SteveBlue
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2012
- Posts
- 2
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- 0
Let me start this thread by saying hello, and showing my appreciation for this forum! 
I've been reading its various sections for some time now, and I've decided to ask a question or two to the community. Please forgive for the mammoth posting.
My system is an older Yamaha av-receiver, connected to two ancient AIWA 3-way Bass Reflex speakers, each with 55W of power, and an old 90W woofer. The receiver is connected to an older Pioneer DVD player via an optical cable, and also bitstreams via my PC's S/PDIF digital out. Having said that, my sound card is the ancient Realtek AC97, and I've done everything possible to minimise it's impact on my sound. I use foobar for playback (with replay gain), Kernel Streaming to bypass Kmixer, and resample to 48khz with foobar's SoX Resampler to avoid Realtek's unremovable resampling algorithm. I'm perfectly aware that it's not a particularly good set-up, but I'm content with it for two reasons: I have a very small room, a huge balcony door with next-to-no sound isolation, and I'm near a very large crossroads, so the subtle notes do not get to me while listening via the speakers. The second reason is that for my first very own audio system I simply wanted to make it sufficient, and still better-then-most. Where I live folks are really not big on audio tech, audio equipment, or audio media for that matter. Piracy is rampant, and 128kbps MP3 is king.
I'm saying all of this because I believe it factors in my headphone selection. Having a less than perfect system means that expensive, top of the line headphones are not the way to go. The music I mainly listen to is hot jazz, acoustic blues (some electric too), swing, big band, classical country, rockabilly, some rock and roll, some blues rock, some vintage RnB... etc. Virtually no contemporary stuff, virtually no classical, no punk, acid jazz, reggae, fusion jazz... My collection is either FLAC or 320kbps MP3's, with an emphasis on vinyl rips, sometimes with extreme snap-crackle-pop sounds in the background. That's why I often tinker with the sounds in iZotope Ozone, to make them listenable.
All of this is to say that I'm really looking for something better than what I'm used to, which is, in short, supermarket-grade headphones. I never use full-size headphones while travelling, so they can be as clunky as they come. I'm more used to the supra-aural, but circumaural is perfectly fine too. They should probably be somewhat tollerant towards bad recordings. As I'm one of those freaks who really like listening to music at night and hypnotising themselves, I would really like a pair of cans that would eliminate as much of outward sounds as possible. There's no paypal here, and I don't own a credit card, so ordering is not an option, and my budget is up to a hundred bucks. I've found about a half-dozen musical instrument stores in the entire city which also hold "higher-grade" headphones, that is to say that they cost more than ten bucks. The brands are mostly AKG, Audio Technica and Senheiser.
Thank you up front for all your advice and help in choosing! I realise that my requests are probably over-complicated and that I'm expecting too much out of a piece of equipment, but I would appreciate if you would just suggest anything that comes to your minn after reading all this stuff, even if it's not one of those I listed above. Thanks again!
I've been reading its various sections for some time now, and I've decided to ask a question or two to the community. Please forgive for the mammoth posting.
My system is an older Yamaha av-receiver, connected to two ancient AIWA 3-way Bass Reflex speakers, each with 55W of power, and an old 90W woofer. The receiver is connected to an older Pioneer DVD player via an optical cable, and also bitstreams via my PC's S/PDIF digital out. Having said that, my sound card is the ancient Realtek AC97, and I've done everything possible to minimise it's impact on my sound. I use foobar for playback (with replay gain), Kernel Streaming to bypass Kmixer, and resample to 48khz with foobar's SoX Resampler to avoid Realtek's unremovable resampling algorithm. I'm perfectly aware that it's not a particularly good set-up, but I'm content with it for two reasons: I have a very small room, a huge balcony door with next-to-no sound isolation, and I'm near a very large crossroads, so the subtle notes do not get to me while listening via the speakers. The second reason is that for my first very own audio system I simply wanted to make it sufficient, and still better-then-most. Where I live folks are really not big on audio tech, audio equipment, or audio media for that matter. Piracy is rampant, and 128kbps MP3 is king.
I'm saying all of this because I believe it factors in my headphone selection. Having a less than perfect system means that expensive, top of the line headphones are not the way to go. The music I mainly listen to is hot jazz, acoustic blues (some electric too), swing, big band, classical country, rockabilly, some rock and roll, some blues rock, some vintage RnB... etc. Virtually no contemporary stuff, virtually no classical, no punk, acid jazz, reggae, fusion jazz... My collection is either FLAC or 320kbps MP3's, with an emphasis on vinyl rips, sometimes with extreme snap-crackle-pop sounds in the background. That's why I often tinker with the sounds in iZotope Ozone, to make them listenable.
All of this is to say that I'm really looking for something better than what I'm used to, which is, in short, supermarket-grade headphones. I never use full-size headphones while travelling, so they can be as clunky as they come. I'm more used to the supra-aural, but circumaural is perfectly fine too. They should probably be somewhat tollerant towards bad recordings. As I'm one of those freaks who really like listening to music at night and hypnotising themselves, I would really like a pair of cans that would eliminate as much of outward sounds as possible. There's no paypal here, and I don't own a credit card, so ordering is not an option, and my budget is up to a hundred bucks. I've found about a half-dozen musical instrument stores in the entire city which also hold "higher-grade" headphones, that is to say that they cost more than ten bucks. The brands are mostly AKG, Audio Technica and Senheiser.
Thank you up front for all your advice and help in choosing! I realise that my requests are probably over-complicated and that I'm expecting too much out of a piece of equipment, but I would appreciate if you would just suggest anything that comes to your minn after reading all this stuff, even if it's not one of those I listed above. Thanks again!
