Headphones

Depending on the quality of your itunes really good headphones may actually be a bad thing. Sometimes a loss of clarity nicely hides compression artifacts and losses in the source material. That being said, I like my relatively cheap Sennheiser over the ear closed back set, they were under $30 from Amazon a year or so ago. I've never experienced Grados though, and everything I've ever read says they're hands down the best.

For a boom mic headphone, I use a similar Plantronics to the one noted above at work, clear conversations over 100' from my office (but strange looks from my coworkers). 2 years of use and it's holding up fine. A handset lifter is a great addition to one of these; when we recently changed phones in the office I couldn't use mine anymore. Having to push the phone button to answer vs just the button on the side of the headset sucks now.

I couldn't say if grados are the best technically, but they just have a nice warm sound that makes them a joy to listen to. I have a pair of SR60s, I actually prefer them to the 80s, the 80s seem sharper and more boosted on the low end. For ipod use I wouldn't bother with anything higher in the line, you might just end up exposing flaws.

pigeon wrote: Depending on the quality of your itunes really good headphones may actually be a bad thing. Sometimes a loss of clarity nicely hides compression artifacts and losses in the source material.

This is a good point. Don't bother with spending over $20 or so on headphones if you're listening to 128kbps mp3s that you got from an 8th grader on Limewire. Most streaming music sounds really bad, too.

I ripped my collection from CD using Exact Audio Copy and encoding with Lame in a variable bit rate format. Not quite as good as a lossless, but I just didn't have the space for any of the lossless formats, and iPods topped out at 80GB at the time and my music barely fit.

http://www.bestMP3guide.com can show you how to get setup for ripping CDs this way.

If you're listening right from the computer I'd recommend an outboard USB sound card/headphone amp. I've got a Headroom Total BitHead, but there are several others.

Always happy to spend other people's money!

-Brian

Have my RS-1's on now.

The SR-125 are very good for the money.

hedafi has ome amazing detals in the classified section.

Wow, wasn't expecting so many Head-Fi members here, lol.

To the OP: Sorry about your wallet.

Amazon has the Sennheiser HD201 closed back headphones that I have on sale for $18 including a $5 MP3 download credit. Good deal.

Brian wrote: I'd check out Headroom's reviews at www.headphone.com I've had: Denon AHD-950--very nice sound, a little extra bass, but an "on the ear" design that was not comfortable for me for more than a couple hours. Sennheiser HD-280 Pro--very comfy, over the ear sealed design. Sounds good with an iPod and a headphone amp. Etymotic ER6i: A good sound-isolating in ear headphone. Great for mowing the lawn, flying, or just shutting out the world for a bit. When they are new, people will sneak up on you because you can't hear anything. Sounded good, but a little bass-shy. The foam and silicone ear pieces start to degrade after a year or two, and replacements are kind of expensive. $20 JVC marshmallows from Wal-Mart-- In ear 'phones with OK isolation. These sound good (for the money) and you won't care if your dog chews them up.

I have a pair of he jvcs that I modified I got rid of the marshmellow part and got me some triple flange outdoor earplugs, inserted the plastic inner support from the mellows into the earplugs and viola they don't fall out and they isolate out door noise great.

Still prefer my panisonic over ear noise cancellers when I'm not on the go.

I had nice pair of sony's they last'ed about a year. I think I only spent around $10 for them. I right now I have some koss. There not that great but they get the job done BTW the koss were only $5.