Well, I have an Asus g751jy series laptop without any claims to a Bang and Olafson anything in its guts and I can tell you that it's headphone output is trash when compared to even my HTC One m8 cell phone. I don't know much about Fiio's solutions aside that they are well regarded so to me it...

Nope, you just create warehouse deals for the rest of us, although when shopping IEMs i did try to go with an Amazon open box option where available.  It had the added bonus of allowing free of cost returns via claiming the item was not as described.  I did this nearly 20 times when shopping for...

The buzz about these is pretty strong but I have no time with them http://www.head-fi.org/t/785377/shure-kse1500-review-shure-kse1500-sound-isolating-electrostatic-earphones

For me in building my home stereos, I always went loudspeaker first, driving electronics second because in my little pea brain, the thought that the transducer is always the more critical, most difficult thing to build right.  I throw this out there because i have had some Technics pieces in the...

Yuck, I just read that the Clip Sport is limited to 2k max songs on the SD card, no matter what the capacity.  I know its a fringe market anymore but that just seems unnecessarily lazy if you are going to bother with designing and manufacturing along the lines of a portable player.

What have you tried so I can rle out some search results?  For some reason my curiosity is piqued in a category I haven't given much thought to in a while.  Pity the SanDisk Clip can't accept SDXC cards otherwise that looked like it might have some potential.

Have you considered battery replacement?  THey can be had from ebay and amazon from my brief look into the matter and if your Zen Extra pulls apart as easily as my long since gone Zen Micro 5gb, it might just be the route you want to go... should only need a small spread of guitar picks to use...

As far as a brief overview this is the one of the better reference for overviewing the fitment types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones#Types   My first sets of decent headphones were both IEMs.  My main reasons for this were the class's typical characteristic of being easy to drive...

Cable noise while moving around had me sending back the vast majority of the IEMs I auditioned the ie 800s were no exception. I am a big Shure fan because across their line cable noise is NEVER an issue. It doesn't matter what you do with the se series cable... They do not generate noise period...

I'll be back in the morning and my experience is narrow in the scope of time frame but decent in varieties of IEMs. What kind of music do you listen to (genres or tracks I can fire up on tidal) and what are you using for playback?

I want to throw out that I realize that I may need to upgrade the amplification end of my setup in order to get the right results and courtesy of the link provided earlier, I now find myself salivating at the thought of the Schiit Yggdrasil and hell, why not pick up a serious amp while I am at...

I really intended to put "higher" not "highest".  Thanks for the catch and the reading... just the kind of post I was hoping for.

I've listened to a lot of IEMs but I am shopping for baaby's first set of cans myself.  If those are on the table at all, and it doesn't seem that way given your OP, I could give you a little guidance on that end.

Greets to all and happy new year.         From time to time, I think it'd be nice to have some open back over ear headphones.  Normally, its quite quiet when I am sitting down to listen anyway so isolation is not a concern. Heat and related discomfort which is why I have initially pegged...