I was comparing my Koss Sporta Pros to my Fostex TH600 and I was thinking, you know, yeah the TH600 sounds better, but is it really *that* much better? For the massive increase in price (more than 10x more costly).
In particular, I was listening to music at 320kbps, and was getting annoyed how the Fostex made me notice the lossy format's shortcomings vs lossless, while the Koss totally masked them.
Was using each with an RSA Predator out of a Chromebook with music at 320kbps and I'm kinda like you know what? I think I might prefer the Koss.
With my lossless library and my ODAC/O2 no doubt I prefer the Fostex, but increasingly these days with streaming services and smartphones, the situation calls for something easy and cheap that always sounds good, from shoddy YouTube videos to high-bitrate lossy stuff and beyond, no hassle.
If the Koss (S)Porta Pro could isolate noise, it'd be the one of the best headphones of all time, practically speaking. That's its one weakness.