Is it tho? I thought this was Sennheiser's flagship from the 90's.

finally someone said it lol

i love $b and bones but admittedly their music is nothing stellar in terms of mixing and mastering. headphones like the hd600 will blow you away when listening to rock, jazz or something that involves real instruments. they’ll blow you away when listening to IDM and ambient, music that involves a ton of little details. otherwise, they’ll reveal all the glaring flaws with a song’s mixing, and take all the fun out of them.

which is precisely why i don’t like them.

i respect them highly, but i would personally never own one. i can’t stand when a headphone just won’t sound good with 50% of my music taste. keep in mind that music has evolved a lot since the hd600s came out in 1997. a lot of today’s music is bass-heavy or mixed badly, often intentionally, and that just won’t translate well to an hd600.

i would recommend going for a more modern open-back reference headphone, as those are a lot more musical and can do hip-hop perfectly. the audio-technica r70x come to mind. they have great bass and warmth, yet retain the great clarity, detail, soundstage and imaging that you come to expect from professional headphones.

Well in the traffic jam each morning during commute both cars are driving the same and you won't be faster with the Ferrari.

Honestly I stopped at HD600, it's been years and I still use them and love them.

Yes.

It also helps if you know what you like. For example if you like new gear you will keep buying them. If you like music, at some point you start listening music instead of the gear.

Bought the 7hz Timeless AEs and I am honestly convinced I'll never need anything better because they somehow fit my ears perfectly and are super comfortable all while having a perfect sound signature + technical performances for my tastes. The fact they fit my ears so well stop me from wanting to try anything else, it's kinda like I found my perfect pair of shoes, I'll wear them out until I cannot anymore!

the first headphone I bought was the focal clear, I just leapfrogged price categories cause I figured it would work out cheaper than slowly working up through hd600s etc. Haven't bought anything since.

I barely use my speakers, getting them to sound good is such a hassle. I'd have to change the entire layout of my home just to improve acoustics a bit.

I'm gear curious. I only use one pair of headphones at home and one (wireless) at work. But my source isn't great (it's fine though), I've been eyeing more expensive DACs and amps, but I haven't bought anything because what if I can't hear a difference?

I've come to the sad realization that I prefer headphones for enjoying music...

(Think it's partly a studio-psychological-damage. I listen to speakers, I move my head, and my mind goes "Whooooooa, what happened to the phase there, and why did the tonality suddenly shift...")

Pretty much. 800S is my favourite pair of cans for listening to music, and that's all genres, a lot of it being in the synth/electronic category. They sound great (to my ears/liking, not the flattest, not the most of anything, but they reproduce music with great detail and an effortless presentation), they are comfortable to wear, they are relatively lightweight, they are easy to drive well.

Might still get another pair of higher end cans for studio work (use 660/280pro). But for enjoying music, unless I run into something I find much more enjoyable to listen to music in than my 800s, I'm not actively searching. There's definitely "different", and I wouldn't mind a pair of STAX:es, and a pair of great planars, but so far I haven't found them overall more enjoyable than the 800S. (Hell, if music is less than stellar production-wise, I sometimes even would pick the HD660s over pretty much everything else...)

I buy gear for the features and comfort. I don't plan on buying anything more than a second pair of headphones for paired listening. If something comes out that is more comfortable with the same sonic qualities, I may consider buying something again but don't plan on it. For source gear, I have a device that has all of the features I could want so the only reason I would buy something else if if I can get the same features for cheap enough that I can get a net gain on selling my old gear and buying the new gear, which is very, very unlikely.

I haven't tried all headphones, so I'm not even sure what I'm looking for xD But I haven't bought new gear (except a few cheap chi-fi IEMs) in a while, I have HD6XX with SDAC and Atom and Starfield with BTR5, and I'm pretty happy with this setup. I did get to try the Moondrop Variations the other day and immediately liked it, but I just can't justify the price. I could get a new larger monitor for that much...

I have sold two headphones (Beyerdynamic COP and HE4xx) because I bought Sony XM3 to replace the COP in the office and I didn't like HE4XX for gaming and they were too heavy for music. I also sold my old amp because it didn't go quiet enough.

Nowadays I just listen directly to Macbook speakers...

Question to OP : how can we EQ to the harman curve and be sure about it ? I mean us mortal can enthusiasts ?

Harman Schmarman. Eq is Eq. My dads Sanyo had presets in the late 80s. It was great to mess around with. 99.9% of people that hear music don't know Mr Schmarman. Slide those things up or down until its suits your fancy. Then change your mind the next day. But always be thankful that you have the option to do so.

I feel like this should be a required reading for new users at this point. Tl;dr: It's impossible to measure what a headphone sounds like to you. Even the same headphone will sound differently between listens due to varied positions on your head. That's the fundamental problem, before even accounting for driver capability.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oratory1990/comments/gbdi7v/after_eqbeats_solo_pro_is_the_best_headphone/fpay3b5/

I buy headphones for their drivers and see if there is any difference is sound, turns out there are slight differences.

I would not recommend anyone buying different driver headphones if they are simply looking for the best sound.

Every headphone I've heard is a far cry from even a basic speaker with the most basic sub. Feeling the bass with your body while having true soundstage is the hight of enjoyment for me.

So to answer the question, yes I've found my endgame long ago(any decent speaker with a sub). If I buy anything in the future it is simply to expand a collection and not as an upgrade to anything as I don't see my enjoyment increasing by having better fidelity.

My favourites are Sennheiser HD560S, AKG K612 Pro and Hifiman HE400SE.

The answer is HD600

I'm at a pretty happy place with my gear and am not looking to change anything any time soon. My most recent addition was the IE600 back in November only because my FH9s didn't really stay in my ears very well, no matter what size tips I used.

Every driver can deliver any FR you can imagine. You just have to lower the volume. Drastically...

Same here. Living in an apartment instead of in a free-standing house also helps keep the speaker budget down.

I think buying more headphones actually makes the desire to upgrade even worse. When I bought my HD800 I thought I was done, until I started wondering about that „planar bass“ everyone is going on about. So I bought a LCD2C.

…and now I desperately want a headphone with the bass response off the Audeze and the clarity of the Sennheiser. Send help.

I basically applied the oratory1990 preset but lowered the bass shelf a bit to my taste. I use a qudelix 5k on my ps5 to apply the parametric EQ and then connect the shp9500 to that.

What did you adjust on the shp9500? I relegated them to Xbox mic duty