Yammy_Lyfe OP t1_iu4lrs5 wrote on October 28, 2022 at 2:45 PM

Reply to comment by CeeBee2001 in Honest question, did we hit peak headphone a while back? by Yammy_Lyfe

That seems to be echoed a lot here. I'm not sure it encapsulate the whole picture, but functionally for me, like I mentioned elsewhere, I could coast on some HD600, 650 or R70x for a long long while and still listen to these three regularly. That tonality goes a long way for me with making music beautiful and working with all levels of recording quality.

From a functional standpoint it's hard to improve on that. I'm curious though what has tried to go in that direction in the last 6 years.

While I do very much respect the excellent performance/price point of something like Sundara as well when I heard it, I didn't necessarily feel blown away from previous offerings. Of course I didn't have older pairs for direct comparison on hand at the show.

I'm very open to finding new and interesting things, but the flagships definitely didn't leave a lasting impression this round. For me personally. I'm sure lots of people love them at those prices.

MashMayoru t1_iu5afb1 wrote on October 28, 2022 at 5:29 PM

Sadly 95%+ of the people on the sub have heard an extremely small portion of whats out there and asking a question like this will mostly just yield hd650 = best headphone even though it couldn't be further from the truth.

As someone that's heard pretty much everything from 10$ to 30000$ it's certainly safe to say there's obviously improvements made or at least to some degree, more competitive pricing for the same thing.

HE1, HE60 and stax omega sealed the deal for state of the art best sounding thing to exist, and now there's a few more headphones that has joined the same performance level at a much more competitive price.

Same with Arya and focal clear, extremely competitive pricing (as of now), without them the upgrade steps would be wildly different for a lot of people.

Same with dacamps u can get 3000$ performance from like a 600-700$ stack now because of the competition.

In terms of absolute peak it's the matter of experience, u can say that the newer systems that's designed to beat/compete against the old best are better, at least objectively they're on the same playing field which means to some people they're better.

STAX x9000 and Warwicks acoustics bravura/aperio, abyss Diana TC ab1266TC, along with HE60/HE1/ShangriLa SR are the pinnacle for now, all of them offer different experiences of about the same performance, and you get to choose what's your preference.