I know the Sony XM5s are getting a ton of hype right now, but after my M4s just bricked after barely 4 months i've decided i aint buyin shit until its been out for at least a few years so i can see how they hold up

so, fellow commie audiophile dorks, what headphones are yall using/recommending?

  • pudcollar [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Finally I get to infodump

    My main pair now are Shouer S12 IEMs, they're hard to beat for the price, really sparkly treble with a good thudding bass and good passive sound cancellation. I have Blessing2 Dusk IEMs that were twice as much, I don't use them much, they sound great but they're not as comfortable for me, the eartips come off, the bass isn't where I want it and I can't EQ in Debian 11 with pipewire. I have Etymotic ER4XRs that are also great, they go way deep in-ear with a triple-baffle eartip and skip all the ear canal meat distortion. Really great isolation.

    Any of those IEMs, thanks to chi-fi standardization or an adapter for the Etymotic, work with the 0.78mm plugs on my Shanling MW200 bluetooth neckband. I like it a lot for battery life, comfort, and it's got LDAC Bluetooth so it's near CD-quality, like the Sony XM series has.

    I have XM3s that sound halfway decent with autoeq on the android app Wavelet. The mic pick up mad background noise, i use Bose QC35iis for making calls, or my neckband. I'm not stoked on the quality of ANC over-ears, although I hear Focal Bathys is OK.

    I went and got a Monolith THX AAA amp to try out open-back over-ear headphones, I needed a stronger than average amp to drive planar headphones like the Hifiman HE6SE i got on an Adorama deal. Those are my backup cans now when my batteries for my IEMs run out, I'm keen on the planar sound these days, particularly bass. I've spent a lot of time listening to my Focal Clear OG dynamic over-ear headphones, they're fragile and expensive to fix headband snaps but they sound fantastic. I got them for half retail on Ebay, from a dirty dirty dude.

    Also I've got on-ear, these cheap Koss KSC75s, the audiophile geeks are just ape shit for these, highly recommended. I bought a knockoff porta-pro headband on aliexpress and they snapped right on, it looks like some cyberpunk retro futurism. And I've got nicehck traceless to see what 7 bucks gets me, which is pretty decent.

    I'm basically buying stuff Crinacle from inearfidelity tells me to buy, he's got dope ranking lists for headphones and iems although the lists are over a year old.

    I also have a Sennheiser HD600 and Qdelix 5K I hardly use.