I don't know if this is an "Ask piitm a question" thread and if it is I apologize but I must say this:

Do not waste your money on the Shure E2c's.


<<Proud E500 owner

how good/bad are the new ipod earphones that will go in each ear? Just to gauge what I am missing out on. Those are the only ones I have ever used.

Blaaaar.

I'm looking at buying these when they come out. You can't really go wrong with Sennheiser, right?

Unless you really can't tolerate in ear headphones, their passive noise cancellation is better than active noise cancellation. Also cheaper.

Ya, i really don't care for the inner ear head phones. I have Shure E2s and i rarely use them because they just feel to weird in my ears.

I'm looking for something that fits over my ears comfortably. Price is not a huge concern either.

My K701s came on wednesday. I have left them playing ever since, since top quality headphones actually do need to be burned in. But i can say, at this point, i am completely satisfied with my audio setup. There are no more components that i "need" to buy and everything sounds crystal clear and amazing. Perfectly clear music, moving around in your head as if you didnt have ears at all but were being fed the music straight into your brain is true audio nirvana.

wow those look really cool. at my poker game on wednesday i was telling the guys in the game how my new top of the line headphones came and they were all like "omg, bose?" i lol'd. bose sucks, the only reason they didnt suck is because they made headphones that had noise cancellation, which people had trouble finding elsewhere. I am glad sennheiser is here to take over and send bose back to "we suck at making headphones that produce good music"-ville.

I returned by E2Cs and decided to get over ear headphones instead. It won't be for portable use. In fact (this may sound stupid), but I needed headphones to play Guitar Hero II. I bought the game when my wife and kid were out of town and played the game very loudly. Now that they're back, I find the noise of the controller to be distracting, so I needed headphones to cancel that noise out.

I didn't want to buy on-line, because I wanted the headphones right away. Unfortunately, that ruled out the headphones I really wanted, the Sennheiser HD580. No one in my area sells that. So I went to Circuit City and found the Sony V600. I went to Guitar Center and bought the Sennheiser HD280.

The Sennheiser is better, but the difference isn't as large as I thought it would be. The Sennheiser has better bass and better highs. Unfortunately, it's not quite as comforable as the Sonys. Even more unfortunately, it forms a much tighter seal on the ear than the V600. The result is that touching the headphone cable results in an obvious sound that you can hear.

Other than that, the difference in comfort isn't that bad.

The choice between the two is really simple, though. Circuit City has a great return policy. Guitar Center has no return policy (for headphones, at least). So I'll be retuning the Sony headphones.

I'm looking for a second set of headphones that would be comfortable to sleep (on my side) in. So far only the earphones that came with my ipod fit that description.

I just thought I should post all of the gear I use for my home headphone setup and explain what it all does.

Here is my signature on head-fi:

Home: Chaintech AV710(Foobar2k!)--->Headroom Micro DAC--->Canare Mini to Mini--->RAY SAMUELS "THE HORNET"---> AKG K701 and Sennheiser HD580(modded)

I use a Chaintech AV710 sound card. They cost about 20 bucks but have a true digital optical out. This is good because my crappy sound card does NO decoding of the audio. The original signal of the MP3 is retained until it arrives in my Headroom MicroDAC(below).



The microdac is a portable DAC that runs on either 2 9 volt batteries or through a heavy duty wallwart. It decodes the digital signal into a listenable audio signal with astounding precision. I would recommend that anyone using their computer for their main stereo get a nice DAC. While I use it with an optical cable, it can also be plugged right into your computer via USB, eliminating the need for any sound card at all. From here, I use a Canare custom 90 degree interconnect. A head-fi member who's name escapes me made it for me, but it looks great and doesnt mess with the rest of my awesome sounding gear. The canare runs into my amp, which is the Ray Samuels Hornet (below)OHHH CHECK OUT THE POWER CAPACITOR ON THAT BABY!.



The Hornet provides all the power your headphones may need. For normal headphones an amp is generally not necessary, but these headphones have such low impedance that they need a lot of power to drive them. The Hornet provides the needed power. after that, they feed the sound into my headphones, which is where the audio nirvana happens. The headphones are at the top of the thread and the sound I get out of this rig is A++++++. The microDAC was $299, the Hornet was $299, the AKG 701s were $244, the interconnect was $10, the Sound Card was $20 and the Optical Cable was $22. All together that comes to $894. So yeah, be ready to spend if you want to experience audio ecstasy.

pittm,

i know we spoke about headphones earlier, but just wanted to confirm, the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3 Studio Earphones are what you would recommend?

I had shure e3cs, but they were stolen and I don't really feel like spending ~200 on headphones anymore. I'd prefer IEM or buds because I'd like to work out in these headphones too. Basically, good bang for buck headphones with good quality that a non-audiophile would appreciate is what I'm looking for.

-nation

ps: also not interested in headphones that need amps or any stuff like that. i didn't read enough into it to see if they're necessary, but i just use them for poker and working out, as i said, I'm no audiophile.

for all the requirements you had, yes, i would say the super fi 3 works perfect.

on RJ's advice for X-mas I got a pair of the UE's (the Super.Fi5 EB's) and I love them. If I had to do over again I'd def get the pro's though as there are times where its "to much" bass when its in the ear however there are 100% awesome other wise. The great thing is the noise cancel you really can't hear a damn thing when you got them in and got music going even at a lower level.