I live in Vancouver, BC. Canada. No local store carry good heaphones!

If you don't mind buying used and know exactly what you want, try the sales forum here. With the Cdn$ as strong as it is, you'll get much better deals that way even after shipping and tax(GST+PST) and the tax often can be avoided.

There are lots of good headphone stores in B.C. The Hi Fi Centre carries Senheisser and Grado Headphones. They also have a wide variety of headphone amps. I have heard that Commercial Electronics also carries headphones although I have never been there myself.

Commercial Electronics carries the headphones you mentioned above. I just recently bought my DT531's from there. They are also quite flexable on the price.

ThatGuy, don't write off online retailers completely. I live in Vancouver too, and just went through something similar so, here's my advice. I looked around at A&B, Future Shop, RadioShack, Sony Store, etc. I couldn't find the phones I wanted though. So then I found HiFi Centre (in downtown Vancouver next to A&B Sound - near Seymour and Georgia I believe). It had some real quality phones, but to be quite honest the prices were a little steep for my tastes. For example, the Grado SR-60's were about $130-$140 plus tax. They can be had at HeadRoom for $62 US (about $84 CDN) plus $10 US shipping, and when they are delivered to you, you pay the taxes and duty, which would be about $15-$20 CDN). Altogether that's about $115, after taxes, when HiFi Centre would cost $150-160 after taxes.

I'm quite sure that HiFi Centre is the only place that sells the headphones on your list, if they even carry them at all.

Take the Beyer 250-80's for example. (These are the ones on your list that you want the most, correct?)
The cost is $179 US. Shipping to Vancouver is about $10 US. The dollar is pretty decent right now for canucks (remember when it was about $1.60 cdn to buy a US dollar? Glad those days are over) so at the conversion rate of 1.35, that would be ~$255 cdn.
Then when the headphones arrive at the door, you'd have to pay roughly $40 cdn for duty and taxes. The total there would be about $295 cdn. I guarantee that you can't get the 250-80's for that price here (if you can even buy them here, that is).

I just bought the Sennheiser HD580's from Headroom when they were on sale for $159 US and after everything it set me back $263 cdn.


Oh and also, another option that you might consider (if you find the headphones you want here) is haggling. Lots of people on Head-Fi do it, it seems. Often you could probably save a few bucks just by asking nicely.


Edit: I just read the post by Cyntax. I think you should check out that store (Commercial Electronics). I've never been there myself, but it sounds cool. Maybe I'll go sometime. Also nice to know they're flexible on the price. Sometimes it's worth the few extra bucks just to leave the store with the headphones right away as opposed to the torturous anticipation of waiting for your new headphones to be delivered to your doorstep.

http://www.commercialelectronics.ca/pro_audio.html

Good luck!

Actually the price I paid at Commercial electronics was less then what it would have cost me to buy them from the US.

It was quite easy actually. I was buying 2 pairs, I just gave him the "come on..you can do better then that" look and he gave me a decent price. If you really haggled alot with them then i'm sure you could save a few more bucks, but its not really worth it. They usualy give you a decent price after a couple of the "come on, whats the real price" kinda looks

Sound Room also carries Senn's. I saw the HD600's there about two weeks ago.

Hi there....If you guys look for AKG headphones, you can go to TomLee. I saw they carry some AKG headphones.

you might see if there's a Guitar Center in Bellingham and just drive down, they'd have the HD 280's and if you do like serveral of us have you can print the buy page from PC Mall and get them for $69.99 USD but why not save yourself the trouble and order from a website? If you find one that has a good return policy (Headroom) you can audition the cans for a while then return if you don't like them.

Commercial Electronics is the only place in Vancouver you can get Beyerdynamic headphones...the DT250-80 is C$250....at least, that was what it was when I priced it last time...they also carry high end Senn's, Stax and some Sony's and AKG's...they were the first to get Ultrasone's, but now the HiFi Centre seems to be trying them out as well, although it specializes in Grados and HD600, HD590s....

For the Sony 750X series, the Senn HD280 and the AKG Studio series, Long & McQuade and Tom Lee are the places to go to...

Sound Plus [near Broadway and Cambie] carry the lower end Grado's...but don't really specialize in headphones...they're more or less Bose people [yech]

A place called Tom Lee music (there's stores all over the place.. one downtown) carries the Shure E2Cs... wonder if they have anything else though.

If you're ordering phones over the internet from the US (or elsewhere) also keep in mind that you may have to pay duty and, depending on the shipping method, you may have to cough up $5 to Canada Post for their handling fee.

On the subject of haggling: you can always throw in a "well I can get it at 'x' store for 'y' dollars less', that kinda thing would probably work. And bringing in a printout of the competitor's prices would help, too.