Which Summit-Fi Headphone For Me? - Page 7

See, from years of experience, Onkyos are just timebombs. There's a reason you don't see vintage Onkyo gear, and all that.

Denon, Yamaha, Sony (especially ES and older stuff), etc will all last, but there's varying degrees of quality. Pioneer IME is all over the place - some of them are road warriors, others are trash. Never honestly heard of Marantz being unreliable - never even seen one die. Then again, as you said, the more DSP crap you stack up, and the hotter you run, the worse you are (there's a metric in IT that you can roughly halve usage life with every 10*C you gain in operating temperatures over ambient - and some of the newer Pioneer and Onkyo units I've seen run hot enough to fry meat on the faceplate).

+1 on this. I agree especially on the 701 point - they really outshine a lot of competitors when you consider the $200-$300 pricetag (or even $400 retail), and that they're celebrifones, and all that jazz. Of course since the Germans started playing Price It Right, they're no longer "high end," but c'est la vie. Was there an original thesis to this thread, because I feel like we've diverged?

I like that - "no clue who their customers are" -

Yeah, the old stuff with the CCS frames and honeycomb bodies, wood-sides, and Elite badges - that was some nice gear. And some of the insanity-level statement players like the HLD-X0 or BD-09FD. I think after the SC-09TX they completely just threw in the towel on caring though.

I'd agree with this. My experience with AVRs is generally positive, but I don't really play around with stuff you can buy at Wal-mart.

Yeah, the 5508 comes to mind as an ideal video processor, but even that one will shoot craps given enough time. And it's usually stupid problems like ribbon cables shearing off or solder joints failing, things that shouldn't make it past QA.

+1. Most of the BOM $ on modern AVRs is for licencing all of those badges on the front, not the hardware inside. I still remember (and even have!) AVRs from before that was even "a thing" - you get the manufacturer's name and maybe a Dolby sticker, and the rest of your money is into components. But now it's just this huge banner of features (most of which nobody will ever use, or it's the kind of thing that like 10% of customers want feature A, 10% want B, etc and they're trying to do the Heinz Method where you make enough different flavors to entice all customers, but instead of releasing 57 different models, they mix them all together - and you can imagine how that tastes).


Yeah, I remember the 701 costing under $300 in 2007-2008 even. And the HD 650 was not $500 either. But then something shifted, and "they" decided that $1500 can be the new $500, and $600 can be the new $200.

It's all market manipulation. I agree with the hand-made/US stuff - it's like you had the DT880 (which are also made in germany!), HD 650, and K701, all sub $500 by SRP, and around $300 street, and the RS-1 would show up to that fight and get laughed out at $695, but you have to remember that the RS-1 is being hand-built in NYC and it's made from some unobtanium wood that is grown just for Grado. But now the RS-1 is the "cheap seats" and "mid-fi" and you aren't even in the game until you've spent $1500 on a headphone (and $5,000-$10,000 on some special amp to plug it into). It's ridiculous. And I'm looking squarely at Beyerdynamic and Sennheiser for this whole mess - it wasn't STAX, it wasn't even Ultrasone with their Edition series (because those've been around since 2004, and STAX have been expensive since at least the 1970s), it wasn't AKG (they're undercutting everyone), or Grado (who have held their prices stable since sometime around 2003), or even the boutique planar guys who are crafting new drivers out of nothing to serve their needs - no, it's Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic who decided that we need to make everything 3-4x as expensive and then forcefully drop a MAP on everyone's head to ensure the skim works. Good grief.

"Boutique for the sake of being boutique" - that's a nice way of saying "expensive for the sake of being expensive" - aye?

I also wish headphones can be a little more affordable LOL...

Amen. I liked how things were a few years ago, where $500-$750 was summit-fi aside from collectible stuff (like the R10).

So what were the summit-fi headphones back then? Like the hd650, dt880, k701 (the ones you guys mentioned)? That's it? Sorry if I don't know too much history about headphones. I think a year ago I was still using ibuds...

Those, the ATH-W series (most of which cost more in-line with the W1000X than the W5000/W3000), the HD 600, various Grado models (RS-1, GS-1000, PS-1, HP-1000, etc), Sony SA5k, not sure if the PROline 2500 was ever elevated, and then the various "big gun" rare models like the AKG K1000, AT L3000, Sony CD3k and R10, STAXen, and the Sennheiser stats. A lot of that stuff was, and continues to be, fairly expensive - but it's all relatively small scale and rare. The prices on some of those have absolutely skyrocketed in the last few years though (like the R10, which are now pushing $10k). The point wasn't really that $1000+ models didn't exist (the RS-1 have been $695 for a really long time, for example, the GS-1000 have been $1k since 2006, the R10s have always been multiple thousands of dollars, STAX have always been expensive, etc), but the trio you mentioned there - those ran around $300, and were pretty much top of the mark. Now though, those are "mid-fi" or even "entry level" to some posters, simply because they don't cost a whole bucket of money, and otherwise aren't sanctified. And it's easy to understand that mentality, in the light of stuff like the Beats headphones (I don't mean to start down that path - I just mean, if you look at something like the Beats Pro which is $400, it isn't generally regarded as a legitimate competitor to the DT880 or K701 in terms of fidelity, regardless of if it's a good headphone or not), and the massive price hiking that Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic have engaged in with their own product lines (the new T series stuff from Beyer is just disgusting, for example). It all feeds on itself. You go from a single $300-$400 fashion headphone being overpriced, to a few $600-$700 audiophile headphones being overpriced, to the entire segment shifting upwards very quickly and the buy-in going from the "affordable hi-fi" (which used to be the argument for headphone listening) to a terrible value proposition. And what I mean there is, if you're gonna spend $5-10k, get speakers.

