Looking to buy headphones

 
 
Flee
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snurch | Heroic Unstoppable!
 
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bose is mediocre but they have the best noise cancelling tech bar none if you absolutely need it

if you want something portable with good isolation, get ciems that mold to your ears

they can get very expensive

if not, just get a good pair of iems with foam tips

any offering for over-ears/on-ears wont do as good as job for sound quality as any half decent iem for the same price

a good iem seal is comfortable, silent and firm when you try to move it
Last Edit: June 03, 2017, 12:39:33 PM by Pepsi


 
 
Flee
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nͫiͤcͫeͤ | Mythic Inconceivable!
 
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im into audio but im into car audio and sound systems and stuff


 
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Solonoid | Mythic Inconceivable!
 
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If it's quiet you want, get something from the bose quietcomfort series.
My personal recommendation is qc25.
Features removable cord and noise cancellation that can be turned on and off, and factory refurbished models go for under $200

If your highest concern is raw audio quality, then Sennheiser is a great choice.
I don't recommend that set you've picked out, as it basically recycles the outdated HD419 cans, which do offer superior sound, but only at the $60 range.
You're better off with their HD558.

An excellent middle ground between the two, but sacrificing affordability, is Sennheiser's Momentum Wireless 2.0
Features bluetooth, active noise cancellation, and the crisp, powerful sound. Sennheiser is known for.

As far as portability is concerned, Earin makes a great product with excellent sound quality, but battery life is significantly short, as low as 2.5 hours, and destined to get below 2 hours after the first year of use. They also suffer some very major connectivity problems and become almost unusable during exercise.

My preferred alternative is v4ink's Teana headphones. Also true wireless, with fewer connectivity issues, and a simpler connection format, they beat Earin in a lot of categories.
The audio quality itself is very slightly muddled, but the product does come with a few sets of adjustable rubber ear molds to attempt to achieve more comfortable fit and a degree of noise cancellation. Although, these molds can be difficult to use.
As long as you don't keep your phone in your front pocket you shouldn't have any of the trouble Earin suffers from, and the battery life is twice as long, or even longer. The charge sometimes lasts as long as six hours of use.
However, they're slightly less portable and rather clunky if you carry them on their charging base in your pocket, where earin's sleek charging case can effortlessly and nonintrusively join your EDC.

All in all, it's a shockingly good product to come from a company best known for their quality printer ink and cartridges.
Almost like buying a television made by Kodak.

So in Recap, my recommendations are:
•Bose qc25 - quietness
•Sennheiser HD558 - sound quality
•Earin - portability
•v4ink Teana - runner up in portability, but easier to use than Earin
•Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Wireless - excels in all categories, but also most expensive


 
 
Flee
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Solonoid | Mythic Inconceivable!
 
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bose is mediocre but they have the best noise cancelling tech bar none if you absolutely need it

if you want something portable with good isolation, get ciems that mold to your ears

they can get very expensive

if not, just get a good pair of iems with foam tips

any offering for over-ears/on-ears wont do as good as job for sound quality as any half decent iem for the same price

a good iem seal is comfortable, silent and firm when you try to move it
Going to expand on this.

If you buy iems, don't just dick around.
You're going to spend top dollar no matter where you go, so you may as well go all out and order something from ultimate ears. Don't fall for the Noble Audio meme, you're going to pay €1850 for a pair of ciems that have excellent cancellation and are hands down more gorgeous than any other audio device you will ever own, but the sound quality is only barely better than some €100 jogger's headphones.

But absolutely everything UE makes is ridiculously good, and you don't need to drop €1000 to get it either.
Usually buying iems on the cheap side is a bad idea, I know fender has put out some laughable products in their day, and at a certain point you're just buying earbuds that look like iems, and are seldom worth even whatever meager amount you did end up spending.
However, the UE 900s go for just €355 and offer the same absolutely PERFECT FUCKING SOUND as the ciems that have made Ultimate Ears an institution in the music industry, and while they may not have that perfect zero noise cancellation ciems offer, they do come with nine different interchangeable sets of buds to make sure your fit is as close to perfect as you can get.

