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've always been picky about sound, but didn't really find my way into audiophilia until headphones. I have a reasonably extensive background in piano, and am one of those bat-eared people who can tell you when one instrument is off in the symphony. I grew up with my parent's Bose system, and I think my first real "ah ha" moment was when I replaced those terrible satellite speakers with a Paradigm bookshelf.
From there, audiophilia nervosa slowly wormed its way into my fibre. An iBasso portable with swappable opamps? I was into the deep end now. Then I started into DIY. I didn't even start with cables, oh no I went straight to building amps and mucking around with my own simple circuit designs. I recreated Meier's active balanced ground (like a more advanced version of Ti Kan's active ground) in cmoy form.
Then I managed to wrangle myself an HE-6... and the real neurosis set in. Now I had a top end piece of gear, which meant it was easy to justify needing a better front end to "keep up" with it. Of course, with each new acquisition now the previous component became the bottleneck and so on so forth. I was up to monboblocks at one point.
Then came the Stax...