I might be forgetting a few models too; apologies to anyone who feels I left their babies out.

I see... so what headphone do you consider to be the cheapest summit-fi headphone? He500 at 700 bucks nowadays?

Depends on how you want to classify summit-fi. If you mean good quality sound that doesn't get old after a few hours and a can that is well rounded and high fidelity in its reproduction abilities, the K701, HD600/650, and DT880 are very much relevant. But they don't "fit" because they're $1000 too cheap. I'm not a fan of this recent "smash everything into rankings" jag that seems to have taken the world by storm - take your cans straight-up and stick with the ones you like, who cares if they don't "win" popularity contests or Consumer Reports doesn't put them at the top of their list.

If you wanted a more conservative answer (as in, one that won't have people get irked at you for challenging the status quo and/or questioning things in general) - the HE-500 are a common suggestion (I have not heard them, and probably never will - imho no headphone has a good reason to be 500g or larger), the ESP/950 are also obscure and expensive enough to sit at the table. The thing is, the ESP/950 are what? $600-$1000 depending on Amazon's mood, and something like the HD 580 or HD 600 were $200-$350 a few years ago, and are nearly as good and just as enjoyable - so which one is really better? (And this isn't meant to denigrate the 950 - I enjoy them quite a bit, but I see their extra cost more as a function of their complexity and American build, not as some sort of objective measure of their performance relative to things around them).
Edited by obobskivich - 8/14/12 at 9:40am

I think my definition of summit-fi is its one of the best there is, at least in its own class (class as in driver types... etc). And you wont be able to get too much higher performance than that, meaning even if you can upgrade, the difference is very little and at that point, preferences should matter more than actual upgrade in technicality. In this case k701, dt880, hd600/650, are they still in or are they out?

I believe the Audeze line are summit, as well as the likes of HD800 and HE-6. However, I feel the HE-500 is the best budget summit can....

And maybe some modified Fostex headphones.

Within your definition, I'd say yes they are still in. The real improvements over those three when moving to something much more expensive and obscure are fairly minor, they still sit at that threshold of diminishing returns. Of course you'll get someone telling you that "oh god no, you need XYZ iPride 5 to experience this dramatic, Universe shattering, life changing, religion creating experience" and to that I don't have a good response, but having gone from 2/3 of those to much more hoity-toity models, the realized differences are minor (there are improvements, but it's more differences/preferences than improvements - for example, I don't "hear more details and feel that I'm rediscovering my music" having gone from the K701 to 'stats - all the detail is still there, but the 'stats have a different presentation and tonal balance).

At the end of the day it comes down to what you think is appreciable though - I remember a recent thread where someone upgraded from an M50 to a K701, and felt the 701 was marginal (if any) improvement, and was disappointed. A lot of people got pretty offended (I don't know why) - so in that case I think it's a case of the improvements not being appreciable relative to the price. In other words, all of this "night and day, universe changing" talk has over-promoted what really is to be gained from spending a lot more money. As Erik said, the point of diminishing returns is in the thousands, not the billions.

The last $50,000 for the last .05%.

That sounds like the general idea of summit-fi, I mean what most people would consider as summit-fi

And that ideation will change - just as it did in the past. Something "new and improved" will come about, and those will no longer be special and fantastic, they'll be old hat, and passed over. Just like the HD 650 or ATH-W5000. It's a moving reference, and that's why it's problematic.

I'm not really trying to argue with any conception here - I think paradoxper is spot-on in terms of what "most people" would say if asked, and there's nothing at all wrong with that. It's just a very loosely defined construct that serves nothing but people staying on a continuous treadmill, chasing a carrot they can't ever reach, to get "the best sound" or whatever else as manufacturers oblige with stream after stream of new products. It's very consumeristic I guess you could say. And again, there is no value judgment attached here.
Edited by obobskivich - 8/14/12 at 10:07am

IF the newer cans are indeed improved and better...why is it problematic?

 

LCD-3 best or most preferred headphone I've heard (including all orthos and stats) not worth the price though. That is just by my value system.

 

HD 650: Amazing headphone, cheaply priced. Not as good as Audeze or some Hifiman...how's this problematic?