The H200 are the first headphones ADAM Audio have developed entirely in‑house.

Given that loudspeakers and headphones are the only listening options we have, it might seem surprising that few manufacturers make both. Many of the biggest names in studio monitoring have never dabbled in headphone production, whilst the market for phones is dominated by companies like AKG, Audeze, Audio‑Technica, Austrian Audio, beyerdynamic, Sennheiser and Sony Professional, whose ranges are mostly devoid of loudspeakers.

This reflects the fact that headphones and speakers actually have relatively little in common from a technological point of view. Design‑wise, moving‑coil phones share much more with dynamic microphones than they do with loudspeakers. But there are a few manufacturers who have successfully straddled the divide, including Yamaha, Focal and Neumann. And, in 2024, that list has gained two very notable additions. Finnish loudspeaker titans Genelec announced their first ever pair of headphones — which have yet to arrive at SOS Towers — and ADAM Audio launched the H200.

However, readers with long memories may recall that these aren’t quite the first pair of headphones to carry the ADAM Audio logo. Back in 2019, the company teamed up with Ultrasone to develop a model branded the SP‑5; but although these were said to be voiced to match ADAM’s loudspeakers, there was a lot more Ultrasone than ADAM in their DNA. So while the H200s might not be quite the first headphones to say ADAM on them, they’re certainly the first to have been designed and made entirely in‑house. And whereas the SP‑5s bore a hefty price tag at launch, the new model retails at a highly competitive £140$150.

The 200 Club

The H200s are orthodox passive, closed‑back headphones designed for music listening and general studio use. They employ a 40mm moving‑coil driver with a diaphragm made from a material called polyether ether ketone (PEEK), which is said to offer an optimal balance of rigidity, light weight and temperature stability. These are housed within earcups that look conventional, but which implement a patent‑pending internal airflow system that helps to control the low‑frequency response.

The plastic shells of the earcups are elongated and tilted back slightly in order to fit snugly over the average human ear, and suspended from aluminium yokes that permit a small amount of fore‑and‑aft rotation and a greater degree of freedom in the vertical plane. The yokes also slide in and out of the headband to accommodate heads of all sizes. The H200s ship with faux leather earpads; these are removable, and an alternative soft cloth version is available as a cost option. The headband cushion is also easily replaceable should the need arise.

Compared with other closed‑back designs such as the Sony and Austrian Audio models reviewed in this issue, the H200s clamp the sides of the head pretty firmly. This helps to keep them in position and maintain a good acoustic seal, which is desirable for consistent performance, but as a consequence I’d rate them only middling for comfort. The construction also makes them distractingly prone to the transmission of physical noise, especially from the headband.

Like quite a few modern headphone models, the ADAM H200s have a socket at the base of each earcup, allowing the cable to be attached to whichever side you find most convenient. This is done using a locking 2.5mm TRS mini‑jack. The supplied cable is 3m long and straight, but short and curly options can be purchased separately if you prefer.

There’s a virtual dimension to ADAM Audio’s offering that helps to set the H200 apart from other headphones in this price bracket.

In terms of what’s actually in the box, the physical package is completed by a simple padded drawstring bag. However, there’s also a virtual dimension to ADAM Audio’s offering that helps to set the H200 apart from other headphones in this price bracket.

House Correction

Since the introduction of Sonarworks’ Reference (now SoundID Reference) a decade or so ago, the studio world has come to accept that software equalisation can make a worthwhile improvement to the frequency balance of practically any pair of headphones. The cheaper and nastier the headphones, the bigger the improvement, and the only real down sides are practical rather than sonic: headphone correction adds complexity, can increase latency, and may require careful setting up if you want to avoid inadvertently bouncing mixes through it, or if you want to listen to other applications as well as your DAW.

SoundID Reference now supports a vast library of headphone models, and also offers loudspeaker calibration. Indeed, ADAM themselves have partnered with Sonarworks to integrate SoundID Reference calibration into their latest A‑series monitors. So it’s no surprise that they’ve decided to offer a software calibration tool for their headphones, but possibly more of a surprise that they haven’t simply licensed this from Sonarworks. Instead, ADAM Audio recruited plug‑in developers Sonnox — who, like ADAM, are part of the Focusrite empire — to create a new plug‑in that goes by the snappy title of ADAM Audio Headphone Utility. This is available for macOS and Windows in all the usual native formats, but there is currently no ‘systemwide’ version, so you will need a plug‑in host application to run it.

ADAM Audio Headphone Utility is, by design, about a million times simpler than the current iterations of SoundID Reference, or rivals such as dSoniq’s Realphones and ToneBoosters’ Morphit. Menus allow you to specify which type of earcups you’re using, and whether you want the plug‑in to compensate for subjective level changes when the correction is changed or bypassed. Another field currently does nothing but looks as though it might become a pop‑up selector for multiple headphone models, suggesting that there may be more in the pipeline. But the most interesting options are the switch labelled Voicing and the large triangular Externalisation control.

