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The choice of music is one item in sound checking that fluctuates quite a bit, no real assortment of songs covers all the bases. With that said I decided to pick a bit of an off the wall set of tracks to see how these headphones responded. At the same time I had the TV sound about halfway to create background noise to disrupt things throughout testing.

Initial D Second Stage D Non-Stop Selection was the first one up, a series of Super Eurobeat style songs from various artists, lots of variety going on throughout each track, examples of such things are Mikado which feature alternating between the left and right channels or distinct sounds throughout the background to make up the base of the song. During play I was able to test out the SRS abilities and see how well it did for environment creation. While in this situation there was a bit of noticeable coloring to everything, it still sounded decent. The good part about the SRS option is that it can be adjusted with a wheel of its own. I usually only turn it up just a bit to throw some of the highs to what would be the rear. instead of directly in. The drivers in the satellites held up quite well as there were a lot of tasks to accomplish with plenty of low frequencies and high frequencies to tackle all at once. I was surprised to experience how well the drivers pumped out the tracks.

Those who remember the movie Clueless will most likely have an idea of who these guys are, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones offer quite a bit of variety in their tracks, lots of hard deep notes from the bass guitars and highs courtesy of the brass section in the band. In a more traditional use I figured the SRS would kick in better any way. Playing Someday I Suppose I let the track run through without SRS on, the kicks from the drums were great, the bass dropped low with minimal distortion and the horns lit up the high notes without a problem. When I ran it through once again with SRS on the sound picked up more life with less coloring to the sounds or at least less noticeable coloring being performed this time around. A few more tracks yielded the same results making it seem as if the less crowded the song is, the better the SRS performs since it has to do the effects on the fly.

Daft Punk is a hard group to overlook for something like this; they have a unique style that just begs to be used as a testbed. I gave Aerodynamic a spin. A track that packs a huge variety of audio shifts and styles. The synth kick drum was the first thing to be identified, solid low response that leaves a hard thump instead of resonating while trying to cover all the other fields. Then of course the Solo on the guitar is great as well as it drives right up the charts for the frequency output. Combine this back in with the rest of the base track and there's some real magic going on. The only unfortunate part is that the kick dominates over the guitar on these headphones. It is not really something that can be helped but it is quite noticeable. Hard bass doesn't go well with screaming highs when coming out of the same driver. The second half of the track is lighter but now using more of an 808 bass sound and midi for the background which alternates from side to side. Overall the AHS-602 do great despite a bit of driver overload.