Quick review
The good
The not-so-good
Mixing music and simply listening is a joy when your ears are between the Sennheiser HD 480 Pro, a pair that keeps the sound in without oversharing with the world.
Corded headphones may well have been the norm a few years ago, but times have changed and now they’re a specialist kind of thing.
Most people have made their way to the wonderful world of wireless headphones, often for the joy of noise cancellation, while the cord sticks around as a “backup” for those devices, or even for offering USB-C digital-to-analogue converters built in.
Sennheiser’s HD 480 Pro is very different to that style of headphone.
Design and features
This is a pair made for people who plug right into their computer, their sound card, an external interface or mixer, or maybe even a dedicated amp and the like.
The 480 Pro doesn’t really need a headphone amplifier to drive them, but the tech inside and the included wound cord tell you exactly who these headphones are for: creators and lovers of sound who don’t want to share it with anyone in the office, or even the mixing desk.
The latter is the primary place you can expect to find the headphones in, however, be it a stationary mixing desk in a studio or maybe one made to go using a laptop. Sennheiser has built these headphones in the shadow of a pair we saw back in 2024 in the HD 490 Pro, which was an open style of mixing headphones.
Different in design, the 490 let the air and sound flow freely, but means people around you can hear some of what you’re playing. By comparison, the 480 are closed, a point you can see when looking at the design of the back of the cups.
While the HD 490 were an open mesh that invited you to see the hardware underneath lurking like the windows on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, the HD 480 are more of an inward curve of black, like a less glossy take of Darth Vader’s helmet from the same film.
Aside for there being a Star Wars reference for both headphones, that makes them different, even if they’re quite similar. They support similar maximum sound pressure levels, albeit not identical, and similar sensitivity and impedance.
They both have an architecture to reduce total harmonic distortion and vibrations, though on the HD 480 Pro, it’s called a Vibration Attenuation System” versus the open-frame architecture in the 490 Pro.
But the style is different, and Sennheiser has built these for people who don’t need to share everything they’re listening to or working on with everyone around them.
In-use
Like their sibling, the design of the pads is a highlight, the plush circumaural earpads providing an easy way to wear the headphones, and even incorporating room for wearing glasses in the design. Your ears go inside these lush pads, and feel more like how you might imagine a cloud would cushion things.
Between them and the design, the 480 Pro hardly feel as heavy as they should, the 274 gram weight barely making a dent on comfort. These are exactly what you’d expect: a sizeable and highly comfortable pair of headphones for working and listening in.
Using the headphones is fairly easy: you plug them in and away you go.
Your Mac or PC should be able to drive these cans, something we tested with Logic Pro on the MacBook Pro M5 14 inch and some projects we’ve worked on. However, we also ran the headphones through a digital-to-analogue converter plugged into both a Mac Studio and a phone to see how the headphones handled day-to-day music.
Sufficed to say, they’re easy to use and fairly easy to drive, as well. While you won’t find a digital workstation plugin in the box like with its predecessor, they are made to
Performance
For the past few days, we’ve been using the HD 480 Pro while on the air for radio, a little bit of mixing, and of course regular listening, matching them with Apple Music’s lossless files and a THX Onyx DAC plugged into the Samsung Fold 7. As you can probably imagine, the results have been clear and fine.
Radio appearances are mostly people talking, which is hardly a workout for the headphones, but things are different when it comes time to mixing and listening.
Armed with music, be it in mixing, or mastered and delivered, the results are excellent, and not out of kilter from larger speakers you might yearn for on your desk.
As usual, we’re putting this pair through its paces using the Pickr Sound Test, which you can try for yourself, which starts with electronic from Tycho and Daft Punk, setting us up with an early highlight: a super-wide soundstage that’s impossible not to notice. There’s a decent balance in this massive space somehow materialising between these cans, while the bass can punch a little harder than you might expect.
It’s a fairly consistent vibe throughout the music we heard, at that. The dynamics of pop delivered reasonable balance with just a little more bass than expected, coming off more like proper listening cans than mixing cans.
In rock and jazz where the music wasn’t as overly pushed, the sound was definitely flatter, though could come off feeling restrained at times, as if the lows were about to distort but weren’t given the freedom to move. Take the guttural sound of FKAW Twigs’ “Two Weeks”, which almost appeared to be driven to the precipice of bass, but was just held back, something we suspect Sennheiser’s Vibration Attenuation System is in charge of.
