The end of budget audio's best bargain: RIP HD 6XX

If you haven’t heard by now, it brings me no joy to inform you that Drop, an enthusiast outlet for group buys of affordable tech gadgets, is being fully absorbed into its new corporate masters’ brand starting on March 31. The final day to place orders on drop.com will be March 25 — 5 days from now. While this, in and of itself, isn’t an unexpected occurrence, it does mean that the best deal in audio, the Drop x Sennheiser HD 6XX, is a likely casualty of this RGB-lit assimilation.

Drop started in 2012 as Massdrop, a community where enthusiasts voted on products and the team negotiated bulk discounts directly with manufacturers. The rebrand to Drop in 2019 and the 2023 acquisition by Corsair slowly drained the soul out of it. This month is just the conclusion.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 23, 2026, to note Sennheiser’s continuation of sale.

We’ll miss you, HD 6XX

For those unaware, Sennheiser’s line of HD headphones in the 600 and 800 series represent the company’s high-end products. Though many entrants have come to the HD 600 line, it’s the HD 600 and HD 650 that really stood out in an era before the popularization of headphone preference research. For many, these headphones were a high-water mark for audio quality in the 90s through the 2010s, and getting a pair was an investment. At $399 and $499 respectively, these weren’t headphones that just anyone could afford — and they definitely weren’t something you’d buy on a whim. Using the consumer price index to calculate what that would cost today, it would be like spending almost $800 USD on a set of cans. Not cheap! Headphones like these were firmly in the domain of professionals and enthusiasts.

But in 2016, after a collaboration with Sennheiser, Drop (then called Massdrop) worked with the headphone giant to bring a more affordable variant of the HD 650 to the world. Priced at $199, the Drop x Sennheiser HD 6XX offered users headphones almost identical to the HD 650, but at half the price, and with only a couple of corners cut on materials and aesthetics. Over the last ten years, these headphones have been the default suggestion for anyone looking to get into headphones as a hobby, and one of the most affordable ways to step into really great audio quality.

In fact, we often recommended these headphones to many people in our best lists. The reality was that the headphones performed well enough that recommending the product they were meant to emulate was almost redundant. If you had two products that performed nearly as well as one another, who wouldn’t want to spend half as much? But it wasn’t just other Sennheiser products — the HD 6XX hung tough with the best available, regardless of price. It was one of the more common examples we would point to when demonstrating that price has no correlation with headphone performance.

There’s technically hope, but signs are grim

This continued on for nearly a decade, falling just short of that mark by only a few months. Though Corsair — who bought Drop — will be using Drop.com to sell a wider range of products, the signs are pretty grim for the continued selling of the HD 6XX. For starters, much of the existing stock of headphones seems to be clearing out as we near the end of the platform. Sennheiser, surprisingly, is selling stock of the HD 6XX in the US only. But it, too, is headed for some uncharted waters.

Currently, there are 116,700 requests for the HD 6XX to return to stock, which it won’t do in five days. If you plan to continue producing something, you generally don’t clear stock to zero. Especially not for extended periods of time. The HD 58X Jubilee is already gone, too. Similar to the HD 6XX, other headphones are also going out of stock, leaving only a handful of available items.

You can read for yourself how Redditors are taking the news, and many are understandably mourning. For some, it’s losing an old friend — a comfortable option to direct new enthusiasts to. Now that it’s no longer on the market, an easy choice is a little more difficult to come by. For those looking for somewhere to land, Apos Audio (founded by former Massdrop employees) carries on a similar group-buy spirit. But hey, there are new headphones coming out every year, and there are plenty of really great options under $300 (geopolitics permitting). But an anomaly like the Drop x Sennheiser HD 6XX may not come around again for quite some time.

Ultimately, Drop did something few companies ever pull off: it made $500 headphones available to people on a $200 budget, and in doing so, pulled thousands of listeners into a hobby they might never have discovered otherwise. If this is truly the end for the HD 6XX, it’s been a good run.