Haven’t heard the XM5s but the 3s and 4s are pretty wonky sounding without EQ, with a tubby midbass hump and upper midrange suckout that gives them a tonality I don’t care for. With EQ, they’re perfectly adequate.

how the goalposts for "modest" have shifted over the years.... I remember when the HD650 was considered an expensive headphone.

I guess I'm not very picky (by audiophile standards). I appreciate quality, but I can also appreciate being 98% of the way there. For home listening, I'd be pretty much entirely happy with just my Sennheisers, a parametric EQ to fill in their bass and make a couple other tweaks, and a respectable-quality laptop headphone out (and I would listen that setup over literally any other headphone setup without PEQ - it's simply essential for headphones IMO).

Past that, it's the land of extremely marginal improvements and consumerism for consumerism's sake. I have much fancier stuff and like trying new fancy stuff, but if I'm being perfectly honest with myself, it's a waste of money chasing ultimately meaningless differences and marginal improvements. But it's fun, so...

I'm not a headset gamer guy so I haven't looked into it that much, but I doubt any conventional bluetooth headphone would be very good latency wise; you'd probably need a latency-optimized protocol (that would likely not be stellar quality-wise). There's AptX LL but it seems pretty poorly supported.

Wonder if anyone makes analog RF transmitter dongles/recievers you can plug wired headphones into? Cursory googling doesn't find much.

MB’s headphone jack is adequate unless it just lives on a desk. I’m not really fond of lugging around a mess of dongles I need to set up and tear down for some absolutely marginal and most likely imaginary increase in audio quality

correction - iPhones use AAC (in addition to the mandatory SBC). I'm not aware that MP3 is used as a bluetooth codec.

and I agree that codec should not be a starting point. If you can use anything other than SBC, which is crap, the codec will be a fairly minor aspect of sound quality relative to the quality of the earbuds themselves (The most likely place you'd run into that is if you use a Windows 10 computer with BT headphones that don't support AptX, Win10 doesn't support AAC over bluetooth, that was added in 11). That's to say nothing about its non-audible qualities; bluetooth stuff can be super buggy/glitchy.

I'm not aware that anything on the market supports lossless yet.

lol, if only people here spent as much effort justifying buying $2000 cans that offer like 5% more performance than $200 headphones with some EQ

you like it, you want it, you can afford it? buy it and enjoy.

We only have two ears, so at least in theory, two drivers are all you need to create an arbitrary illusion of sonic space. The 3 dimensional image is created by subtle cues in intensity, frequency response, and timing in the sound both ears receive that are processed by your brain. Presumably headphones can enhance or miscue these perceptions by some aspect of their design.

From my experience at least, the problem with plastic is it tends to get brittle with age. My old HD600 failed when one of the plastic pieces that hold the drivers in the cups cracked when I was swapping the cable - wasn't applying any kind of extraordinary force or anything. That said, if making them more durable would double the cost or something, I'd rather just get another set of cheaper headphones.

What's that big tube-lookin' thing?

when I'm listening to something on my phone, which is a lot... few hours a day probably, but that's a matter of convenience, not preference. I don't really get this audiophile IEM craze personally, I associate in-ear buds with fairly disposable, uninspiring sound. They never seem to have the airy soundstage of good open-back cans, they usually to require a lot of nudging to maintain a seal for me, and many of them aren't that comfy to have on your ears after a while.

That's like 2x the bass shelf the Harman research says the average person likes best, so I reckon so.

I always like to compensate for the natural rolloff there on most HPs. Sometimes I add more low end <100hz on top of that, I like the illusion of the tactile thump you get from good loudspeakers, though I feel some kind of weird puritanical audiophile guilt about it.

I find my bass preference is right about Harman-average. With the HD600s I like to use something close to the first two bands of Oratory's preset: a 5.5db shelf at ~100Hz, and slightly attenuate the low mids to compensate for how that muddies them up. (beyond that I mostly let the headphone do its own thing EQ-wise, except to tame that ~3khz midrange peak 6xx-series Sennheisers have)

This was a much bigger pain point 15 years ago, but at a time when I can buy a 16TB hard drive for like $200 that I probably won't come close to filling with lossless music within my lifetime, I kinda feel like there's little reason to leave any quality on the table.

I pay for Amazon Music's lossless tier. Not particularly great as far as streaming services go, but it's cheap. And I buy from Bandcamp if I want my own copy/want to support the artist (most artists don't make a living from streaming payouts unfortunately).

Well, if it's showing the HD icon anyway, sometimes it drops down to a lossy stream and then it starts to sound pretty chewed up. But if your music is only getting one whack of decent quality lossy compression (and 256kbps AAC is more than decent), the difference will be subtle enough to matter to only the most obsessive audiophiles.

