Which headphones of Drop's currently available?
I have some rewards points to burn but there's no obviously good options on Drop right now for headphones Contenders Ultrasone - maybe? I don't own any Ultrasones, so curious. Looks like garbage travel headphone which could be useful also. Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro. - Maybe? I have the DT 880 Good price point, really uncomfortable headphones but could be interesting to try the upgraded version. E-MU - strong contender but $400 is a bad price point for what it is. Which of the above would you choose and why? Nothing else on Drop is relevant to my interests, because Already own 6xx 820 800 s Ether cx Garbage / Consumer grade Meze 99 - garbage bass canons, hard pass No gaming headphones obviously Sennheiser wireless - no to wireless/bluetooth Hifiman - I have 2 of drop hifimans and they make really bad cheap shit on Drop, hard pass on HE-R7DX Aeon - I own the closed, Drop refuses to address #padgate so no reason to buy open Beyerdynamic 177x - wireless, nope Too similar 8x / 560s...
Mar 28, 2024
On my home setup, where I'm stationary, and usually listening for the sake of actually listening, I can definitely hear the differences between lossy and lossless formats on my good gear. On cheaper gear, I can tell, but it's much more subtle. 320k is pretty solid if the gear isn't exactly great at pulling out any additional content, but it's existence is mostly for the sake of space saving, not quality. And really, it's not like FLAC is particularly large given modern storage space. FLAC is downright tiny compared to uncompressed WAV. And if you're after space, v0 VBR is pretty much indistinguishable from 320k CBR to my ears, in a smaller package, and unless you're using really old gear, pretty much everything handles VBR just fine.
Lossless is better than lossy formats. Period. The big reason behind this assertion, is that you can resample a lossless file whenever you'd like, between other lossless formats, down to a lossy format, whatever, and the only losses you'd ever see, are those that occur is making it a lossy format. Lossy formats have already thrown out data. There's no getting it back, and any further resampling will throw out even more (lossy to lossy) or just make the file bigger for no reason (lossy to lossless).
The music itself is important though. If you listen to crap masters, you won't be able to tell any difference anyway. Good masters definitely lose a lot the more you compress them. If 320k MP3s sound better than lossless, you're probably too used to compressed music, and you're going to prefer the compression and artifacts of it. You may not like hearing something properly. You're not alone here, and frankly that's annoying, as it allows producers to get lazier in producing lower quality things with the limits of MP3 being their target, or worse, trying to achieve that compressed sound. We have people being raised on low quality MP3s (iTunes is a pitiful 128k) to blame for this, as they're overly used to it. I guess it's good for your wallet though, as you have no reason to pursue better gear to better reproduce something, since sticking with MP3 leaves you with something anything is capable of.