The first pair was the LCD-X 2021. They made me cry but the weight made me sell them. Then the HD800 S didn’t make me cry but impressed me with its amount of detail and has been the most comfortable headphones I have had. Nowadays, the Susvara is the one that gets more listening time having that planar 20Hz- 20K Hz without sacrificing comfort and detail.
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My first headphones were the Jecklin Float electrostatics. Their clarity and transparency were amazing, at first. Then the lack of bass and slightly dulled/rolled off upper midrange and sheer physical discomfort started to get to me. Also, after reading warnings in the reviews, annoyingly I had to keep a close watch on volume level to avoid burning them out by overvoltage arcing. Almost the same problem as with the old Quad ESL-57 electrostatic loudspeakers.
Nothing as fancy as all of you.
I had the working assumption all headphones ranged from sucky to mediocre.
Then I wanted some wireless headphones (pre-bluetooth era) and just totally randomly got lucky enough to get Sennheiser HDR-120 (or earlier equivalent).
I was like wow, this sounds good. But I was still clueless that it was the lowest tier of entry-fi. So dumbly walked around thinking I had the best headphones ever, for years, until they finally broke and I upgraded to HD558. These were a HUGE step up that made me aware there were upper layers to this pursuit.
BTW, HD558/598 are still to this day seriously underrated. This is coming from someone with a collection of $1k+ headphones now. They have qualities no other headphones have and if I could only own three pairs, these would be one of them! No kidding.) Besides being the lightest most comfortable headphones ever made, they have a unique mixture of analog vinyl-like romantic glow and warmth WHILE having good neutrality and clarity, and some kind of sweet spot in resolution that’s just good enough to sound great but just romantic hazy enough to to hide edgy glare and poor recordings. Absolutely great for pre-1950’s recordings of any genre. And for wearing in bed when you’re in danger of falling asleep and not wanting to mash and mess up your $2000 (fill in the blank) pair of flagship headphones.
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I’ve had a bunch of different headphones over the years, but the first ones to make me feel some type of way were the Beyerdynamic 990 pros. The next step up didn’t come for a while after that.
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I agree with this. There are many headphones and IEMs that are tuned to give a wow factor on first listen and then some of them can become tiring over longer periods.
Yet, some other may not have that initial wow factor but when spending time with them, you realize just how good they are.
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For me, it was the best Stax electrostatic headphone that a friend had - I forget the exact model number - in about 1992 or so. He had it driven by a Stax tube headphone amp, and the perfection of the sound, the smoothness and accuracy, staging, etc., were absolutely phenomenal. The best headphones I have ever heard!
My own personal set for many years was an Audio-Technica electret condenser AT-7 connected to their special headphone power adapter. It may still work, but I have not used it in a long time - the pads have degraded.
My current set is an Audeze EL-8 … similar sound to the Audio-Technical and better in some ways (flatter bass response for example).