Pioneer HDJ-2000MK2 VS V-MODA M--100 Head Phones Review

0:00 This is for me possibly the holy grail of videos

Right, ladies and gentlemen, this is for me possibly the holy grail of videos. I have two of the world's best DJ headphones right in front of me and I'm going to give my own opinion on which is the best. Now, I've used V-Moda for a long time. I like the M100s because they're practically indestructible. Notice I said practically because... Even a diamond is destructible. You get the right weight or hammer and you slap it on the head in the right place, right position and you can crush a diamond. Same with any headphones. They may make them so they're, in adverted commas, indestructible but let's be honest if you're really pissed off and annoyed with them you can destroy them like that. But you don't want to do that because they cost a lot of money. So...

I have here from Pioneer the HDJ-2000 Mark II. There they are, in all their glory. And I have here the Vmoda M100, in all their glory. Now both of these sets of headphones are pretty much brand new. So first of all what you can do with the M100 that you cannot do with the Pioneer is... You can change the shields. So if you're a bit of a pimp DJ, you can have your DJ name on there. Just take the shield that's off and replace it with your own design. And that could be done, of course, via the website from Vmoda. You can have any metal, even up to platinum if you want to, if you really want to. And you can pretty much have any design. You can make your own design up as well. You can have your DJ name on there.

2:21 These are the silver ones

Freaking funky to have your DJ name there. Alright, so both sets of headphones are collapsible. Just grab the 2000s, push those in and there you go. Now I'm not going to open the box and show you the box. I mean one box is bigger than the other. There you go. We're interested in the headphones. Right, first of all let's have a look at the 2000 Mark II from Pioneer. Now, they're very shiny. These are the silver ones. They look good. They twist. There's a nice movement. There's a nice little bit of a click there. There is metal over the top of the head and this is going out to every single headphone manufacturer out there. Even if your headphones are, let's say, targeted for DJs and they cost £20, 20 bucks, you need to make sure that you put a piece of metal over the top there. It's not going to cost much more, is it?

But, by just having plastic over the top means that if, which happens, we accidentally sit on them, drop on them or move them in an awkward direction, then that is going to snap and you might as well throw the damn things away. On the other hand, both of these headphones have a metal rim all the way around the top there, so of course you can twisty bendy them and they're not going to snap, so spot on for the two of you. On the 2000s are circular and we've got a nice kind of almost regimented hexagonal kind of shape here for the V-Moda. Now again, one of the policies of V-Moda is as little of plastic as possible and no circles and they've done just that. Right, so from a comfort point of view both of them feel...

4:47 You can twist them and move them around

Pretty good. They do feel very comfortable. There may be slightly bit more pressure on your head with the 2000s, but again, I would say that's depending on how far you have to fit them around your head. But there's very, very little difference. I mean, if any, I'll be honest with you. From a point of view of sound cancellation, Alright, so the V-Moder M100. You can twist them and move them around. Again, they have metal over the top. The sound is very good. I'll give you a demonstration of that in a bit, believe it or not. But what you can't do is you can't twist one of the headphones around. You can bend them in, but you can't twist them. So for example, you can say monitor. You can monitor with one quite easily by having the headphones at the top of your head and just putting one of the ear cups...

Behind your ear and the other one over your ear. So if you monitor left or right, there's no problem there. And having them like that, they have never fallen off and they don't feel as though they're going to fall off, you know, as though they're loose. I'm shaking my head now. Nope, they're not going to fall off. Okay, the Pioneer on the other hand, what you can do is you can turn one of them around like this. So you can physically move one of the ear cups so it's facing in the opposite direction to your ear, which is great. And you can do the same with the other ear if you want to. Alternatively, what you can do with the Pioneer, which you can't do with the M100, is you can flip one of the ear cups over and you can monitor like this. A lot of DJs like to do that. They don't like to have their headphones over the head. They just like to pick them up, have a quick listen. Yeah, fine Barbie girl.

Okay, I can hear it. World laughing. Yeah, good. Sorry about that. Right, so sound-wise, what are they going to sound like? Right, what I've done is I have got... Oh yeah, very quickly as well. Both of them have cables that you can plug in. Big advantages to this, I mean super big. Let's imagine you're at an event, you're playing away and all of a sudden you think, oh damn I need to get my beer and it's 20 foot over behind me. You run, you reach to get your beer only to find your headphones have gone twang, put your headphones back on and there seems to be this intermittent sound of crackly popply noises. It could be because you've pulled some of the cables that are attached from the cable itself into the headphone.

7:27 A very, very tiny micro XLR male jack

Now that is only going to happen of course if you have a connection that is hardwired into one of the ear cups. That doesn't happen with these because both of them come with separate cables. Now the slight difference is Pioneer come with their own designated plug and you have to have this plug. So it's almost like... A very, very tiny micro XLR male jack. And that fits in there and then that is locked in place. So, all right, admittedly, yeah, you probably could pull those but if you did have some form of accident and there was a problem with the cable, you can just get a new cable. So that is an advantage but also it's a disadvantage because if you do pull the cable, the cable's probably knackered. The advantage though...

