Best headphones for around $200

[ashmedai]

My Sony V6 were like $70 (or something like that) plus a bit more for some velour pads. They're very nice for stuff like bedroom/night use, and actually fairly portable with good isolation if you can handle using full circums for public transit. A bit underamped straight out of most sound cards & portables IMO, and are surprisingly good - without amplification, and another nice surprise if you use it. A very interesting option for the budget.

But best at $200? Um, no.

 

[Klob]

Which brings us back to the original point...

Yea, and here it is again said better than I can say it. The sooner you come to realize you are just a tweako idiophile the sooner you will gain enlightenment and start enjoying music instead of sweating over irrelevant crap.


http://theaudiocritic.com/plog/

[FONT=times new roman,times,serif]As for amplifier topologies, the sensible answer is, “Who cares?” Any amplifier, regardless of topology, can be treated as a “black box” for the purpose of listening comparisons. If amplifiers A and B both have flat frequency response, low noise floor, reasonably low distortion, high input impedance, low output impedance, and are not clipped, they will be indistinguishable in sound at matched levels no matter what’s inside them. Of course, some of the new “alphabet soup” topologies do not necessarily satisfy those conditions.[/FONT]

[FONT=times new roman,times,serif]I really believe that all this soul-searching, wondering, questioning, agonizing about amplifiers is basically unproductive and would be much more rewarding if applied to loudspeakers instead. For various reasons that I have discussed in the past, people are more willing to change amplifiers than loudspeakers. That’s most unfortunate because a new and better loudspeaker will change your audio life but a new amplifier will not.[/FONT]

[FONT=times new roman,times,serif]—Peter Aczel, [/FONT][FONT=times new roman,times,serif]Editor & Publisher[/FONT]

 

[ashmedai]

Okay, this is just getting silly...what does calling people unintelligible names have to do with $200 headphones?

 

[Klob]

It has to do with this.

http://theaudiocritic.com/plog/

Electronic Personality?

peteraczel | 26 April, 2007 10:26

Electronic Signal Paths Do Not Have a Personality!

I keep forgetting that my newer readers outnumber the old-timers and that some of the basic truths about audio that are old hat to me and to the regulars are new and fresh to the recent arrivals. Here is something, therefore, worth repeating for the nth time.

Every low-distortion electronic signal path sounds like every other. The equipment reviewers who hear differences in soundstaging, front-to-back depth, image height, separation of instruments, etc., etc., between this and that preamplifier, CD player, or power amplifier are totally delusional. Such differences belong strictly to the domain of loudspeakers. Depending on the wave-launch characteristics, polar pattern, or power response of the loudspeaker (those are overlapping concepts), the stereo presentation of the program material can vary greatly. It cannot vary as a result of the properties of a normal (i.e., low-distortion) electronic signal path. The only exception I can think of would be totally inadequate channel separation (less than, say, 30 dB) between the left and right channels of a stereo device, which is hardly ever the case—and certainly not when high-end components are being discussed by said reviewers.
Beware, therefore, of electronic audio components with a personality. If they have a personality, they are either defective or the brainchild of a reviewer without accountability.