[Blootrix]

Bought Logitech G533, I thought there would have been less wireless static, they're being returned in the next few days.


**Budget** - £100~ (Situated in the UK)

**Isolation** - Whatever works best with Virtual 7.1. (I've heard Open Back are best.

**Public Use** - No

**Preferred Type of Headphone** - Full Size

**Past Headphones** - Had AD700's for four years, they were OK, but not very comfortable. I hated the band on them. Bass was horrific. High's were a bit much for me at times.

**Preferred Music** - These are for 7.1 gaming. A little editing and show watching, but that's mainly gaming.

**What would you like to improve on from your setup** - Detachable AUX. More bass. Full and comfortable band. Similar or better positioning/soundstage to the AD 700's. No animal products, leather, suede, etc.

I have been doing research myself but I really don't know enough about this to make a decent decision, I was looking at the AKG K240's and ATH-M40X, though I heard the latter of those were closed so I assume the soundstage isn't great.

Thanks in advance!

 

[ProtegeManiac]

No animal products, leather, suede, etc.

If this is about ethics and not allergies to more recently animal products like leather, you're out of luck. Since the core idea is that the entire process of making the headphone and getting them to you must not cause any suffering for animals, you still have a number of problems.

1. Plastics tend to be oil by-products, which are made from dead dinosaurs. So technically, tyrannosaurus and apatosaurus suffering en masse in a meteor strike or ice age made plastic headphones possible.

2. Drilling for oil is an ecological risk. Think of all the penguins and seagulls that drowned in the oil spill. So again, petroleum is still the product of animal suffering.

3. Transporting the raw materials to the factory then the headphones to you burned petroleum and coal, which got spewed into the air in the process. A double whammy of animal suffering right there, not counting any deer or rabbits or cats the trucks might have run over.

4. Cheap headphones have a high likelihood of being the product of human suffering if they're made in China (as opposed to, say, Grados from Brooklyn, where US labour laws are followed), and humans are also animals.

5. Transducers have magnets and rubber. Mining magnetic materials and farming rubber damage the environment or local animal habitats.

 

[Blootrix]

If this is about ethics and not allergies to more recently animal products like leather, you're out of luck. Since the core idea is that the entire process of making the headphone and getting them to you must not cause any suffering for animals, you still have a number of problems.

1. Plastics tend to be oil by-products, which are made from dead dinosaurs. So technically, tyrannosaurus and apatosaurus suffering en masse in a meteor strike or ice age made plastic headphones possible.

2. Drilling for oil is an ecological risk. Think of all the penguins and seagulls that drowned in the oil spill. So again, petroleum is still the product of animal suffering.

3. Transporting the raw materials to the factory then the headphones to you burned petroleum and coal, which got spewed into the air in the process. A double whammy of animal suffering right there, not counting any deer or rabbits or cats the trucks might have run over.

4. Cheap headphones have a high likelihood of being the product of human suffering if they're made in China (as opposed to, say, Grados from Brooklyn, where US labour laws are followed), and humans are also animals.

5. Transducers have magnets and rubber. Mining magnetic materials and farming rubber damage the environment or local animal habitats.

I love your reply, I'm really not trying to be rude, but it gave me a laugh. Looking at the way you put everything, it looks like buying almost anything would violate some sort of ethic haha.

I just don't eat meat and I avoid wearing or buying products made of from animal products like leather, suede, fur, etc, that's all. I'm not a die-hard, save the world type by avoiding everything type person, there's only so much someone can do to try to help leave less of a footprint before it's not even worth leaving a footprint at all.

 

[Luminance]

AKG K240 MKII would probably be the best for gaming in this price range, but they need an amp or good sound card as far I am aware.
Otherwise the Sennheiser HD 518 or Philips SHP9500 would be a good choice. Both are open cans, fairy accurate, with wide soundstage.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

I love your reply, I'm really not trying to be rude, but it gave me a laugh. Looking at the way you put everything, it looks like buying almost anything would violate some sort of ethic haha.

I just don't eat meat and I avoid wearing or buying products made of from animal products like leather, suede, fur, etc, that's all. I'm not a die-hard, save the world type by avoiding everything type person, there's only so much someone can do to try to help leave less of a footprint before it's not even worth leaving a footprint at all.

Well it had some humour in it. In any case, I'm just saying that recently animal products aren't going to do as much as you think. There are people who would eat the meat off the cow so the skin has to go somewhere (not like they always end up as fertilizer for grain and veggies anyway).

Even eating less meat doesn't do as much as one thinks it does. Over here "less meat" means "more rice," and rice is an ecological disaster as far as crops go. Farms already take up a lot of space that should be animal habitat (and eating grass isn't going to help - one's calorie intake will just mean you'll starve the elk and deer first) and rice takes up a heck of a lot of irrigation (so all the dams take away more valleys where we normally have deer and wild boar). In that case a small population of hunter-gatherers eating meat has a much lower environmental impact than 100,000,000 converting to a vegan diet. Add to that how vegetables unless turned to kimchi or sauerkraut don't keep as well as grains (that are dry after milling) or meat (that can be frozen), and you'll end up needing farms to make more cabbage. Oh, and speaking of cabbage...I eat nearly as much cabbage and lettuce as I do meat (and minimal grains, especially irrigation-heavy rice), and I've become as much of a methane factory as a cow. Eating vegetables just made me fart out more greenhouse gas than I would if I ate mostly hamburgers and steaks. But I lost 55lbs switching over to Korean BBQ (ie, bacon and lettuce with cabbage kimchi) from burgers (carb-heavy bread), so there's that.

If you really want to reduce environmental impact, raw materials for your products won't get you as far as using solar power, and spend all your free time playing video games. Why video games? It lowers sex drive and thus, can reduce the human population. Some residential areas have more people in it than there are tigers in the whole world. The real problem isn't eating meat or the per capita carbon foot print if the population just continues to grow faster than we can make crops that grow fast enough since they don't last as long without a heck of a lot of salt and, as is the case in this side of the world, chili and vinegar.

In other words, I'm just saying you can relax about what your headphones are made of. Just spending your time playing video games (assuming you're using renewable energy) instead of dating (beyond driving there in a Tesla, eating the right food, and convincing girls to take a pill and risk viruses, because baleen whales might end up swallowing discarded condoms) is already helping the environment. Remember that the industrial revolution didn't just increase individual carbon footprint - it also allowed for a lot of other things to happen, including better healthcare (ambulances, doctors can be brought anywhere, vaccines, etc) and large scale farming (that reduced the prices of food) that allowed for a large human population to flourish. People ate a lot of meat before, but there were a lot less people too.

Hell, just staying at home listening to music instead of cruising or dating already helps the environment. Basically, if we neuter cats to help the ecological balance with birds, humans not reproducing (and ideally not dumping condoms into the ocean) should also be considered a viable strategy.

So...yeah, whatever you do, staying at home by yourself already helps.

 

[Blootrix]

AKG K240 MKII would probably be the best for gaming in this price range, but they need an amp or good sound card as far I am aware.
Otherwise the Sennheiser HD 518 or Philips SHP9500 would be a good choice. Both are open cans, fairy accurate, with wide soundstage.

Thank you very much for the suggestions, I'm actually VERY interested in buying a Sennheiser pair of headphones. I noticed the HD558 and HD559 are only £20 & £30 more expensive than the HD518's. Are either of those two any better/worth the upgrade?