McIntosh MHP 1000

For a full-bodied listening experience, these are a must for audiophiles

Listen to your favourite track on the MHP 1000 and you realise the many notes and nuances that you missed. Ensuring tonal quality with a full-bodied listening experience, these half-kilogram headphones may feel heavy, but are a pleasure to use.

The aluminium and black leather design coupled with meticulous engineering make these headphones free of fatigue to wear and use. The closed design isolates external noise to give you a fully immersive listening experience. The earpads, like the headband, are made of premium natural soft leather.

On the inside are 40 mm diameter, 3-layer compound diaphragm dynamic transducers that feature a viscoelastic centre layer, powered by a Tesla annular neodymium magnet motor assembly to give you a full frequency response from 5 Hz to 20KHz, and a nominal pressure level of 97 db to 122 db.

The headphones have a nominal impedance of 200 Ohms and hence will require a headphone amplifier to be used. Though McIntosh ensures that the MHP1000 will work with any of its legacy headphone amps, it recommends that the MHA1000 (roughly $4,500) be used.

The MHA 1000 uses McIntosh’s unique Autoformer technology to produce three impedance ranges of 8-40, 40-150 and 150-600 ohms, so that you can also use other headphones. Featuring a Headphone Crossed Director that McIntosh calls HXD, it allows high-quality recordings to be reproduced as though on conventional speakers. The MHA1000 also features four digital inputs and can decode files up to 32 bits and 192 kHZ.

The MHP1000 comes with two stereo connector cables: a 1 metre, 3.5 mm, and a 3 metre, 6.3 mm version. Both feature gold plated custom designed connectors for a perfect fit and a lossless connection.

Though these are the first headphones by McIntosh, the MHP 1000 showcases 65 years of the firm’s history with crystal clarity and a price that is just about right for the serious audiophile.

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Gagandeep Singh Sapra