With the V-Moder, which is in my eyes far superior cable to the Pioneer, it's just a very basic mini jack. So if you happen to have a mini jack to mini jack just lying around somewhere and you've got a controller with a mini jack input, you're fine because you just plug that into your headphones and if all of a sudden you move away, it just pulls out. That's it. One quick tip as well for the Vmoda. All of their cables, I believe all of them, in fact I'll probably say most of them just in case, there's a slight difference in between the two ends. One has got an angle, the other one is a straight end. The straight end will always go into the headphones and the angled end will always go into where the music source is, never the other way around.

Also, the advantage to the V-Moder is you can fit the headphone input into either side. See, isn't that genius? So you can go into the right or the left. Also with the V-Moder, I think on a couple of their cables, you have like an extension. So where you plug into your mixer, there's a small tiny extension to a female adapter. So from there, you can go into another set of headphones so you can have two DJs monitoring. But again, with a lot of modern-day mixers now, the likes of... I've got the DJM900 Nexus 2. There are two outputs on here anyway, so you can do a back-to-back mix with ease. So for this demonstration, what I'm going to do, I'm going to plug the Vmoda M100 into the micro headphone, the mini jack.

10:17 V-Moder and then go back like

And then I've got the Pioneers plugged into the quarter inch jack. And the track I'm going to be using is Lenny Fontana featuring D-Train, a track entitled Raise Your Hands. So at the moment both of them are playing and what I'm going to do is I'm going to have one on like that and then at the moment I've got the Pioneer on and I'm going to quickly switch those off. And go to the V-Moder and then go back like that. Talk amongst yourself. Right, I'll be honest with you. I will be honest, honest, honest with you. There's very little sound difference. Very, very little difference. If anything, I would say that the V-Moder have got more of a flat signal. In other words, we're not talking about heightened mids and trebles and wonderful kind of curvy warm bass. It's all nice and flat.

11:52 I'm going to unplug the V-Moda and turn the volume up

All the EQ, all of the frequency seem to be at a constant. Whereas the Pioneer do seem to have a tiny bit more bass and there's a tiny bit more high end. It's almost as though what they've done with the EQ. Do you know, I don't know if you remember like the old school graphic equalizers where what we used to do as DJs, we used to have like, almost like a smirky smiley face where the low would be quite high. So what I'll do this time, I'm going to place the Pioneers there with the headphones facing towards the camera. I'm going to unplug the V-Moda and turn the volume up. Okay, we're at the break. Let's unplug the Pioneers and plug in the V-Moda. So what we're listening to now is just the headphones. There does seem to be a little bit more rumble with the V-Modas as though they can't handle that sort of low end.

Quite sure that both of them are around about 3,000 milliwatts. Now, that sounds a lot. And in headphone terms, that is a great deal. It is a lot. Because 1,000 milliwatts is the equivalent to one watt of power. So, of course, 3,000 is three watts. Now, that is a lot for headphones. I mean, if you go back a few years, in fact... Even now, if you've got some small Bluetooth speaker and you look at the output, it may only be one or two watts. Yet these headphones, each one, each of the ear cups can produce three watts of power. So that's six watts. I mean, that's a great deal of power. Now, I would quite happily take a set of these, maybe plug them into an iPhone and just even use these. As headphones, as speakers sorry, it can be done. That was on CDJ mode. You see now that's quite loud for headphones and you would be an absolute idiot to put the headphones on at that volume. What you have to remember, this is a tip for you as well. Even though it's low volume, as soon as you put that low volume closer to your ears, believe it or not...

14:42 You can't hear it very well because the one's cancelling the other out

The SPL, sound pressure level, gets higher and higher the closer it is. So eventually if you've got those ear cups directly over your ears at that SPL, it's possible, not definite, it's possible you could end up with permanent hearing damage and you do not want that. Tinnitus is not a good thing to have. And once you've got tinnitus and it seems to be there for a few days, and the next day it's there again, and it's still there a week later, it's probably not going to go away. And also, once you get that whistle in your ear of a certain frequency, that actually means that when that certain frequency plays in a tune... You can't hear it very well because the one's cancelling the other out. And as DJs, we don't want that. I do have tinnitus myself. I have to be very careful now about my ears. And just to show you what I tend to use. No, there's nothing in there. Where is it? It's over here. I will use some of these. Look at that. They are earplugs. Right, so what do I think?

Which one's better? That's a very, very difficult decision. That's a really difficult decision. I like the sound of the V-Moder because it's flat. The last thing I want personally is big booming bass. V-Moder also do the LP2 which are less expensive and they do have more enhanced bass. For sound quality, I would go with the V-Moder. On the other hand, if I was to choose for looks, usability, functionality and there's more movement in it, I would definitely go for the Pioneer. So if you're the sort of DJ who wants to have headphones that do everything, that have good sound, move as you want them to move. Twist and turn, then the Pioneer are for you. On the other hand, if you're a DJ who wants a flat sound, you don't want anything heightened and lowered. You don't want all of a sudden to hear the sound through the speakers and think I want something different from my headphones. If you hear the sound coming through the speakers and that's the sound you want to hear, then go with the V-Moder. Also, if you're a producer...

Thank you for watching.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.