Avatar-san t1_jdghd4n wrote on March 24, 2023 at 5:43 AM

I found speakers with a basic subwoofer to sound better than any of my headphones.

It's a different beast entirely, headphones don't have true soundstage, the bass you can feel from your entire body is always better than just hearing and feeling with the ears.

The biggest reason I love headphones is the comfort and accuracy. With a speaker even turning my head changes the sound to a point where I'd rather use a headphone.

This could also be the case of you having headphones I would in no way describe as good.

mistersprinkles1983 t1_jdoknp3 wrote on March 25, 2023 at 11:35 PM

To be fair, neither of the headphones you have are HiFi. ATHM50X doesn't deserve to be popular just like Beats doesn't deserve to be popular but they're available at every Best Buy and people buy them and think they're good. They're not. Actually IMO M50X is worse than the old M50 (no X) and definitely worse than the cheaper M40X. If you want to truly get good sound out of wired headphones you're going to need to run them off a semi decent dac/amp and get some decent headphones.

Having said that there are some things that headphones will never do as well as speakers, such as if you're just a total total bass freak. Overall though, in terms of clarity and detail, headphones tend to give you more bang per dollar vs speakers, if you know what to buy.

So TLDR blame your headphones. Try something higher end. If you don't want to bother with an amp you might find something wireless like Sennheiser Momentum 4 or even the cheaper 450BT sounds a lot better. Make sure you have at least BT 4.8 on your phone/other devices.