john q lin said:

The headphones I regrade buying m50x, Sony bt 950.
Surprisingly good ones are Philips L2, shp9500, m40x.

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I presume that by "bt 950" ye mean the Sony® MDR-XB950BT?

bcschmerker4 said:

john q lin said:

The headphones I regrade buying m50x, Sony bt 950.

Surprisingly good ones are Philips L2, shp9500, m40x.

Click to expand...

I presume that by "bt 950" ye mean the Sony® MDR-XB950BT?

Click to expand...

Yes, it's very comfortable, but it's too big, and the sound quality was not hifi, especially with bass boost on. The wire cable was cheap.I was only $100, I didn't have high expectations.

Audeze LCD-*
 
Extremely heavy. I don't even care how good the sound is, if the headphones are going to be so heavy that I can't use them for more than an hour at a time.

Sennheiser HD6! What a mushy sound. At least they were not expensive.

For higher prized cans: HD700. Treble peak was not tolerable for half of my music.

B&W P7 wired over ear... Worst clamping force ever it made me headache and I am not even a big head guy. Bass is massive though but other than that nothing impressed me

For me,

DT990 - Treble cannons. I was warned but wanted more bass than the 880 and thought they would be OK

Audeze LCD 2 - Good sound, but they are too delicate and the QC is very iffy. First pair had a messed up hinge that would stick. Second pair chipped after tapping it on the edge of my amp. Still sound good, but I don't want to have to treat headphones like glass.

HiFiMan HE-400i - Good bang for the buck, but the hinges are really bad. They slowly loosened up since it is plastic on plastic. They are still in one piece, but feel very loose and close to falling apart.

I really wish someone would come up with a bulletproof planar. I would be all over it if they stood up like my Beyers.

Very dissatisfied with the HiFiman HE-560 build quality. The ear pads easily separate from cups and are VERY difficult to re-install. Headband twists out of shape and again difficult to get back to normal. Not pleased with the reply to my concerns from HiFiman (out of warranty),and provided little help. And this is for a headphone that costs nearly a grand! ($1200 CND)

Great thread. Read backward to 100. When I see that some of you do not like AKG 701 or 702, it reminds me that when I bought my 702s, they sounded crappy. After a couple of years, I found out on this forum that they need 300 hours of break in. They are now one of my favorite headphones-- the Wywires Red headphone cable helped too. Nice comfortable headphones.
Love my old Senn HD600s too. Both of these are comfortable.

For me there's two from recent memory:

Audeze Sine: Very poor build quality. The superstructure is made from cheap trash metal that snaps too easily and Audeze will charge around $150 to fix them, and takes their sweet time doing it. Mine broke with very little pressure. The cypher cable that came with it was sometimes intermittent. The sound was kind of blah from these phones. For $400 there's better options.

Mr. Speakers Ether C Flow: The main reason why I say this was a bad purchase was that with tax and shipping I paid almost 2k and these are not 2k sounding headphones. They're good closed cans, but not great. Both my Beyer T5p and Ultrasone Sig. Pro closed cans sound just as good for much less money. If the C Flows were $999 (roughly similar to the other two I mentioned here, I wouldn't be writing this. Now, the Mr. Speaker Ether Flow (non-C) are superb sounding headphones and are my favorite headphones—ever. Those truly are top shelf headphones. I'm always scratching my head when people say they like the C version better. I believe them, but it confuses me.

These are just my opinion here of course.

Interesting to hear your experience with the Sine, had been considering them...

doctorjazz said:

Interesting to hear your experience with the Sine, had been considering them...

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What else have you been looking at?

I'm always considering to much stuff. The iSine seems really interesting as well.

Noble Dulce Bass, my most disappointing purchase since joining Head-Fi and buying 100+ headphones.

All mid-fi headphones I bought (AKG K712, HD650, Sony 7506) after hearing how my Yamaha HS7 speakers made them sound lo-fi.

The MrSpeakers Ether FLOW (open) are the worst purchase I have ever made.
I paid 1695 GBP for them and sold them in the end for around 1200 GBP (no-one seemed to bite above that, also due to the massive increase of people all selling their Flows at the same time).

I tried a variety of amps, burned them in for 200 hours, and added a Wywires Red cable, but nothing could fix the problems I had with them.
They sounded too distant with a very small soundstage (as if there were someone else sitting next to me listening to music), mids were lacking and the sound was not involving, one might say etherial.
YMMV of course - this is just not what I'm looking for in a product like that.

I feel like as soon as you go above a certain threshold money-wise, you should always experience the equipment before purchasing it.
This avoids getting misled by threads that are 80% hype from people who don't actually own the product (with almost 100 pages of posts before the product even gets released).
I fell victim to this, but I have no-one to blame but myself.

However, the Flows were super comfy, which leads me to the second worst purchase I made recently: the Focal Spirit Classic.
May sound great, but I can't wear them for a very long time.
If I were to torture someone to get vital information out of them, I would let them wear these for around 2 hours.