I'm a freshman in head-fi, only before several months ago I began to turn myself into HI-FI music, and buy a sennheiser HD219s.
But until now, I can't really how a good head-phone is, I just feel that my HD219s is just similar to my iPhone5 ear-phone.
So I hope to buy a more expensive one within $200. However, without any experience, I just don't know how to select a better one and destinguish the difference.
Hope someone can give me some advices.Thanks!
Heya,
The first step to realizing with your ears, a higher fidelity sound, to help know it's worth getting more expensive equipment for rendering music, is
to seek out higher quality recorded & mastered music. That means using lossless quality audio when able, and seeking out specifically higher quality recordings and albums with better mastering, etc. It's amazing that something straight from a CD can sound so
bad sometimes, but that's because it's poorly recorded and/or poorly mastered, and just isn't high quality even though it's lossless and straight from source. My point is that not every album is equal in quality. You have to pick and choose selectively for albums that are high quality in every aspect, that you enjoy listening to. It takes a while to find enough albums that truly are well done, to build a large library of it. This is the first and most critical step if you want high fidelity sound and want to be able to appreciate expensive equipment that renders audio. Because garbage in, garbage out, heavily applies here. If the album is poor, if the recordings are poor, it will sound poor, no matter what awesome set of audio devices you pass it through. So you have to start with something very high quality, for it to be realized.
From there, a decent pair of headphones and a simple but clean DAC/AMP to pair it will will do the job very well.
Closed headphone options:
Shure SRH840
Brainwavz HM5
SoundMAGIC HP100
Nuforce HP800
AKG K550 / AKG K271 MKII / AKG K272 HD / AKG K167
AudioTechnica A900X
Open headphone options:
AKG K240 MKII
AudioTechnica AD900X
Beyer DT880 PRO
Sennheiser HD558 / Sennheiser HD598
Philips Fidelio X1
Some basic dac/amp options:
Fiio E10 (home use only with USB)
Fiio E07k or E17 (home and portable use, with USB)
Very best,
