MX4 for that, and it’s not the very best technical performer, as we have the LCD-5 in that spot. But the beauty of the MM-500 is that it’s a do it all headphone, which is easy to drive. You can use it for everything you want, anywhere you want, and it will perform at a really good level. Therefor I am convinced many audiophiles will like the MM-500.

The Audeze MM-500 is probably one of the most rounded headphones releases the company has launched to date.

As one of the pioneers of consumer planar headphones, Audeze's new generation headphones are audiophile hardware that's worth getting excited about. The design itself opens a new era for the headphone company, with a more mature design and finish. Furthermore, Audeze continues to push the envelope on its sound, with the MM-500 presenting a much tidier and richer sound that we have heard before, setting a new standard for clarity and forward sounding audio that is ideal for both content creation as well as content consumption.

Apart from my complaints with the clamp force that make this headphone mildly incompatible with my life-long affliction of large head syndrome, and that I expect this to be a problem for other similarly large-domed audiophiles, I’m going to recommend the Audeze MM-500 - that is, if you know what it is that you’re getting into!

the MM?500s are more forward in the upper midrange, and subjectively brighter. I still wouldn’t call them bright in absolute terms, though, and such brightness as they possess has a different character from the 10kHz airiness you get in many moving?coil models, being more focused in the upper midrange. Achieving a good high?frequency response from a planar headphone is a considerably technical challenge, and some other models I’ve tried have met this challenge only at the expense of unevenness in this area. That’s not at all the case with the MM?500. A good test for this sort of thing is the original mono mix of the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’. On some headphones, the tambourine hits are rendered as piercing bursts of noise. On the MM?500, they sound like tambourine hits. More than that, in fact: you can follow every swish and slap of the instrument, as though it was being played right in front of you.

If you’re into the incredible detail that high-resolution music files can reproduce, the Audeze MM-500 is specifically designed to highlight that kind of listening.