I’m over 50, wear Vans and hoodies, along with faded jeans. Luxury and elegance tend to surround me only peripherally. Consequently, fine woods, finest leather, and golden embellishments look about as natural on me as a kangaroo on a streetcar. And yet, for months now, you’ve rarely seen me without a hefty dose of opulence on my head. Where two white stubs used to protrude from my ears for the purpose of sound reproduction, a rather massive representative of the headphone species now crowns my skull. And I have absolutely no desire to take it off again. This text explains why.
If you’re planning to sunbathe in the park wearing headphones like the Sendy Audio Peacock, you should have a solid ego. Understated is not its thing. With the Sendy, it’s clearly heading toward luxury: a housing made of fine woods, cuddly ear pads covered in the finest goatskin, which also dresses the headband and yoke. It comes in a wonderful vintage wooden box and weighs around 600 grams (including the cable). Thus, the Peacock is the perfect antagonist to my rattling plastic earbuds, which make you look as though joint butts are sticking out of your ear canals. Even though the Peacock looks rather substantial, thanks to the fluffy ear pads you don’t feel the weight all that much, even during extended sessions. The headband provides a good, but not overly tight, fit.
The Sendy is perfectly happy to be shown off in public, but it doesn’t have to be. It works perfectly well from the audio output of an ordinary smartphone (assuming it still has an output), but there it operates miles below its potential. As a companion on a train ride, it’s great, provided you don’t mind the envious looks of the plastic-earbud crowd. But a peacock doesn’t belong on a train. And a headphone with the Peacock’s ambitions deserves an appropriate environment. One in which, purely by coincidence, three promising partners are standing around, willing to let it dock its plugs with them.
With its planar magnetic drivers, the Sendy offers a huge potential bandwidth from foundation-deep 20 Hz to somewhere around 40 kHz – bat territory. However, it requires a powerful amplifier, which explains the weakness of smartphones and some portable devices. iFi Audio’s powerful iFi Phantom DSD, which we brought in specifically for the test just to be safe, is still acclimating when I sink into the lovely sounds of Sepultura. The cover version of the Massive Attack classic “Angel” rumbles in a structured, tight, and tactile fashion in the cavity between my ears. The acoustic conditions there are definitely better than outside. The Peacock fills my ears with clear structure, puts everything in its place, and renders it in credible dimensions. Next stop: Tiamat’s classic Wildhoney. “Gaia” lets me plunge ultradeep into expanses rendered with hair-fine detail. I’m so fascinated that I immediately listen to the track again, this time on the Harmony Design Ear 903. This fascinating preamplifier is considerably more forgiving than the iFi Audio, which has now thawed out. The iDSD may push the boundaries of my personal universe farther into the distance and atomize overtones even more microscopically, giving the whole thing a wonderful openness, but it exacts a price that only becomes apparent in comparison: It gives the Peacock a cooler character, at the expense of naturalness. For a headphone, the elegant peacock has a generous diaphragm area. In the interest of energetic efficiency, the voice coils applied to it were doubled and suspended between two magnetic fields. In combination with its open design, this gives the Peacock not the driest kick bass, but its foundation extends all the way down into the deepest basements. And with this combination, a “earthier”-voiced headphone amplifier simply gets along better – at least to my taste.
After such hearty fare, I switch to “Fever,” written by jazz icon Peggy Lee. I own the song in a pristine DSD version that streams from the laptop into headphone partner number three. My M-DAC from Audiolab may seem like an outsider by comparison – if only because of its age. And yet, paired with Sendy Audio’s peacock, it proves to be a “perfect match,” which may also be due to my long familiarity with it. Its arguments, however, are objectively sound as well: The double bass in the song calls for swing, not power – and that’s exactly what it gets. The fingers snap dryly, and the stage inside my head is brought to life in the most entertaining way. It effortlessly brings out the open airiness and lively microdynamics of the electrostatics. It performs this trick particularly beautifully with vocals. The Peacock places singers tangibly in the space, without immediately putting them in your lap. Intimacy without uncomfortable breathing into your personal safety zone. A guitar has body, strings have metal, and the cymbal is allowed to shimmer without immediately being attacked with an angle grinder. This is less a studio magnifying glass than a generously illuminated living room.
Despite all its opulence, the peacock remains pleasantly suited to long listening sessions. Even after two complete albums, the usual “This is enough now” feeling fails to appear – the one where you take off your headphones and check whether your ears are still hanging where they were installed that morning. Of course, a device this size doesn’t disappear on your head like a spiritual experience made of carbon and fluff. You can feel that a fully grown ornamental bird has taken up residence on your skull. But it has manners. The pads snuggle up, the headband distributes the clamping pressure, and nothing pinches or presses on your head. Only the outside world isn’t completely shut out by the open design; instead, it’s declared a silent participant. Vacuum cleaners, doorbells, roommates: all enemies of immersion. The Peacock is not an escape vehicle. It’s a reading chair with a cable.
And perhaps that is precisely its real trick. It forces you to slow down a little. Not plug in, take off, and ignore the world on the side. Instead, sit down, connect it, choose an album, and then disappear. Not from the apartment, but from the rhythm of the day. For someone like me, who normally tends toward volume emissions and physical experiences, that is almost suspiciously cultivated. Almost grown-up. But don’t worry: the Vans stay on.
Headphones Sendy Audio Peacock
Design: Over-ear headphones, open-back design | Drivers: planar magnetic “Quad-Form Drivers” with dual coils and magnets | Frequency response: 20 Hz to 40 kHz | Impedance: 50 Ω | Sound pressure level: 105 dB | Features: replaceable ear pads, 4-pin mini-XLR on the headphones | Included: leather hard case, twisted connection cable (2.5 m long) with 4.4 mm Pentaconn (balanced), Pentaconn-to-4-pin-XLR adapter | Weight: 580 g | Warranty: 2 years | Price: around €1,600
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