The short answer is: because headphones are not used for sound reinforcement and music is not recorded for headphones. The long answer is...

1950s: <Crickets>

1960s: Why would you want to listen to music through this strange military/medical aparatus?

1970: OK, here you go, but we have no clue how to voice this thing and our microphones don't really resemble human ear.

1980: Alright, weirdo, we now have a microphone that resembles human ear median between 1 and 3kHz and then it goes haywire, lol. Also here's a bit of theory that your headphones should have mainly midrange. Our transducers don't have enough bandwidth anyway. What is this Walkman thing again? Musicians want hearing aid? What?

1990: Hey, we figured that adding more bass and highs actually makes these things pretty nice. AKG didn't get the memo, lol. With some educated guesses, we got this tonality thing down for speech intelligibility. It works for music too. Aha and those earplugs, that musicians wanted are tuned nicely too, but only by one brand.

2000: Earbuds, earbuds everywhere! You want some earbuds? We have earbuds. AKG still didn't get the memo.

2010: Doesn't it suck that earbuds don't have bass? And laptop speakers, they don't have bass too. You know what, we have headphones that have nothing but bass and suddenly headphones are cool now. People are getting rich off them and scientists are suddenly interested in them for real. We have preference curves now and new tech. ALG finally releases a headphone with bass.

2020: Those earplug/hearing aid things are now all the rave and the technology is speeding up. Soon we'll have MEMS drivers and the price-performance will go through the roof.

Meanwhile speakers started this aorund the 30s I think and by 60s measurement tech and theory was pretty solid with HiFi and whatnot. People needed speakers for radio, TV and concerts, PA. Headphones were considered dangerous, uncomfortable, sonically inferior. Just generally meh.

Nobody really cared for headphones until 2010 when dubstep happened and high frequencies were killing your soul while bass was scarce through the PC speakers. It was all about bass.

When it comes to loudspeaker research it too went through phases and voicing is still an open question every time a new tech drops that allows for more channels etc. Just recently I watched a video by Dave Rat, where he argued that we need to use one channel per one microphone track so that engineers don't need to mix. He made a very live sounding speaker that way. Currently we're in a post-Toole world, where every loudspeaker is a slim tower with a waveguided tweeter, that sounds dead off axis, and is tuned for smooth power response rather than on axis FR. Meanwhile our most recent headphone microphone covers 20Hz-6kHz, lol. But they're catching up because of the wearable hype.

The best thing since sliced bread.

baking soda and superglue.

Dildo music.

It's cheap TPE overmolding. It degrades quickly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/jlo7iu/any_idea_how_to_clean_off_the_rubber_coating_that/
I had some things that now are completely shiny. WD40 and something to scrub it.

It's a good price for an eartip that's molded after your ear. You need to get your molds first, then they make positives that fit your earphone. You can also order entirely custom earphones, but they're pricier especially if you want full sound.

CIEM

I mean... You saved yourself a lot of money.
Anyway what do you mean by better sound?

If you want soundstage, then you should try CIEMs. They have the best ambience. You can try custom tips on the pair that you already have.

Try boosting 10k with an EQ before you commit to a new purchase.
If it doesn't help, then maybe lifting the top octave.

Exactly. First try EQ and see if you have headroom to work with. Maybe low shelf is a bit much, but definitely try to get more of the tones below 100Hz.

It's just occlusion. Yeah it's not for everyone.
There are nice earbuds though. Have you heard of ViDo? $3 good bass. There are some more refined earbuds, although the review business around those seems to be shady.

If you want to compare IEMs to headphones, you should look into custom IEMs. They have some ambience that regular IEMs don't.

A bit off topic, but there is a beautiful, free publication from Klippel about flaws in loudspeakers, called Loudspeaker Nonlinearities – Causes, Parameters, Symptoms . The measurement and analysis tech has gone a long way to have a lot of insight into inner workings of a driver. It is DEEP. The same tools are used to analyse headphone drivers and microspeakers so I guess it's not entirely irrelevant.

The best drivers are optimised with software and a ton of simulation of the magnetic circuit and the airflow around it. The experimental research is carried with simple and complex signals. Not as complex as the ones from Jerobeam Fenderson, but still it's more than what you see on ASR.

They dissect distortion into many parts : HID, IHD, IMD, AMD and some more. They scan the entire diaphragm with a laser and then split the recorded movement into discrete components so that you can see if your diaphragm is making sound or just rocking.

Generally the task of a headphone driver is to turn voltage into pressure just like a compressor in your fridge, except it needs to happen on time. When voltage changes by one unit, the pressure must change proportionally and under varying conditions. Some drivers do it well, some don't. The 70 page paper I mentioned describes the issues that transducers face. A lot of it comes down to quality control. The symmetry of the assembled driver is not always the same. This last thing will become less of a problem with MEMS microspeakers, but with a driver assembled by hand there are always rejects that end up on Aliexpress. You can buy a driver and see what's inside. You'll see that there are many different drivers, made with different materials, vents, rings, magnets. Their coils have various diameters and lengths. You'll also see their prices.
If you go on ASR, you'll see that they also measure differently.

