Speakers! There are many albums I love but can't enjoy unless I play them on speakers. There is no album I love that I can't enjoy unless I play it on headphones. As simple as that.
Oh sure, headphones can be so very clean and detailed. Headphones are more discriminating than speakers(lower distortions, no reverb, left channel only getting to left ear) so it's the way to go when doing listening tests. But for music enjoyment, at home, there is a more natural way to do it. One that almost all sound engineers used to mix and master the album you're playing.
So,
-Option 1, I don't live where I live, I'm all alone(sometimes I dream of it but don't tell anybody). I'd get good speakers instead of my old LSR308 I can almost never use because it disturbs whomever(why I never bothered getting anything better
). Plenty of ways to lose 10k with a speaker setup. Multichannel would be my poison nowadays, 3 years ago I was so sure I would never care for more than stereo. But since I've demoed more multichannel systems(for maybe one day........), but more importantly, more multichannel music(also movies and TV shows stream in Atmos now. Stereo is dead).
-Option 2. What I had to do. Get a Realiser A16, use it with your HD800, spend the rest of the money on music and a well deserved trip to recover from the torment that is setting up and measuring actual speakers with the A16.
You'll never get a better, more convincing feeling of space and imaging on any classic non DSP headphone's playback system, no matter how much money you throw at headphones, amps and DACs. Not an opinion, but an objective fact based on how humans locate sounds. You can have a gazillion taps and oversampling to the moon for the nicest looking impulse response, a gigawatt of power and the lowest ever level of distortion out of a transducer, so long as your HRTF wasn't involved somewhere(naturally with speakers, or in some convolution with headphones), realistic is not going what you'll get.
Some people manage to imagine big spaces with basic headphone playback, I have a very hard time escaping lateralization*, and whatever space I manage to invent, collapses the moment I move my head a little. That does not happen to me with the A16. I still get impacted by what I see and the size of the actual room I'm in, but the instruments are far from me and anchored to a physical place(like my turned off speakers because my brain still thinks they can make sounds) thanks to head tracking and a fluid change between my recorded impulses for convolution in the right direction.
*
Sound localization refers to the ability to identify the location of a sound source in a sound field, whereas lateralization refers to the similar auditory ability in which the listener determines the location of sounds, presented through headphones, in their head (intracranial)
Musiek and Chermak, 2015
Obviously, I'm always grateful for headphones and IEMs, and keep using them massively when I'm outside. I also believe that the future of fidelity is through headphones because speakers will never match the level of fidelity. But only if we stop ignoring the elephants in the room, like head movement, and HRTF.
