The MDR-M1 are another pair of studio headphones from Sony. Some of you may remember the MDR-MV1 studio headphones that we reviewed about a year ago. Well, this couple has nothing to do with them. Instead, the M1 is a successor to the incredibly popular MDR-7506.
The 7506, and its various versions, have been around for over three decades at this point, and have become a cult classic. You probably don’t need to know much about headphones to be able to recognize them, as you’ve probably seen them hanging on the head or hanging around the neck of some celebrity singer, musician or podcaster at least once in your lifetime. .
So, the M1 has some very big shoes to fill. The $400 MV1s were fancy, flagship studio headphones while the M1s are meant for the more mainstream. Still, at $250, the M1 is 2.5 times the current price of the 7506. Do they justify the price jump? More importantly, do we finally have a worthy successor to the venerable 7506? Let’s find out.
design
The MDR-M1 are a pair of closed-back circumaural headphones. The design is very similar to the 7506 but with modern Sony design sensibilities.
You get the same earcups, yoke, and headband design as the 7506. Both have the distinctive blue ‘Professional’ sticker on the side along with colour-coded left and right labels. The headband also retains the visible stitching pattern around the edges. The cable is one-way and is mounted on the left side.
The new model has some notable improvements over the 7506. The M1 earpads are much better in terms of materials; Gone is the 7506’s garbage bag plastic, replaced by a soft, leather-like material with thicker padding and more depth. I measured about 22mm at the deepest point and 15mm at the shallowest point.
The redesigned headband features thicker cushioning in the middle whereas the 7506 had essentially none. The new headband design also hides the wiring for the right speaker as there are no longer any exposed cables hanging over the side. The new joint design rotates the earcups forward 90 degrees so they can lie flat.
Unfortunately, the downside of the new yoke design is that the earcups no longer fold inward. While the 7506 earcups had limited rotation ability and could be laid flat, the ability to fold them inward allowed them to collapse into a much smaller size that was easier to carry. In fact, it seems like Sony doesn’t want you to travel with the M1s at all, as they don’t come with a carrying pouch like the 7506.
Fortunately, the M1 have turned out to be a generally better headphone in terms of design. You now get a detachable cable that can be plugged into a standard 3.5mm jack and a screw-in mechanism that locks it in place. You get two cables with the M1, a 1.2m cable and a 2.5m cable, with 3.5mm jacks on both ends but a 6.3mm converter is provided in the box and is connected to the 2.5m cable by default.
In that sense, the M1 is even better than the MV1, which comes with a longer and heavier cable that terminates in a 6.3mm plug, and you have to connect the bundled adapter cable for 3.5mm connectivity. Having two cables of different lengths and a small converter instead of an adapter cable is definitely a better solution. You don’t get a coiled cable like the 7506, but it seems like the industry has moved on from coiled cables overall.
Overall, the M1 are a well-built pair of headphones. Sure, they’re made almost entirely of plastic, but if the 7506 is any indication, this is a tried and tested material that can withstand the rigors of everyday use for years to come. I also liked the feel of things like the twist on the metal connectors for cables and the satisfying click of the headband adjustment slider. The sliders feature markings so you can match them on both sides and if multiple people are using the same headphones, they can remember their settings and quickly switch to them without trial and error .
Rest
Comfort is a tricky topic because different head and ear sizes can make the same pair of headphones comfortable or uncomfortable. For its part, Sony has made the earpads of the M1 bigger, thicker and softer than those of the 7506. The 7506 earpads, despite their circumaural design, were not actually that large and so they mostly sat on the user’s ears rather than around them.
In my experience, the M1 earpads aren’t as big an improvement as I would have liked. I have fairly small ears and yet I was not able to completely clean the holes inside the M1 earpads. This meant that the entire edge of my ears were constantly touching the inside of the earpads and, at times, even protruding outside their inner confines. The earpads also aren’t particularly deep, so I can feel the fabric covering the drivers at all times.
The combined effect of all this was that the M1 was not at all comfortable for me. In fact, I would say they were actually quite uncomfortable at times. It was impossible for me to wear them for more than a few minutes without constantly removing and readjusting them so they could put pressure on a different part of my ears and hurt. The only time I could wear them for more than an hour was while gaming and that was only because the pain of the headphones was harder to notice than the pain of playing Overwatch 2 ranked.
The headphones are quite light and the clamping force is not much. It’s really only the earpads that make them hard for me to live with. The 7506 have amassed a sizable collection of third-party earpads over the years, and for good reason. The same should be the case with the M1 as the stock pads won’t be for everyone or even most people.
audio quality
The M1 features 40mm dynamic drivers with a wideband 5-80,000Hz frequency range. The drivers are slightly angled within the earcups to point them more effectively towards the inside of your ears.
