How do you listen to new gear before you buy?

Purchase Advice
2

This is a good topic I personally think that many people have to deal with in many places due to the lack of brick and mortar stores that specialize in headphones and in-ears and the multitude of options available online that are exclusive to online stores only.

For me, I am a bit lucky in that I get a lot of review units sent to me, but before I engaged in the audio review world, I did some of the following:

  1. Read a lot of reviews, impressions ,etc. and then take risks on buying stuff (easy, but most expensive option). Of course, finding like-minded reviewers with have similar tastes in music and sound qualities is the best option for taking the least grain of salt from reviews (and also being aware of “bad reviews” which are more of an affiliate farm than an actual review).

  2. Spend time on forums like these, and occasionally, (at least in prior to COVID times), people who organize meet-ups. Head-Fi has a lot of regular community meet-ups all over the world, and hopefully there is one near you. In Seattle where I’m from, there is/was a regular quarterly meetup setup on Headfi, and Torq also used to set up meetings here when he lived in town.

These meet-up opportunities were awesome for me. I got to meet a lot of new people who I only knew by usernames prior, try out a lot of gear, and also a lot of DIY creations. It was good networking event.

  1. Some stores do offer loaners. It doesn’t hurt to ask. Some may require downpayments, and/or credit to their stores to use them. I know a few people on here who have done that, but I don’t remember the exact stores that do this. Things may have changed now during the pandemic.

  2. Along with #2, I’ve found there’s a lot of very nice people on the forums who are willing to meet up on a 1on 1 or a small group setting and have little listening sessions. I actually wrote about one of them in my qdc Anole VX IEM review here: Qdc In-Ear Monitors - #15 by antdroid

  3. Also an easy one. actually should be #1 on this list. Buy USED. Then you can sell it for same or with very little loss if you do not like it. The caveat of course is that you are buying used, and there could be problems or other things that come along with it, but my experienced buying used so far (and I’ve bought/sold a ton of things) is that most people are honest and I’ve never gotten ripped off personally in the audio world, at least.

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