Advice on what to consider when buying your next headphone

[thewas]

Quite nice advice for newbies and not only which can be expanded also to other audio categories.

Short overview:

00:00 - Intro
00:51 - Avoid solely considering your budget maximum
01:43 - Avoid the sunk cost fallacy
02:45 - Avoid sanitized "reviews" from content farms
03:10 - Avoid buying too heavily into marketing copy
04:08 - Get information from multiple sources
04:43 - Don't base your purchase solely on measurements
07:35 - Don't base your purchase on everything BUT measurements
08:47 - Don't play the authority game
09:26 - Avoid the cope
10:17 - Consider the product, not the brand
11:16 - Make sure you buy from a retailer with a good return system and refund policy

 

[m0pher]

That's actually a pretty good list.

 

[dark132]

For modern music, hd660s is more suitable, and for classical music hd600 is more suitable. As long as you have two, you don't have to buy the more expensive hd660s2.

 

[Robbo99999]

Quite nice advice for newbies and not only which can be expanded also to other audio categories.

Short overview:

00:00 - Intro
00:51 - Avoid solely considering your budget maximum
01:43 - Avoid the sunk cost fallacy
02:45 - Avoid sanitized "reviews" from content farms
03:10 - Avoid buying too heavily into marketing copy
04:08 - Get information from multiple sources
04:43 - Don't base your purchase solely on measurements
07:35 - Don't base your purchase on everything BUT measurements
08:47 - Don't play the authority game
09:26 - Avoid the cope
10:17 - Consider the product, not the brand
11:16 - Make sure you buy from a retailer with a good return system and refund policy

That seems like good advice to me. Although that still provides a lot of grey areas for people buying headphones, as in there'd be a lot of research someone would need to do to make their decision whilst still operating in grey areas - you make your best decision using that purchase advice but you still don't know until you try it & probably still don't know until you try it in the same session vs other headphones, so it's as complicated (or as simple) as you want to make it I suppose, but I'd say it's still good advice. I'd place about 80% of purchase advice weighting on measurements, and I'd use non-measurement advice related to comfort/size of earcups & long term reliability user ratings & ease/cost of pad replacement.

This was interesting in the video, does anyone know where the unsmoothed Harman Target came from that Resolve posted up? @thewas , and I may as well tag @Resolve too as he created the video! I screen grabbed both the normal Harman Target that we know and also the unsmoothed Harman Target and I'll include them here (and if you want to compare the targets then click on the pic and then just use the arrow keys on your keyboard to flip between the two pics so your brain will be quickly able to see how the target changes):

I'd be interested to try some EQ's to the unsmoothed Target, but I'd like to find out where it's come from or how it's been calculated if they calculated it themselves. I'd say there'd be a bit of a noticeable/audible difference between them. (I'd say it looks a bit like the 2015 Harman Target but with less treble above 5kHz)

EDIT: and I traced the "Unsmoothed Target" using VirtuixCAD and then graphed it in REW vs the normal Harman 2018 over ear curve that we know so see following (red is the "unsmoothed"):