This is the O&E E800P. O&E is a new headphone company based in China that I honestly can’t even find all that much information on. I signed up for a beta test and honestly didn’t even expect them to come but I actually got these yesterday. I was given a deadline of November 1 to send a review in which happens to coincide with a vacation, so I’m writing this really quickly and will update this if anything radically changes when I get more time with it. It looks like the Monoprice M1060 but the drivers have different rated sensitivity so I can’t guarantee they’re actually the same headphone.

I believe this is a pre-production so I won’t go into detail about the packaging or build, but there were a number of issues I’d like fixed before this is released:

The cable going into the cup side has four conductors. I thought this was needlessly complicated until I realized that the plugs going into the cups were a TRS plugs and both channels were wired on both side; the channels weren’t separated so they sounded mono. I had to desolder one wire from each side to get them to actually get stereo sound.

The headband is huge. I’m at max extension on the DT880 but I’m at minimum extension on these. I can’t imagine this would fit a lot of people comfortably.

One of the cups swivels freely while the other one doesn’t.

Both cups jiggle without much force because they aren’t flush with the headband

The grills’ edges aren’t completely smooth; I cut my finger on one

The headband had light fraying

I took some a quick frequency response measurement:

The E800P’s measurements look rather terrifying with a 15dB dip from 3kHz to 6kHz. Surprisingly, they don’t sound as awful as the measure, but they still have a way to go. I was asked to compare to other planar magnetic headphones, so I’ll include some brief comparisons.

The E800P’s bass has a good amount of impact without any noticeable bumps, but it manages to sound slightly bloated and muddy because it struggles with separation. Compared to the Hifiman HE400i, it sounds more impactful, but I’d hesitate to compare it favorably to anything higher in the Hifiman lineup because I do believe it needs a lot of work to compete with even the HE500. It also hits harder than many LCD2’s and even LCD3’s I’ve heard or owned, but again, it doesn’t come close in technicalities.

The E800P’s midrange is iffy. Up to around 1.5k, they sound fine, but the E800P does more than just dip; they tumble downwards. I struggled to enjoy anything with vocals or instruments because of how much upper midrange they lacked. It’s not too unlike the Hifiman HE400 from memory, but worse. It vaguely reminds me of a few pre-Fazor LCD-2’s I’ve heard, but this is so much more drastic. They sound so distant that the only genre I enjoyed with the E800P was non-vocal electronic.

But things start to go up with treble, literally. There’s a very noticeable 8kHz spike that keeps them from sounding totally dark. It leads to an interesting sound, I can’t really explain why because I generally hate darkbright sound signatures like this one, but with electronic music with no vocals, this headphone somehow works because it’s just fun. However, that’s not to say it sounds good. On the contrary, the spike makes them sound very, very artificial.

Overall, this is a really hard headphone to recommend for most people. If these were priced alongside the similar-looking M1060 at $299, I’d recommend EDM lovers compare these to the Fostex TH-X00, but I believe I was told this would cost north of $2,000. This is not worth remotely close to $2,000. I don’t even know if this is worth 20% of that because it’s such a specific sound.