I generally come at this from your perspective, but there are a few points to consider:
Price doesn’t matter much at all below some point, and that point can vary widely depending on the consumer. For example, when I was in college I survived on generic mac & cheese because it was like $0.27 for a box instead of something like $0.65 for the Kraft. Today, I don’t even look at the price; I just buy the Kraft. But some people see headphones in the $2k to $5k range just like I see mac & cheese. The price difference is irrelevant to them.
Some aspects of quality are highly subjective and therefore difficult to quantify. Check out these Rosson headphones: Rosson Audio - RAD-0. I really like the resin with deep blue, so 513, 527, and 528 all look really nice to me. But would I pony up over 50% more than the MPL-0 that (according to Rosson) sounds almost identical for the better looks? Hard to say, so I’m glad I’m not in that market right now. And I could easily understand someone preferring the wood to the resin, so they would see a seriously negative value proposition there.
Currently listening to this chain:
WiiM Pro Plus → Schiit Valhalla 2 → Drop/Senn 6XX
To me, this sounds ridiculously good for under $750 total. I’m thinking it’s probably a case of diminishing returns from here on out, so that also factors into my thinking. I’m not trying to get double the performance for $1500 because I already think that’s just not gonna happen.
Ohhhh, you’ve sold the frugal lifestyle short! I don’t look at that highfalutin “Macaroni and Cheese” – I eat and run a repair and construction business with $4.99 per 24 cases of Top Ramen noodles.
Ramen noodles do so much more than serve as floor wax and dessert toppings.
You rich people crack me up. You need to live in a van down by the river like regular people. Toilet paper? Tree leaves were good enough for Adam and Eve.
I have to agree on the Momentum 4’s. My high frequency hearing is toast at 76 so I am pretty far removed from being an audiophile. I currently have a very modest inventory of phones. Grado SR80 1st gen, HiFi man Ananda, Sennheiser HD-6xx, Dali IO-6 (which I won) and the aforementioned M4’s.
I usually listen while I walk and use an LG V-40 phone as player. Even using Bluetooth APTx, the clarity of the mid and highs (as much as I can hear) is very good. The bass quality and quantity surpasses all the others by a significant margin. It is knock you on your but bass.
Actually, I agree with you. My reply was somewhat flippant. Music above all else.
Many get too carried away with chasing gear. It is hard not to get sucked into that mode but in the
end, it is about the music.
Amen brother. I used to travel with my $$$ IEMs for the flight. A lot of PITA work to get high fidelity. And for what, so the plane’s vibration could make a noise floor more elevated than any about to die tube?
Now I am all about the AirPod Pros. If they ever catch up to me and send me to prison, that’s all I will need.
Same here. I used to travel with Focal Bathys, but found them too bulky, and with the noise floor on an airplane it just wasn’t worth it. AirPod Pros 2 have great ANC and decent sound on an airplane. And the value equation is terrific as well (under $200).
Value for money is subjective and might be dependent on many things. To me it’s a balance between cost and sound. I’ve been experimenting with a variety of headphones and initially went down the iem path eventually stopping at:
Flare Gold - stunning sound but initially quite expensive at $AUS1700. However I got mine second hand for a much lower price. These are my travelling headphones for planes trains and automobiles.
I already owned
Sennheiser HD580 and it was interesting to read comments in previous threads. These are a go to for classical music, especially acoustic and chamber. Their timbral and tonal accuracy is exceptional.
Two years ago I decided to see what the hype was all about and got the HD650s - I’m still ambivalent about these and yes I’ve got plenty of amplifier power (Asgard 3)
I bought a pair of Audeze LCD1s and loved them but the headband cracked so I didn’t do a direct replacement but got the HFM Ananda Stealth instead. While these have great sound I realised after a while that these are slightly veiled and I yearned to go back to the Audeze sound.
Well Audeze answered my prayers and I am the extremely happy owner of the recently released Audeze MM100. They do everything that I want and meet all of my sonic criteria. The sound is transparent and almost holographic. Timbre and tonality are excellent and very accurately reproduced. They beat the Anandas in a number of areas. What I like is they do even better than what I heard with the LCD1s. These are my end game headphone at the moment and what’s amazing is the price. Cheaper than the Anandas at $AUS679 they are an excellent bang for buck set of cans.
No kidding!! How have I never heard this term before!!??
Everything is F’d up now… turns out I’m not much of an audiophile after all. And my name!! It’s all wrong…“Melophool”!!?? Well that just sounds…weird…like I’m into melons and just misspelled it.
Few of us know jargon outside the niches we inhabit. Beware of the academics and vendors who create 100 novel words when 10 standard ones would do, as they are either confused themselves or trying to hide their ordinary and uncreative thoughts. See sophistry.
Melophile does not appear in the major English dictionaries, but musicophile is in the OED. CallForte is a site that’s less than two years old, and was registered in Reykjavik Iceland through NAMECHEAP INC:
And here I thought that musicophile should be sort of like Autosummarize in Word, but for music. Take say Beethoven’s 6th, and hit Musicophile (Musicofile?) and get your 3 minute and 30 second AM Radio length version.
So, in looking over the responses to this thread, the following seem to define the sweet spot of performance and value (not in any particular order):
Sennheiser 580-600-650
HiFiMan HE-400
Audeze MM100
Koss Porta Pro
DT770 Pro
Above this “sweet spot” level, the diminishing returns factor kicks in where you have to pay a lot more for relatively smaller improvement in performance. (e.g.: double the price gets you 20% improvement). Each of us has his/her own tolerance for this evolving price/performance ratio.
Bang/Buck: Koss KSC75
Don’t know if it will ever be dethroned. The only things that come close are the Superlux, for me specifically the HD662 Evo + Solderdude’s mod (without the dissassembly steps), and this is mostly because it completely fills in whatever sub-bass is missing from the KSC75 while not costing much more. But you lose a lot on comfort so IDK.
TOTL/Surprising Cost: Massdrop x Koss ESP/95X
Found it used for 380 EUR shipped, but I have to mention it also “costs” needing to be plugged in for at least 24h continuously before it sounds obviously better than a HiFiMan HE-400i, and for several days before it reaches its absolute peak performance. And you have to do it again every time you unplug them or lose power.
(Some people don’t believe this, you can get your posts straight up deleted on ASR for claiming this, but you can find confirmation of this experience from long-term owners of electrostatic headphones, e.g. nottagorilla on Massdrop, or Ken Rockwell who says the same of his Stax and explains it via the need to spread the charge uniformly across the membrane surface.)
All of my collection fall into entry level/Mid-Fi.
Probably my best bang for the buck headphone are the Ambrosia’s from Nectar Sound. They were selling for $399.00. Hard to beat that sound, IMO, for that money.
Gotta put in a vote for the Koss KPH 30i. Today, I started off with Nirvana MTV Unplugged in New York. Great. Then I threw my collection on shuffle and just enjoyed the tunes while tidying my office. At some point I hit dialed down 125 Hz by a dB, then bumped 50 Hz by 3 dB and bam(!) Bob’s your uncle.
