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Up 'til now, I've had a rather naive faith that this forum would serve as a guide in the quest for the 'holy grail.' Despite this faith, it's become abundantly clear that not only is this faith misguided, it seems more and more obvious that most members don't care much about sound quality at all.
Instead, they're closet status chasers. They want 'props' and congratulations from other forum members as they climb up the status ladder: from $80 to $100 to $200 headphones, and so on. And of course it doesn't stop there: must buy ever more expensive amps, DAC's. Oh, and it doesn't stop there, either. Must recable, and recable again. Must mod. Wood is better than, whatever.
It's like watching a dog chase it's own tail. At under $30 the ksc75's plus a headband plus shipping, is likely to get you 95% of the way towards the VERY BEST headphones AT ANY PRICE. They are certainly likely to exceed just about anything else out there up to $150 or $180 aside from grado sr60i's.
It's really sad watching people waste their time and money their entire lives over non-existent, pseudo-incremental gains in sound quality.
That's the sad delusion of shopping addiction: nothing you buy is ever enough: once the "high" of a new purchase wears off, you have to buy something else, something typically more expensive in a never ending spiral of debt.
PATHETIC!
Sorry I haven't posted in a long time guys!
This post resonates with my experiences.
You see, when i started this audio adventure in 2010 i was only 14 years old. At this time there was still a lot of audio "myth" running wild with subjective claims of "increased sound quality"; back in those days you would see people buying $150 bag of gems to attach to their equipment to "lower the noise floor" or $100+/ft cables. Not to mention a huge bias towards "audio quality = more money". Unfortunately I live in a small town with no specialty shops that have demo rooms, and had to buy products myself and form opinions at the expense of my wallet.
Between now and then we've seen a large movement away from purely subjective reviews to objective reviews and products, such as innerfidelity's measurements/reviews and the ODAC/O2 amp. At this same time a huge movement towards value and community contributors mass-reviewing audio equipment (CliOS, ljokerl, Dsnuts, Innerfidelity, HiFiGuy528, ect) has greatly improved clearing out the myths surrounding audio.
Between now and then I've spent countless dollars trying to find audio perfection. I've built many speakers such as Paul Carmody's Overnight Sensations and Amiga, I've bought cutting-edge science amplifiers such as the Dayton Audio DTA100-a, helped friends build car audio systems with top end Infinity Kappa components, Bought DT990's, Sony MDR v6's, Grado 60i's, many IEMS, ect ect. To this day
to my ears the Koss KSC75's are still the best sounding pair of audio reproduction equipment, period.
You see, Headphones and IEM's don't have the issues surrounding speakers. Mainly baffle step diffraction, high voice coil inductance, room interaction, problematic acoustic phase shift between tweeters/midranges/subwoofers, intermodulation distortion caused by high x-max(excursion), complex passive crossover networks which create tons of problems themselves, box (enclosure) resonances, ect ect.
My point is, I've spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours in work and research into audio to try to create an audio experience better than a $15-20 pair of Koss KSC75's. As a overall package, i have never been able to achieve that. Of course this is subjective, i guess the frequency response of the KSC75's just sound pleasing to me. Not to mention it doesn't have all of the above problems of speakers and more.
What I've come to understand after approximately 4+ years to finding audio nirvana is that there is no perfect way to engineer a speaker/iem/headphone. Audio engineering is all about trade offs.
You're free to spend all the money you want to find better finding audio equipment. All i ask is that you at least give the KSC 75's a try before buying more expensive equipment. You may find no improvement, or too little to not justify a nice refund.