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
Short version of the cable story: "I'd better say they sound better, even though they don't. Otherwise I'll feel like a fool for buying these cables".
Break-in period is right up there with the psycho-induced phenomenon of improved sound by changing cables. It's these same psycho-induced phenomena that have people believing that headphones that have low transparency along with high distortion and excessive driver coloration, such as the Sennheiser HD6XX series, are good headphones. What these headphones provide is "safety". Then, being human, "safety" gets translated to "good". But from the purely auditory sense their ability to accurately reproduce the recorded sounds in a clean, precise, and transparent way is in realty quite awful.
Here's a review (not mine) pulled from Amazon that helps explain further:
Break-in Period. Engineers can't risk designing product that depends on a break-in period. Too much uncertainty. When listening to headphones that have audible coloration the listener over time will minimize their perception to it. They will also adjust their perception to compensate for spectral imbalance. Some audiophiles are not aware that they are mistaking mental adaptation for a nonexistent brake-in period. In my evaluations I will temporarily adapt to the sound of a particular headphone model to determine how similar it is to or dissimilar it is from other headphone models in order to place it and others in the proper category.
Upgrade Cables. Upgrade cables do not improve sound quality. Not to the slightest degree. When I purchased a new Onkyo A-9050 integrated amplifier I needed to check it out after receiving it. However, I was currently enjoying my JR Transrotor headphone amplifier and was not in the mood to do so. When I did make the switch the Onkyo unit sounded lousy. I went back to the JR Transrotor unit and it also sounded lousy. So, what happened? My depth of perception dropped along with my mood. If one is excited about checking out a new product the opposite effect can happen. One's depth of perception is greatly affected by mood. I chose European karaoke music to do my evaluations for bass and overall sound because it was the music that I was interested in at the time. Therefore, I was able to up my perceptive depth and get into a zone for doing those evaluations. During my evaluations I had to be aware of my mood and degree of perceptive depth all the time. I repeated many evaluations on different days.
would succumb. Almost all of your critical components such as thin film precision resistors are "aged", or we say annealed to stabilize them; Engineers design this in, we know what they are, should be, as deposited and subsequently where they should fall into a specification window in regards to Rs and TCR, after aging... after all this we do know that they will age further with use, the term "break-in" works well here... "Electron Winds" along with O2, H2O etc. all play a part. Engineering is still knowing that they will stay in the spec. window... for a while... passivation quality and environmental conditions mostly rule then.
In fact all matter would bend to the onslaught of ”European Karaoke Music”. The sheer angst, wrought asunder and raped quality of music with the voice bloodily ripped out of it, would warp the harps of the gods if played. Why it carries the cursed name of ”empty orchestra”... ‘Karaoke’. Having ‘European‘ stirred into the karaoke cauldron, is perhaps the epitome of musical malfeasance.
Save your tender tympanic membranes and fields of cilia from all such further abuse; perhaps the damage was irreparable for that reviewer. They may now perhaps dwell in the land of Autotuned Bieberism, In search of a voice. Only the power of Aretha may bring them salvation; if they could only hear her again...
Or worse, the eternal 'Stairway to Heaven' in a musac elevator... going down...
Again though, different headphones respond differently to changes in cables. A lot of your mid range cans aren't really resolving enough to discern a difference, but other headphones like the K240 Sextett or the LCD 2 are and do exhibit small changes
But your right about perception, as dumb as It sounds I do like to unwind and empty my thoughts before I listen to try an eliminate my "mood" from impacting my perception . Still your perception can lessen or enhance the very real differences, and since we have no way to judge how much our mood impacts our perception it's hard to tell what is real and what's... imaginary.
Now I've spoken mostly about Headphone cables here, inter-connectors... I've found to make less of an impact... longer than necessary cables can be nosier and anything with a poorly constructed physical contact will degrade your sound... but even Monoprice cables have a sufficient enough physical contact imo, and most people don't use 50 foot cables across a 7 foot run
Now for burn in...I have no say, I've never noticed a HUGE difference from Day 1 to Day 1000. I've heard people saying a headphone will/can "settle in" and maybe it's true maybe it isn't... I would imagine a change in fit that happens over time is more the cause of a change in sound that... "burn in" in fact we know how much of a difference pads can make and ePads DO wear out/in over time. In fact I like my old DT 880 pads SO MUCH [they wound up wearing in at an angle for me] that I've kept them on my HE 4 to this day... any time I try new pads the changes to the sound are terrible... so yea over time as the pads "wore in" the sound did change but I can reverse that change in minuet's so I don't ascribe the improvements to "burn in" or to my brain "getting used" to the sound, different isn't bad it's different... I have a collection of many different things and I'd like to think exposing my self to a variety of different sound signatures helps keep me grounded
Still before I review anything I too "live with it" exclusively for at least 4-5 days,
The problem with comparing cables is that not only is it nearly impossible to do blind comparisons, but the act of swapping cables itself takes way too long to be able to even do sighted comparisons. Auditory memory lasts for only a few (3-4) seconds, so any swap that takes longer is not going to be valid.
That said, if you hear a subjective difference in cables, it doesn't really matter whether it's placebo or not. If it makes you happy and you think it's worth the cost, then (duh) it's worth the cost. Doesn't matter if it's a $10000 cable or $0.10 one.
hopefully obvious sarcasm aside, I appreciate your respecting our difference in opinion and choosing not to validate your self at the expense of invalidating my thoughts on the matter, if for you all cables truly sound the same then do enjoy the extra funds at the end of the day ^^
Truthfully I started upgrading cables purely for functional gains back when I first got my HE 4. I went Modular for convince, this was before "removable" cables on full sized headphones became a more normal thing. The improvements I heard came about 1-2 years ago... and honestly it wasn't that one of my cables sounded Better but that one of them sounded obviously worse! Literally everything attached to it sounded thin and... harsh ugh! Trying to define what about the "bad" cable sounded BAD more or less lead me to starting to hear the good in comparison to the bad