Denon AH-D9200 headphones review: Sound sensation

It's not every day that you would go out and buy a pair of headphones for £1,400. But it's not every day that you get to experience quality quite like that on offer from the Denon AH-D9200. Yes, these are expensive over-ears, but the sound experience is undeniable.

Design

• Japanese leather over memory foam earpads
• Aluminum diecast hanger with adjustment
• 3m silver coated OFC cable (6.3mm plug)
• 1.3m audio cable (3.5mm plug)
• Japanese bamboo wood finish

Dressed with a memory foam headband that's covered in stitched leather, the D9200 is a fairly large scale but supremely comfortable set of cans. The design is striking too, thanks to that Japanese bamboo wood finish, while the aluminium headband accurately clicks from position to position to make for the perfect fit.

Some have called the D9200 'portable', and while you could don these over your ears on your travels, we suspect most people will stick with them for at-home listening. The separated left/right 3.5mm channel inputs, one per earcup, would make standing on the London Underground a bit more fussy than wearing a pair of Bluetooth wireless cans, really.

But that's not to draw away from all the D9200 gets right: these well-made over-ears make no apologies; they're headphones with design, material and quality focus. There's no noise-cancelling, there's no wireless connectivity, there's none of those higher-end features that many tech-savvy types crave.

Sound

• Patented 50mm 'FreeEdge Nanofiber' drivers
• Over 1 Tesla Neodymium magnet
• 5Hz-56kHz frequency response

Listen to the D9200 and your mind will be blown with the sheer quality on offer here. By doing away with any of those additional technologies, Denon has created a product focused on its main reason for being: delivering the highest-quality sound.

It's not that a pair of headphones £1,000 less sound bad, it's just that the way in which the D9200 delivers whacking bass, stonking levels of detail, and a crisp sharpness that's never shrill is really second to none.

A lot of this is to do with the drivers utilising a Neodymium magnet to keep a clean signal, while that wood housing avoids resonance that might cause vibrations and clatter in other headphones.

Feed the D9200 good source material and it'll deliver in droves. As with so many audiophile headphones, it's the addition you get from the higher-end frequencies that really give away extra, before-unheard qualities.

The bass, too, is really big. Not in a boomy way. Just really thick and taut. And with the earcups themselves so large, everything is delivered in a spatially open way, which sounds very free.

You needn't listen to Hi-Res tracks by classical composers either: the range these headphones offer, from pop to rock, underground bass music, to classical, leaves no facet untouched.

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