Price is a bummer. I had HE6 (heavily modded including direct cabling) for few days and I liked it most before I heard HE1000. They are very good but little uncomfortable.
Hifiman is not the one to blame for pricing. It is Audeze mainly who started pricing their oversize gear at stupidly high prices for non limited editions. Knowing most people think price reflect performance Hifiman came up with stupid pricing for HE1000 also. No no going back for anyone.
Fact of the matter is people go overboard with hifi gear with less critical analysis in reviews. For me HE1000+Vio V281+V850 + cables+ streamers etc that cost over US$7k sound say 15-20% better than same song played via my Lenovo T520 sound port without any external DAC/Amp and with humble Philips X2 which is about US$300. But people who review each component including cables claim night and day differences. I have seen one person who is having LCD4+ Chord Dave included the comment "out off all I love $15 headphones from ebay"
in his signature. So something is wrong.
Well, yeah...
In my view headphones beyond DT880/K702/HD650 normally offer very little improvement to the overall "high fidelity headphone experience"
That's why I've kept those former "flagships" despite owning some of the newer and much pricier ones. One thing is technical performance and/or rational critical listening where you listen to find out which one has a blacker background or more precise imaging, the other thing is enjoying the music, forgetting you're wearing headphones. With regards to the first one, yes, it's not hard to tell HD800 is a tad more capable than DT880 here and there, but when it comes to enjoying the music both are quite close and which one is better is normally recording dependent. DT880 has just a hint more bass and just a hint less of a 6kHz peak so it does rock better most of the times to my ears (read, more enjoyable). It's also sturdier and more compact so it's better for certain circumstances.
I think headphones over 500usd are luxury/exclusive products.
Like watches, you don't pay a Zenith watch for being much better than a Hamilton watch. Both look good, both last many years, both tell the time and both have cool engineering inside.
If you have the money and want a Zenith then you'll have to pay 5 times the price of a Hamilton, if you can't find something better to do with the money, then why not? It's like going on holidays, that's much pricier and only lasts a few days.
Enjoyment is really a personal thing. Sometimes the enjoyment arise from very unintuitive things.
Some people enjoy listening to music with 6k headphones just for the sake of being 6k headphones. It's definitely a complex matter.
I don't support these days pricing, don't get me wrong. But I think manufacturers are free to ask whatever they want for the products they make.
In the same way customers are free to buy or not.
One last thing to note is that 100usd for someone is 10.000usd for someone else. That plays a big role as well.
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