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
One complication with CDs these days is that they're not necessarily authoritative. I had to dig for this, but I found a source: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=678549
The gist of the message behind the link above is that certain music, when you order from Amazon, will be burned onto CD on-demand instead of shipped as an official, original pressing: "CD-R Note: This product is manufactured on demand when ordered from Amazon.com"
Which raises the question, burned from what source? If Amazon is ripping to MP3, then re-burning that to CD then they've thrown away musical information and you're not getting the lossless 16/44.1 material. Even if that's not what they're doing, they're not forthcoming about what their process is or whether their on-demand CDs contain the full original authoritative audio files, so the only safe assumption is that they do not.
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CDs are not without some issues, though--physical media takes up space, and it can deteriorate (scratches, etc). To get past those issues, I use an app called dBpoweramp (https://www.dbpoweramp.com/) to do bit-perfect rips of my CDs (a whole topic of its own), then I archive the discs in CD boxes (e.g., https://www.uline.com/BL_8559/CD-DVD-Storage-Box).
My flow with dBpoweramp simultaneously rips to uncompressed FLAC (archival copy) and several other formats; it dumps everything to a NAS. The bit-perfect rip process ensures I get an exact copy of the music off of the CDs (e.g., no clicks or glitches), which I only need to do once. Forever after I can use the FLAC archive to regenerate all the other formats, which I've done on occasion when I needed to fix metadata errors, etc.
So at the end of the day, I'm all about listening to digital music files via computer (through a nice external DAC). But I still get to that end result more often than not by buying CDs and doing my own careful extraction to lossless file formats.