Every chamber has a number of modes. Modes are resonances of an enclosed empty space. A small chamber like the back of a headphone has these modes above 5kHz. A medium one, like a loudspeaker box will have them lower, around 500Hz. A big one like your room will have modes around 50Hz.

These resonances at the back of an earcup will stop the diaphragm from moving at certain frequencies and boost it at other, creating the zigzagging response that you see in measurements.

IF you want to get rid of them, you can damp them with some sound absorbent material or with tuned resonant chambers. At least this is the way loudspeakers are made. Headphone earcups are usually too small for absorption so the only way we deal with this problem is by venting them. That's why we have open headphones.

Bass in headphones and loudspeakers is created by diaphragm excursion. The diaphragm rests on an air spring created by the closed chamber behind it. In headphones there is also a front chamber and the eardrum, but let's ignore it. The air spring opposes high excursion of a diaphragm. In practice it reduces bass extension, but amplifies the frequencies just above that. This is why you rarely get deep bass with closed headphones. They often have a bump around 100Hz and then roll off like it's nobody's business.

On the upper end you just move the back chamber modes lower into the midrange.
On the lower end you get more bass extension.

With the space gained you can fit more resonators and damping material, so there ais more room for improvement.

If I were to practice handstand in the garden, I'd prefer speakers. Because since when people care about their sweetspots while they're sweating? :)I can't 100% agree with you. Speakers vary in their interaction with the room. You can fix the modal region with good results, but an echoey room will often need some work. Maybe not as much as people think when they watch pictures online.

But I can see a pattern here. You seem to be using some narrow dispersion speakers. There are different builds.

Finally a fellow soul, who dared put 'soundstage' in double quotes!
A soundstage is a concept from stereo speakers, that was repurposed (and bastardized) by headphone geeks.

Let's be real. Headphones don't have soundstage. They have sound bubble with a stretched drum kit. The term doesn't work. It confuses people.

Bass comes with distortion so you can't elevate bass and expect no penalty for it. In this case EQ is a trade. You weigh the pros and cons. Sometimes getting more of muddy bass is not your preference. Leakage from long hair and glasses can worsen it. People tend to say that distortion doesn't matter in headphones, but they really mean that within reason. Distortion at bass can be very high and if you add to that leakage it means that your driver has to wobble outside of it's linear region. Such was the case of Sennheiser PX100, which had speaker level of distortion in the bass and consequently lacked the clarity of it's direct competitor, Koss Porta Pro. It's worth noting that the Koss generally sucks in it's upper range, which is why I personally never respected that headphone either.

Midrange and highs can have problems related to phase and personalisation. They often have very sharp peaks that drift in frequency from person to person. Good luck with notching them accurately! That's because the frequency of modes in the cavity between your eardrum and the driver varies with volume. If you have wider head, the driver will be pushed closer to your eardrum. If you have bigger ears, they'll displace more volume. Your ear canal entry can vary too.If you study B&K 5128 patent, you'll see that there is no one ear impedance. There is a range of ear impedances. That's OK for broad humps. Not OK for undamped resonances.

Back to the peaks and nulls in the highs. It's not easy to fix them and sometimes impossible when the mode is out of phase and cancels the otput from the driver. In such case the sound literally cancels itself and no matter how much you crank the volume up, it still is near zero dB. The only remedy is to physically address that mode in the earcup or the driver. A null like that will result in decreased detail and is an example of non-minimum phase behavior in headphones that is usually not talked by reviewers such as Crinacle, because it makes the topic too convoluted for non-engineers.

Sample variation can be an issue. You need the manufacturer to have at least some decency and do consistent QC and driver matching. On top of that the driver has to have the potential to compress air at low frequencies and have optimised modal behavior on both sides of the earcup.

That being said there are some cheap headphones that do most of that well. Long forgotten Philips models that are still in circulation on used market can be EQed to some success, but you need to make your own curve and I think this is the most important part - nobody cares about cheap headphones enough to work on EQ for them. They suck in more ways than just sound. Build quality and comfort for example. Some of them do one thing well. Aiwa Shellz comes to mind :) Can you make the upper range beautiful on those cute little buggers? Absoulutely. Can you make it play bass? Absolutely not.All in all when you EQ a headphone, it's better to be on the safe side and only add low Q filters. You'll avoid making things worse.

I had a few of these and was always impressed with sound quality. It was also quite easy to use. Cowon E2 was nice too. It didn't have the reading voice, but did have EQ presets.

>OG brown Zune

I had worse players.
Iriver E10 for example - a little noisy. Samsungs were cleaner but still no bass and no power. The best sound at the time was still from CD players.

You can solder two diodes directly to the driver like explained here:
https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/diode/diode-clipping-circuits.html

Aiaiai TMA-1

HD600 is precisely 1 over HD599. What did you expect?

HD600 is bang for buck. Any version of HD6?? really. If you want something clearly better, then you need a lot more cash; like 1kGBP.