If you're saying Headphones will never sound as good as real quality speakers in a nice studio/room then I'm with you 100%.

I believe you, I just wish I knew better than to follow those youtube reviewers sponsored hype.

Sorry to revive this thread, but the 40's are indeed really disappointing. I tested them and the 50's at the shop and they sounded fine to me. I guessed they would sound much better in the quiet of my home but it's even worse. I compare them to my favorite headphones (Somic HM-463 which cost...

I'll just leave this here:       Read more about it: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Suffice to say that the CD audio norm is more than what human ears can hear so anything beyond that is a waste of diskspace and bandwidth (EDIT: Especially on music that's compressed as hell like the type of music the OP listens to)   You may disagree and I'm not gonna try to convice you. it's...

  Neither does the human ear. Not to mention the extra bits are filled with blank noise on 24bit flacs.

  Flac will not make any difference in audio quality with the stuff you listen to so don't bother.   Flac and so called lossless audio is way overrated. In real life there's no way to notice the difference between a flac and a well encoded high bitrate mp3/aac.

It's hard to find Japanese music that is well produced and not a compressed mess.   here are some suggestions both old and new:   This artist's name is Beni, she's just awesome. (her unplugged album is the one that sounds best)   ANZENCHITAI - Wine Red No Kokoro.     And a couple...

  Well, it's obvious that people who like underground and indie stuff like you have nothing to complain about.   But me, I can actually appreciate the talent in some of the mainstream artists, and their music sounds okay when you see it on TV, or hear it in a party. But when you sit down with...

  Thanks for the suggestions, some of those really do sound good.

Don't think that FLAC will dramatically improve the sound, it's practically identical to 320kbps MP3 in real life. People will say flac contains more sound information, but I am a human, I don't care about sounds my ears cannot possibly hear.   Get better headphones, it's the only thing that...

  The main point of having a DAC/AMP is to be able to drive headphones with high impedance at high volume which the iphone/ipod can't do, not dramatically change the way things sound.   The main advantage you have now is that you are able to drive your headphones at a decent volume and hear...

The Boom

    You're not gonna notice any difference in quality with that style of music. No need to try FLAC as it's still gonna be the same with electro music.   Hell, you don't even need high spec headphones if you're only listening to artificial kicks and hit hat. It's like buying a ferrari...

A dead give away when you play music on a bad phone is when you pause the music, the music stops but the noise keeps going for a second or two.