Headphones--good brands at a reasonable price?

In My Humble Opinion
21

What’s a reasonable price to you?

With full-size headphones there are two basic types of headphones, open and closed. Open phones usually have the best sound quality, but they have an open structure that provides no isolation from outside sounds, so they’re useless in noisy environments. Closed headphones have a closed cup on the outside and these are what most people of as traditional full-sized headphones, but the sound isn’t as good for the money as open headphones.

I’d recommend Sennheiser if I had to pick one brand in general, but it depends on what you’re looking for exactly.

22

Here you go.

Slick Deal Forums, a head phone hot deal shows up weekly at least people usually discuss it so you know if it’s decent or not.

Also, Here is the head phone buying guide at head-fi

23

This is an attempt to recreate the thread about headphones which was overrun with spammers last night. I’ll try to restore the good posts in the next half hour.

samclem, moderator

I think it worked.

24

Emphasis mine. There are excellent closed headphones as well. I second the vote for Sennheiser. I like Beyerdynamic as well, but without knowing what’s meant by “reasonable” (and I’m somewhat confused, because IIRC the OP in the original, spammed thread, wasn’t actually asking for headphone recommendations, but about burn-in) we can’t really make a better recommendation.

25

to illustrate, I took a “fresh” speaker off of the shelf and measured the parameters new, after a brief run @ rated power, an extended run @ rated power, and after an overnight “rest.” This is a 16cm door speaker for a car, but the principles are the same.



	Fresh	3 min	25 min	24hr rest	
D    	130	130	130	130	[mm]
Re   	3.64	3.77	3.94	3.65	[Ohms]
Fs   	63.93	61.91	60.56	63.25	[Hz]
Zm   	19.13	19.01	18.76	19.16	[Ohms]
BL   	4.73	4.71	4.55	4.55	[N/A]
Qms  	3.009	2.893	2.837	2.982	
Qes  	0.707	0.717	0.753	0.701	
Qts  	0.573	0.574	0.595	0.567	
Vas  	14.19	15.11	16.43	15.64	[liters]
L10k 	0.42	0.43	0.44	0.42	[mH]
n0   	0.5	0.48	0.46	0.54	[%]
dBSPL  	89.09	88.88	88.75	89.41	[1W/1m]
Ms   	10.8	10.81	10.4	10.01	[grams]
Cms  	0.57	0.61	0.66	0.63	[mm/N]

key points:

nearly immediately, the suspension “stretches” which causes compliance (Cms) to increase which necessarily lowers the resonance (Fs) and mechanical Q (Qms) and causes equivalent air volume (Vas) to increase. Running it longer causes these values to shift even further, but after stopping operation and letting the speaker settle for a while, they return to somewhere between what they were new and after a few minutes of operation.

conclusion: a dynamic loudspeaker can be considered “broken-in” after only a short time of normal operation.

26

Ha! Beats by Dre.
Everytime I see some kid wearing those all I see is “sucker”.
Something tells me you could let them listen to a Grado, Sennheiser, or Sony, they’d know it sounds better, and they’d still get a Beats cause all the cool kids are doing it.

27

For my iPod I recently switched to the Sony headphones that are like the “Beats by Dre”. I opted to not replace the ear buds as I was getting sick of those things. Earbuds break easily, end up covered in ear wax and they don’t sound that great. These are comfortable, sound very good, durable and cost $19.99.

I’m never going back to earbuds.