Nation recommend me some headphones please

This is an archive of the mabination.com forums which were active from 2010 to 2018. You can not register, post or otherwise interact with the site other than browsing the content for historical purposes. The content is provided as-is, from the moment of the last backup taken of the database in 2019. Image and video embeds are disabled on purpose and represented textually since most of those links are dead.

To view other archive projects go to https://archives.mabination.com

Lan wrote on 2012-07-28 14:22

I need something light, portable and that will be comfortable to wear even after a few hours of use. My self appointed budget for this is about $120 :)

Your aid will be greatly appreciated.
Sumpfkraut wrote on 2012-07-28 18:43

Here's a guide to earphones form all price categories, if you're into those then you might look that one up.

I can't give you qualified advise what model to exactly buy by myself though, because I only had a handful of headphones in my life, and none in that price category. But I can tll you that it is either way best to narrow it down to several ones that interest you in reviews and then try to find stores or private persons in your area where you can try them out. Of course just buying based on reviews can work too, it's what I did and I'm pretty satisfied so far. But while it seems easier, it is a gamble because everyone's ears are shaped differently and thus affect the sound differently, and you might pass out on opportunities simply because you didn't know the sound of the contenders, which might just be even better than that really pleasing pair you got in the end.

You should stay away from head-fi and perhaps headroom as a source though - they have a lot of audio esotericists with distorted views on audio technology who spout misdirecting and sometimes potentially gear-damaging nonsense about what is good and what not. Considering that, maybe that list is not a very good direction since it mostly redirects to head-fi. You can contrast their reviews with John Doe reviews on Amazon et al. I guess.
RebeccaBlack wrote on 2012-07-30 03:11

Head-fi is alright if you read into headphones enough and can pick out the obvious BS. Always good to look for a bunch of sources, reviews, videos, etc. If you don't care too much, just getting something that's universally high rated and seems to have what you like should be pretty safe. Just make sure you look at a lot of sites. I think Beats are high rated on Amazon, for example, and they're dramatically inflated for the price. A $400 pair might sound like $100.

Head-fi is sort of the big, central audio place of the internet, imo. With that said, there's a lot of random people who don't really know what they're talking about much like there would be on an Alienware forum for computers, for example. It's hard to get legit advice, because the audio world is filled with crap and one place will tell you the complete opposite of another, and some are sponsored/censor or "adjust" their reviews, etc.

A lot of people love the Audio-Technica ATH-M50, which can be bought for about $100-120. I haven't personally looked into it much and they're not really "portable", but they're not super bulky with 3 meter cables like some of the full-sized Sennheisers and a lot of higher priced headphones like Audeze, HiFiMans and Stax. And yeah, it also depends on what types of headphones you want. Open, closed, earbuds, etc. "Portable" can also mean anything from "what doesn't make me look dumb" to "tiny iPod earbuds".
Sumpfkraut wrote on 2012-08-01 20:42

Quote from RebeccaBlack;921820:
Head-fi is sort of the big, central audio place of the internet, imo. With that said, there's a lot of random people who don't really know what they're talking about much like there would be on an Alienware forum for computers, for example. It's hard to get legit advice, because the audio world is filled with crap and one place will tell you the complete opposite of another, and some are sponsored/censor or "adjust" their reviews, etc.

Such as the staff at Head-Fi, which purposefully breeds the culture of blissful and sometimes "assertive" ignorance that Head-Fi is renown for. Misinformation is the rule there, information the exception.
RebeccaBlack wrote on 2012-08-02 05:12

Quote from Sumpfkraut;924196:
Such as the staff at Head-Fi, which purposefully breeds the culture of blissful and sometimes "assertive" ignorance that Head-Fi is renown for. Misinformation is the rule there, information the exception.

I don't think they're as bad as they're made out to be. They've covered up some things in the past to protect their sponsors (according to the blog you posted), and they certainly don't regulate (or even encourage) proper information from their userbase, but they don't go out of their way to spread horrible misinformation at every opportunity either like most audio places seem to. Basically, there's good and there's bad. They certainly don't censor any sort of positive discussion about the O2, either, and the O2 might as well have been known as the "fuck you Head-Fi" amp being that he designed it specifically to prove he was right and they were wrong. And of course to deliver a great product at a good price. It's just clear that was a pretty major motivation from what I read.

In any case, this is why I recommend getting your info from a lot of sources... with other electronics, you can usually get legit reviews from a single site like Newegg, but here it's in your best interests to see what everyone has to say and how things measure up.