Depends on which lossy codec your connection uses, and whether your source material will compound multiple lossy compression steps . SBC (the standard-enforced bluetooth codec everything must support) is garbage sound quality wise to me, optimized for power efficiency on brain dead hardware. The other codecs sound better but they have patchy support between vendors. Their audible effect on sound quality tends to be overblown.

With the current specs Bluetooth's theoretical best-case data throughput (accounting for protocol overhead) is marginal for lossless CD-quality audio, and in the presence of interference/weak signal strength you don't get best-case throughput. And you would basically have to have the radio on the whole time, which would brutalize your battery life (especially with small earbuds, where you just have no space for a bigger battery).

Well, there's only so much you can do with a passive speaker driver in a plastic cup. I suspect audiophiles will resist it and it'll probably be beyond the R&D budgets of most audiophile brands, but I think the next frontier is headphones with various integrated electronics and DSP to do things you can't purely in the 2-wires-into-1-driver realm. There's some headphones now with microphones that point towards your ear to dynamically EQ the sound, seems like an interesting idea; ditto deriving a personalized HRTF from a 3d scan of one's ears.

Certainly not, but many high-end headphones have weird-ass tunings (cough, Audeze). In objective terms, you can certainly make a compelling case that they are better than the HD650s (which I am very fond of, mind you, and this is admittedly a silly comparison since they're completely different types of headphones) - the drivers have superbly low distortion for dynamic drivers, especially in the usually-problematic bass region, and to my ears they don't have any overly problematic resonances that would prevent them from being EQd to whatever tonality you prefer. HD650s are woefully subbass deficient (sans EQ, which will further degrade the bass distortion) so someone who likes bass-heavy music or booming movie soundtracks or whatever would find much to like about the APMs in comparison. In other words, you could get APM to sound like HD650s tonality-wise without them breaking a sweat, but if you tried to do the opposite, the HD650 drivers would be screaming in agony. Of course until Apple deigns to lets you set up a customizable system-wide equalizer you're pretty limited in your ability to tune them in their natural Apple habitat, which is very unfortunate.

I think you're getting a bit confused with the terminology. The Magni is a headphone amp, not a DAC. It takes line-level analog audio input and amplifies it to drive your headphones. A DAC converts a digital signal to a line-level analog signal. The logitech dongle is both a dac and a headphone amp (if it's what I'm imagining).

If your question is "will it make any audible difference if I use a dedicated external DAC instead of my motherboard's line out".... maybe? Audio DACs are a mature technology and a competent "low end" implementation is transparent for the purposes of human hearing... so it depends on the quality of your motherboard's audio output and how much of a golden-eared audiophile you are.

Out of curiosity, is this known to affect their whole lineup (including Utopias and whatever their TOTL closed cans are called) or just the lower end models?

Well, it's possible. Headphones are easy to counterfeit so if you perhaps got them from some 3rd party Amazon seller or whatever, they could very well be fake.

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The thing with headphones is that since they basically create a tiny room with your ear (a physical audio filter) as the main piece of furniture within, your individual ears have a significant effect on how you perceive headphones, so what works well for other people may very well be unpleasant for you (which is why I personally do not buy HPs I haven't heard or wouldn't be able to easily return/resell without taking a loss). I personally really don't get along with headphones that produce excess response around 5-6KHz or so, which is where the DT770 seems to have a sizable peak, so like many headphones that a lot of other people like, I suspect I'd personally find DT770s intolerably shrill.

But pretty much all headphones can also be greatly improved by EQ, so I suggest installing EqualizerAPO and trying to tame the offending frequency response peak before writing them off, they could very well transform into terrific headphones for you. Of course, you can't use EQ with every source, so maybe they're just a bad fit for you. Oratory1990's presets are usually a good starting point: https://www.dropbox.com/s/npqrz9dqdda292x/Beyerdynamic%20DT770%20%28new%20earpads%29.pdf?dl=0

It's normal that new headphones will sound weird if your ears are very used to some other set. I'm guessing the Corsair has kind of a muddy low-end focused tuning, based on my general experience with gaming headsets, so a bright set of cans might be quite jarring. But if you listen to your DT770s for a while, your ears will likely habituate to their sound, and then your headset may start to sound weird and tubby/muddy to you. I'd give them some time.

Or maybe bright headphones just aren't for you. I personally prefer a more laid back sound too. They can almost certainly be tamed with EQ.

I can hear it too, just sounds like some recording artifact - something saturating or resonating in the studio? Pretty normal for different cans to highlight bits of a recording you may not ordinarily pay attention to, depending on their particular frequency emphasis.

Apple? https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MNHF2AM/A/earpods-with-35-mm-headphone-plug

I'm guessing if you got them from some 3rd party Amazon reseller they were quite likely counterfeits of indeterminate quality.