They specifically sound fairly muddy because they have a fair bit of THD that results from the use of tubes. Hence the suggestion. If trying to go for a fairly clear but still tubey sound, then Bottlehead Crack, Shortest Way 51+, or Woo Audio 6 - but those are all quite pricy comparing to budget OP is reasoning about.

If you got tube route, do something more obnoxious - Darkvoice 336i or Little Dot mk2. Still inexpensive but both have a very pronounced tube character. But really, take it from someone with a more high end rig built around the very similar HD650: you have total overkill with Piety and MMB2. I would just add some EQ to counteract the bass roll off, and the sound is just magical.

Electrostatic headphones have impedances to the tune of 100,000 ohms. 1500 ohm is not that big a deal as long as long as they are either fairly sensitive (which is probably the case for crystal radio headphones), or you got a high voltage amplifier (do not need much current at this point).

Is that just dealing with the single lightning port limitation on one of the Macbooks?

True, although I think for a lot of use cases the space settled on things like the Apple Dongle. Cannot be bothered with batteries beyond my phone/

That’s some old kit there. I had an Indigo and a Bithead, did not expect to see these pop up. Reminder of how much worse the $100-150 options were back then (yet much better than standard laptop out).

>Do you think I should consider a better amp/dac for them? Maybe a tube amp?

Only if you absolutely love these. Otherwise that money is better spent on different headphones. If subbass is your jam, you will never really get that satisfaction out of HD6XX.

Your ears also only move back and forth in 2 spots, practically speaking. We hear in stereo, so a good recording can produce a pretty good illusion (say binaural).

Probably best not to assume though? I am obviously not a budget user with HD650 here, but that comes after having experienced a bunch of higher end stuff. A key thing about “budget end game” is that people listen and realize “this is achieving levels of enjoyment that are comparable to more expensive stuff”. Everything after is often just FOMO / “well, I can afford fancier so why not”.

>The tubes I've experience (Little Dot Mk3 and similar) added the missing bass, but made the sound really messy, boomy and technically weak.

Ya, that matches my experience. Little Dot MK3, Darkvoice 336i - those are just not great amps. They change the sound by virtue of having high output impedance and copious distortion. Good tube amps tend to be hard to distinguish from solid state, which makes them kind of a moot point for a lot of folks.

Eh, you are probably better off with a track with a host of specific issues and qualities that you could test against. Hot treble to test for spikes, various instruments in mids to test timbre, something deep bass in the bass but also midbassy to test for elevation and spikes, range of male and female voices since that will also help you catch anything unnatural in the mids, and loads of percussion. Tape it vinyl clicks could also help with testing instrument separation.

> Even if a song you're listening to is flac, if the recording was shit then it won't sound good with revealing headphones.

This is sort of true? Depends on what is wrong with the recording, and what is meant by revealing. There are headphones that make specific recording mistakes really stand out (Beyerdynamic DT880 for example), but that is because they have treble spikes in specific regions that help detect that. Those headphones can make it straight up punishing to listen to a badly made record. Well tuned high quality headphone will still enable you to hear those mistakes, but it should not punish you.

Everything still sounds better, regardless of the recording being great, good, passing, or horrible. I listen to fair amount of early black metal, and that sounds fine. Classic rock actually tends to sound really nice on likes of HD650 because recordings from that period are really midrange centric, and that is where HD650 shines.

>Would buying one of these headphones just to listen to music on spotify be a waste of money?

Nah, Spotify Premium just straight up sounds great. Most people won't be able to tell it from CD rips.

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