It can be a similar situation where there isn’t a lot of bass to work with. In the Deftones “Digital Bath”, the highs come off as slightly restrained, almost as if a punch is being pulled.
The sound isn’t quite as warm as what Sennheiser offers in the HDB 630 noise cancelling headphones, but that’s shouldn’t be a surprise. The focus here should be on a flatter sound, and you mostly get that, albeit also feeling like there’s a little more for the folks who like to listen and work.
Throughout it all, the soundstage is wide and spacious, and armed with high-res sound (or the original files to mix from), the vibe is you’re getting everything, warts and all. It’s as clear as it gets with minimal distortion and fuzz, except in extreme lows.
About the only quibble we have is the bass can be a little heftier than you expect, sounding more like a conventional listening headphone at times than a flat mixing headphone. That’s not a bad thing, but rather a part of the personality offered by the HD 480 Pro, giving you a little more than simply workhorse headphones.
In short, they do both: the HD 480 Pro are designed for work and play. You might not ever want to take them off.
Value
And given the price, that’s a totally valid position to be in.
Set at nearly a thousand dollars, the Sennheiser HD 480 Pro headphones are not inexpensive, attracting a $739 price tag for just the headphones by themselves with a small bag, or $819 with a firm carrying case in the HD 480 Pro Plus.
These are recommended retail prices, of course, and so you’ll probably end up finding the Sennheiser 480 Pro headphones for less. At the RRP, it’s difficult to recommend, but a mere Google glance showed prices more around $580 for the headphones without the case, and a little more with it.
At around $150 less for the street price, the Sennheiser HD 480 Pro make a lot more sense, and actually nail value batter.
The bigger problem isn’t feeling like retailers might rip you off at the suggested retail price, but more what the HD 480 Pro competes with. In fact, with Rode’s NTH-100 offering similar comfort and sound for roughly a third the price, the question becomes which makes sense for your listening and mixing pleasure.
Both are great, but we’d actually go on a limb and say the HD 480 Pro is more comfortable. Depending on what you’re doing, Rode’s audio could be just as good, but you’ll never want to take off the HD 480 Pro. They’re that comfortable.
You just need to decide whether the cost accounts for these headphones being more comfortable against the Rode, or any other pair of headphones they’d compete with.
What needs work?
While the price gets our Spider-sense tingling, the cables are the only real issue we have with the HD 480 Pro headphones, much the same as they were on the HD 490 Pro before them.
We’ve come around more to the use of Mini-XLR cables in Sennheiser’s headphones — they’re balanced, so the choice makes sense — but we do take an issue with Sennheiser only including one.
For a pair of headphones to cost as much as the HD 480 Pro, it’s kind of surprising to see just one cable in the box. Granted, it’s a nice long coiled cable, but you only get the one, unlike the two you could find in the open variant that is the 490 Pro Plus bundle.
We’re actually reviewing a pre-production variant of the 480 Pro Plus, so it should be the same as the final release. The fact that we’re seeing just the one cable suggests it’ll be the same at retail.
Of course, this could just be a sign of shrinkflation, and might just make the similarly priced HD 490 Pro more valued. The sound will be open and others will hear some of your audio, sure, but at least you’ll get an extra cord.
What we love
The price is on the high side, but the comfort is difficult to ignore, and practically impossible at that.
The huge circumaural cans of the HD 480 Pro are delightfully large, encompassing your ears in a mixture of foam and fabric, and are also technically replaceable, too. They’re the sort of pads you’ll be able to wear for hours, because we sure did, with about the only obstacle being the cable.
Obviously, the sound is a key part of the listening experience, and it too is lovely. However, if we had to live in a pair of headphones, this would be one of the pairs we’d never leave.
Final thoughts (TLDR)
Easily some of the most comfy cans you’ll come across, the Sennheiser HD 480 Pro makes the case for staying plugged in when you need to, typically when work demands it.
They’re not perfect sonically, but the sound is a really interesting mid-point between poise and professionalism, imparting a level of confidence that almost works, but doesn’t sound quite as good as a predecessor.
It’s difficult to argue against these cans too aggressively, because they do sound really good. And for anyone who needs something close to mixing speakers, but needs a closed environment, Sennheiser gets near enough for jazz. In fact, jazz likes these cans. The problem is not everything else does the same way.
You also won’t likely find anything that hates these headphones, though, and that’s a positive. They’re a lovely pair for people who are striving to find a middle ground for music mixing and listening. They’re just not their open-backed sibling, and that’s OK.