This is all after the fact, however, that you have left the range of casual listening.
Ultimately, despite how praiseworthy higher end iems and ciems are, they're still just that: higher end.
If you're not completely serious about changing the way you listen to music forever, you should never spend more than €200, unless it's on a pair of completely decked out over ear headphones that are jam-packed with features, high durability, easy to use, etc. You spend more on something like that for what it offers beyond just the raw audio quality, not because you have transcended consumerism and are pursuing audible nirvana.

/rant

Do shop ultimate ears if you want a portable speaker though, they're affordable and the sound is infuriatingly good for the tiny package it comes out of.


 
DAS B00T x2
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This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Active noise cancelling is weird as fuck to me.

That's all I got.


 
 
Flee
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Flee
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Flee
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Solonoid | Mythic Inconceivable!
 
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So in Recap, my recommendations are:
•Bose qc25 - quietness
•Sennheiser HD558 - sound quality
•Earin - portability
•v4ink Teana - runner up in portability, but easier to use than Earin
•Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Wireless - excels in all categories, but also most expensive
Thanks for the advice. I appreciate the detail you put into this. My response would be that:

The qc25 feel very cheap to me, sound quite poor without noise cancellation, only have music/call control with the cable plugged in and are quite a bit more expensive.

I already have Sennheiser's 598's and they provide (to my knowledge) better sound quality than the 558's. Neither of them are very portable though, and that's what I'm going for now.

Looking for headphones rather than earbuds this time around. The Earin ones look pretty neat, but they lack connectivity as you said. I need to be able to go wired as well and use them with, for example, the TV's on planes or other devices (laptop/TV) that don't have Bluetooth. Never heard of the Teana's before. They look decent too, but again lack some features I want.

And the Momentum 2.0's are too much for me to spend on this.

I've been looking around and haven't seen anything that beats the ones I'm looking at now. I'm seeing nothing but great reviews and they meet all my requirements at a very attractive price. I want headphones that let me noise cancel when necessary (I travel a lot for work these days) but also turn the feature off otherwise (to wear in public / on a bike to stay aware of traffic). I want them to be durable, portable and provide great audio quality. They need to be wireless but with the option of going wired and connecting to any standard 3.5 mm jack, and they need to let me take calls, change volume and change between songs on the fly. And at €195, I don't think I'll find any better.
Yeah the 598 is a superior product to the 558, but seemed a little pricey considering the other selections on the list are all under $200, save the Momentum 2.0.

Honestly, having read your more fleshed-out list of desires it seems to me that you're going to have to sacrifice a little sound quality or move your price range up to the €350 area.

The Sennheiser 4.00 series is just an reskin of the old 400 series.
All of the core components remain unchanged.
They tossed a few new features in and upped the quality of construction for the casing, but are still bound to the limitations the 400 series experienced, which very quickly drove the price of every product in the series down from €150-200 range to around €55-70, then into complete discontinuation. Since selling off some of their surplus the price has started going back up, but that doesn't excuse the problems that led people to refuse to buy them.
If you're okay with sound quality that varies noticeably between devices and inconsistently going from decent to shit to good sound depending on a wide number of factors, then they're your hail mary, reaching out from what more expensive sets offer to touch the price range you want to live at.

But they likely won't work well with lower end cell phones, are usually built mainly for use with apple products, and on a PC may deliver sound anywhere from thin and tinny, to unreasonably burly and without nuance.

But I'm on a rant again.
I just really, really, really don't think it's going to be as good of a product in the long run as it might seem to be in the store.


 
 
Flee
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Flee
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DAS B00T x2
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This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
You're really not going to have problems with headphones on a phone untill you're getting close to the 100 ohms mark.
Usually,  at least.