The frequency response of the M1 is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from Sony. It’s the same kind of homely sound we get on other Sony headphones with boosted mid-bass, subdued low treble and bright high treble.
Starting at the bottom end, the M1 has quite a slight boost in the mid-bass and upper-bass ranges. This results in a warmer, more booming quality to the bass, but not to the extent we find in some of the company’s more consumer-oriented models. On the other hand, low-bass is lacking, and the drivers don’t hit the lower registers with enough impact, leaving the bass a bit of a note in the middle. Despite being open-backed, it had much better low-bass than the MV1.
Moving into the mid-range, some residual energy leaks out of the high-bass, which dampens the lower-mid frequencies and brings some unwanted weight to some string instruments and voices. However, the upper mid-range is absolutely fine, resulting in most male voices still retaining their timbre and natural sound quality.
Moving into treble, the M1 disappoints with a slightly dull low-treble region in the 2000-5000Hz region. This causes other stringed instruments such as the guitar to lose some of their clarity and also affects the breathing of some female voices, resulting in a slightly stifled sound.
Things pick up here and there as we get into the upper register, however, suddenly the treble response catches a second wind in the areas above 6000Hz and especially in the 7-8000Hz region, where things get a little spicy. Can. Cymbals and hi-hats, as well as some electronic music sounds, have an extra burst of unwanted brightness, making them sound a bit tinny and harsh.
The overall tone verges on being slightly V-shaped, with a rise in the mid-bass and high-treble and a fall in the upper mid-range and low-treble regions. The sound is warm, perhaps a little too much at times, and there isn’t enough usable treble energy to balance it out, resulting in a slightly dark overall presentation. I would hesitate to call it muddy but it’s not as clean or clinical sounding as I’d like with a pair of monitoring headphones.
This was also a problem with the MV1, where it seems Sony can’t stop itself from coloring the sound of its headphones with the distinctive Sony house sound, even though the intended purpose of the product is monitoring audio. You can’t monitor something if the thing you’re listening to is coloring the sound along the way. Then again, the 7506s aren’t exactly neutral sounding either and people seem to be treating them just fine. The M1 is comparatively less colorful, and better suited for monitoring than the 7506.
Apart from professional use cases, the M1 are great headphones for home use. For those who just listen to music, watch movies or play games, the M1 is reasonably streamlined and versatile. I personally would have liked a little more lower treble presence but it’s not something you can’t fix with EQ. Even without EQ, I had no interest in fine-tuning the sound of these headphones and most of the music I heard was enjoyable.
The M1 don’t have a particularly wide or attractive sound stage, in no small part due to the closed-back nature of the headphones. The sound is placed firmly around your head rather than away from it and the imaging performance is only so-so. These aspects may also be improved to a degree with a slightly more extended treble response. Having said that, I didn’t have too many issues with audio placement when using the headphones for gaming and the M1 is perfectly usable for casual gaming.
Unlike the closed-back design, the M1 actually has good passive noise isolation. The headphones can easily tune out most small background sounds like air conditioners and fans, which can be good for people who can work in noisy environments without using wireless noise-canceling headphones.
The M1 headphones are also very easy to operate. Not only can you easily power them from a laptop’s headphone jack, but you can also power them from a smartphone quite well; I used a passive analog dongle with the Nothing Phone (2) and the phone’s internal DAC/amp had more than enough juice for these headphones. With the short cable, it really wasn’t a bad setup for listening to music.
On the subject of cables, I would like to say that the stock cables exhibit a small but notable amount of microphonics, where the movement of the cable around your clothing transmits sound to the earcups. Plus, the cables are great.
conclusion
The MDR-M1 is an improvement in almost every imaginable way over its predecessor, the MDR-7506. They’re slightly more comfortable, have better build quality, more balanced sound, and better connectivity. The only downside in comparison is the lack of foldability and travel pouch, making the new M1 much less suitable for travel.
Apart from the comparison with the 7506, the M1 come across as quite a well-designed and well-built headphone with good tuning for home users keeping in mind the versatile use case. However, the sound may be slightly colored in the original intended use case of monitoring. They weren’t comfortable at all to my ears, which isn’t even for professionals who you’d expect to wear for hours on end.
At $250, the M1 is a bit expensive for what you get, especially considering the 7506 is only going for $99 and isn’t 2.5 times worse. If the price of the M1 drops to around $150 the M1 will be worth picking up for home use and you can spend the savings on a pair of quality aftermarket pads. But if you’re looking for monitoring purposes, there are more analytical options out there.
