It is an interesting paradox that although the digital audio never loses quality no matter how cheap your hard drive is, you will always need a good stereo to make it sound great.
More along this line: you can record a guy playing a $150 guitar with a $5 microphone, but after all it will take a $500 pair of headhphones to hear the riff exactly as it was recorded. This is the biggest predicament of audiophile technology, that our ears remain the most unreliable interface, the weakest link.
If you haven't noticed yet, we are living in a digital world, where most of our music is stored in digital formats, and thus reproduction and copying of digital data has become an inherently lossless process. Technology got us used to the fact that digital copies, be it images, songs or videos, never lose quality, and are on par with the original. Moreover, whether you send the HD video over a $10 HDMI cable or over a $300 one is totally irrelevant to the quality of the image (though I know there are thousands of radical audiophiles and tech junkies who would immedately try to debunk this notion). As much as I usually mock audiophile revelations though, I believe there is still some merit in buying a good pair of on-ear headphones.
As long as the picture and sound reside within the computer realm exclusively, in the form of raw strings of nauseously boring, consecutive digits, it all just comes down to mathematics. Ultimately though, multimedia files become actual sounds or images the moment they enter the living room, be it in the form of vibrating air or colorful backlit pixels on a flatscreen TV. And this transition alone, from virtual to the real world, inextricably takes some down-to-earth physics. When all has been processed, decoded and streamed in the computer guts, something has to actually move the air in the room, (or produce light pixels, if we're talking about TVs). Then, there is an ear that picks all this up. This digital-to-analog transition that takes place is the source of loss, the vague area, where the uncertainty principle reigns (for lack of a better word). This is where we also seek the perpetrator: in the speakers and headphones, and their connecting cables. But never in our ears.
I am both a musician and a music lover myself (not a serious audiophile though). I know "this and that" about tech and music, so you won't sell me your Beats By Dre headphones no matter how hard you tried. I am going to spare you any audiophile rhetorics to support it now, and allow myself some general rant instead. If you ask me how much a good pair of headphones costs, the answer will always be "well, it depends". It's essentially like asking how much a good guitar costs. The underlying question is "what is a good guitar?".
As long as the picture and sound reside within the computer realm exclusively, in the form of raw strings of nauseously boring, consecutive digits, it all just comes down to mathematics. Ultimately though, multimedia files become actual sounds or images the moment they enter the living room, be it in the form of vibrating air or colorful backlit pixels on a flatscreen TV. And this transition alone, from virtual to the real world, inextricably takes some down-to-earth physics. When all has been processed, decoded and streamed in the computer guts, something has to actually move the air in the room, (or produce light pixels, if we're talking about TVs). Then, there is an ear that picks all this up. This digital-to-analog transition that takes place is the source of loss, the vague area, where the uncertainty principle reigns (for lack of a better word). This is where we also seek the perpetrator: in the speakers and headphones, and their connecting cables. But never in our ears.
I am both a musician and a music lover myself (not a serious audiophile though). I know "this and that" about tech and music, so you won't sell me your Beats By Dre headphones no matter how hard you tried. I am going to spare you any audiophile rhetorics to support it now, and allow myself some general rant instead. If you ask me how much a good pair of headphones costs, the answer will always be "well, it depends". It's essentially like asking how much a good guitar costs. The underlying question is "what is a good guitar?".
There is plethora of reasons to buy good headphones, though. First, you obviosly do need a new pair of headphones when your old ones have been lost, damaged, or simply don't work (broken cable anyone?). Besides, you also need a pair of good headphones if you like to be as close to your music as possible, and catch every possible detail. Plus, you need headphones when there is a baby sleeping in the other room and your common sense doesn't allow to listen to music as loud as you like it.
The relevant question is if you need a better pair of headphones. Upgrading makes sense for a couple of reasons, and for a lack of better one: it is waaaay cheaper than upgrading your hifi amplifier and speaker system. Good headphones offer not just superior sound, they can also provide excellent isolation from the noise around you.
Test them
There are dozens of competent hi-fi websites that offer comprehensive reviews of headphones, but reading them is nothing next to actually testing the hardware yourself. Don't get me wrong, writing about headphones is not a bad idea per se. It simply follows the "dancing about literature" concept a bit.
Taking your favourite music with you and asking the shop assistant to show you a bunch of headphones is a good start. On top of that, it is a good idea to remove the price tags when comparing products to safeguard yourself against the charm of "price magic".
The problem with trying out brand new headphones is that, according to experts, they usually take a few dozen hours' listening to achieve their designed characteristics and thus produce better sound. It's much like battery formatting, only with headphones. This process, called the "burn-in", is what you obviously do not have time for while in the shop. To avoid it, I do recommend asking your audiophile friends at first to let you test the headphones that they already own. You might find the ones you really like without the hassle of looking for them in a shop.
Looks
Don't take headphone design and looks as a particularly relevant indicator of their value or quality. As long as it might matter when you listen to music outdoors, fashion is secondary concern when you are a home listener primarily. Anyway, most of good on-ear headphones are way too hefty to wear outdoors and keep vestige of serious looks. Don't take good design for granted, either. There are numerous companies like Audio Technica, Beyerdynamic, Oppo or Sennheiser, which produce headphones that don't necessarily look stunning, but offer superior sound quality.
Beats are by far the best looking headphones around, although it does not always translate to sound. Their higher models do offer superb audio quality, but are premium priced to say least (not to say blatant rip-off). By buying Beats by Dre you are not only supporting their marketing budget, you are actually becoming the carrier of advertising yourself, as Beats usually sport the company's iconic red logos on either earcup. Conversely, most other producers let you remain relatively lo-profile, with either small, inconspicuous logos, or virtually invisible model markings.
When looking for a good pair of headphones, don't seek Sony, Technics or JBL products only. There are dozens of specialized producers that, while relatively unknown to the public, have produced great headphones for decades and their products have earned them high esteem in audiophile circles (viz. Grado, Audeze etc.)
Trial and error
Chances are your first hifi headphones won't be the last you buy (if you take the audio bait, that is). Looking for the audiophile's holy grail won't be an easy process, and you must accept a lot of trial and error along the way. For example, I personally considered my old Sennheiser HD215 a decent pair of headphones until I recently tried Beyerdynamic DT 990 PRO. And this is not necessarily that Sennheiser were worse (although cheaper). It's more that the sound characteristics they produced were not exactly to my liking. They lacked some punchy bass, whereas Beyerdynamic furnished my ears with ample, dynamic lows, thus making me immediately fall for them.
My instant advice is: buy, resell, try, return. Do all you can to try out as many pairs of headphones as you can to find out what kind of sound you actually like, or what design choices you seek in their build (e.g. separate left-right cables, or one cable going down from the left earcup only). Ideally, you can own several pairs of headphones and use them whenever you feel fit.
The model of headphones you will ultimately settle for will depend vastly on the type of music you listen to and sound characteristics you like.
Buy second hand
There is some evidence that headphones' drivers may ultimately wear down, but it is a really long process and thus shouldn't really concern when buying second hand. Used headphones are a reasonable option to spare you some money and get a higher model than the one you would buy otherwise.
You can quite accurately assess the condition of second hand headphones by simply looking at the earcups and padding, e.g. I recently got a pair of mint DENON AH-D600 headphones which normally retail at $399 for... a third of that!
Search, test, resell, repeat. Be careful, it's addictive!
Search, test, resell, repeat. Be careful, it's addictive!
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