The former has two options, which mirror the equivalent settings on ADAM’s current A‑series loudspeakers. Pure is said to offer the most accurate, neutral presentation, while Uniform Natural Response is “a dynamic, natural‑sounding response curve of ADAM Audio’s own design, which stems from a variety of iconic ADAM Audio legacy products, including the AX Series”. Pedants might wonder why the same voicing can’t be both ‘neutral’ and ‘natural’; the two might be better described as ‘clinical’ and ‘fun’ respectively.

Externalisation is ADAM Audio’s attempt to mitigate some of the other well‑known issues with mixing on headphones that can affect translation to other systems. Standard headphones deliver almost complete separation between left and right channels, which is not at all what we experience with loudspeakers, where both ears hear both speakers, as well as reflections from room boundaries. Solutions to make headphone listening more speaker‑like range from simple crossfeed, where some of the left channel is fed into the right and vice versa, to ambitious binaural processing that models room acoustics, speaker response and the human ear itself. ADAM Audio’s offering is somewhere in the middle: a refined crossfeed technology that varies the amount of inter‑channel bleed with frequency, in a fashion that is said to be specifically optimised for the H200.

On The Scales

Unusually, ADAM Audio offer a meaningful frequency response measurement as part of the H200s’ specifications. With respect to 1kHz, the ‑3dB points at either end of the scale are at 2Hz and 23.5kHz. On paper this might sound limited compared with the high‑frequency numbers thrown around by other manufacturers, but those other manufacturers almost never qualify them with tolerances, so full marks to ADAM for doing so.

In other respects, the specifications of the H200 are fairly typical for a modern pair of closed‑back headphones. The nominal impedance is given as 32Ω, and a 1mW input at 1kHz will produce 97.5dB SPL output. This is not quite as sensitive as some rivals, but more than adequate for real‑world listening levels with any source. It’s also nice to see a distortion measurement given in the specifications, especially when it’s a very decent 0.002% THD for a 1kHz signal at 100dB SPL.

Subjectively, I rather liked the sound of the H200 even without ADAM’s frequency correction applied. In a world where most headphones seem to offer some flavour of ‘scooped’ tonality, they stand out by presenting the upper midrange in an agreeably forward way, and their most obvious distinguishing characteristic is a gentle but noticeable emphasis around 2.5kHz. In other respects, they struck me as being impressively close to my idea of ‘neutral’ right from the get‑go, and definitely more so than the vast majority of closed‑back headphones in this price bracket.

Some frequency analysis tests on ADAM’s own correction utility showed that they, too, clearly view the basic tonality as being reasonably close to neutral. In both modes, the plug‑in applies a narrow cut around 6.5kHz, which is presumably compensating for a small resonance or similar gremlin. A slightly broader cut is also apparent from 2.5‑3 kHz, and suggests that a couple of dB attenuation is enough to tame the H200s’ aforementioned mid‑forwardness. Both modes also apply some very broad tone‑shaping equalisation. In Pure mode, this consists of a gentle cut below 100Hz and a very broad shelving boost above 4kHz or so, again amounting to a couple of dB at most. Uniform Natural Response delivers more of a ‘smile curve’ sound, lifting both the lows and highs significantly. It’s certainly less flat, but it isn’t overdone, and is still closer to my idea of neutral than the default tone of many headphones. I didn’t have the opportunity to compare it with any vintage ADAM speakers, so I can’t tell you how closely it mimics the classic AX‑series sound.

I also really liked the plug‑in’s Externalisation feature. With complex psychoacoustic processing such as loudspeaker and room emulation, I find you’re often a bit too aware that the sound has been processed. The results are rarely completely natural, and in the worst event can sound noticeably phasey or watery. That’s not the case here. There’s no attempt to make it feel like you’re standing in front of a huge pair of Augspurgers in a world‑renowned studio, but Externalisation makes the sound stage feel much more speaker‑like, and does so without obvious side‑effects or down sides. I also like the simplicity of the plug‑in, though it would benefit from the option to have it automatically bypass itself during bounces, and a systemwide version would be very welcome.

Right Second Time

With the benefit of hindsight, the launch of the SP‑5 half a decade ago feels like a bit of a false start for ADAM Audio. They were too expensive to make an impact in a very competitive market, and they inherited enough of Ultrasone’s ultra‑bright family sound to make them a Marmite proposition from the sonic perspective. ADAM probably weren’t too thrilled with the SP‑5 review I wrote back in 2019, so it gives me all the more pleasure to report that they have absolutely knocked it out of the park with the H200s. By taking everything in‑house, they’ve come up with a really compelling blend of practicality, sound quality and value for money. You can spend a great deal more on a pair of closed‑back headphones and end up with something much less good — and the ADAM Audio Headphone Utility is a very valuable cherry on the icing.