Which headphones of Drop's currently available?
I have some rewards points to burn but there's no obviously good options on Drop right now for headphones Contenders Ultrasone - maybe? I don't own any Ultrasones, so curious. Looks like garbage travel headphone which could be useful also. Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro. - Maybe? I have the DT 880 Good price point, really uncomfortable headphones but could be interesting to try the upgraded version. E-MU - strong contender but $400 is a bad price point for what it is. Which of the above would you choose and why? Nothing else on Drop is relevant to my interests, because Already own 6xx 820 800 s Ether cx Garbage / Consumer grade Meze 99 - garbage bass canons, hard pass No gaming headphones obviously Sennheiser wireless - no to wireless/bluetooth Hifiman - I have 2 of drop hifimans and they make really bad cheap shit on Drop, hard pass on HE-R7DX Aeon - I own the closed, Drop refuses to address #padgate so no reason to buy open Beyerdynamic 177x - wireless, nope Too similar 8x / 560s...
Mar 28, 2024
I listen to Western and Indian Classical, Jazz and Blues and some classic Rock. An overwhelming proportion of the best music of these genres happened at a time before there was high quality recording, much less hi-res audio. Take the best body of work of Billie Holiday, Ben Webster, Liberace, Stefan Ashkenazy, Karajan, Ravi Shankar or Bhimsen Joshi for example. Converting a Toscanini Concert into a FLAC file may produce some improvement in audio quality, but no matter how much you scrub and polish it you cannot inject new data into a lower resolution original just as you cannot put in new pixels into a low resolution photo, except by a software trick.
Has anybody stopped to think that there may be limits to how finely the human auditory system can resolve detail and judge quality? Surely there must be a point beyond which one can no longer tell the difference with a device whose improvements may be measurable in a lab but not discernible to the ear.
Much as in photography, where ridiculously higher pixel counts are being offered in a fiercely competitive market, the quality of an image is more than the number of mega pixels it contains. So it is with music where sheer resolution and cold clinical precision are not everything. Instead, I would much prefer to listen to the warmth and charm of a slightly less perfect and relatively inexpensive tube amp (Thank heaven for the Chinese and the likes of Bottlehead!).
I think there are two kinds of audiophiles. There are those who love high quality audio but are primarily focussed on the music they listen to. They would relish a less than perfect recording of Sinatra over a high resolution sample of music that didn't move them much. Then there are those for whom the prime motivation is the audio quality. I don't mean that they are indifferent to the music itself, but that they are very intolerant of poor sonic quality, no matter how great the music.
I guess if you belong in the latter category, trading in both kidneys for a bargain Astell - Kern or a Hifiman 901s makes sense. If not consider giving up one for a X5 or X7 (I have the former). If you're a really bad sport and determined to hang on to all your body parts, there's always the old reliable iPod Touch, now resurgent in a brand new avatar!