devopsprodude
Senior Member
Last week I finally got fed up with the just overall meh sound of my Sony WH-1000XM3 ANC headphones. They are comfortable, have excellent ANC, and are good for Zoom calls, but the sound when listening to music is just muddy and underwhelming. So I started doing research. I follow Sean Olive a bit and used https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/blob/master/results/RANKING.md as one guide and based on Sean's recommendations, starting using rtings.com.
Initially I was wanting closed back cans for the isolation and improved bass, but I've already been down that road with the OPPO PM-3 headphones, which are quite good, so I decided instead to focus on soundstage and overall sound quality. Triangulating based on the Harman curve list and soundstage/sound quality/comfort ratings on rtings.com I eventually settled on the Hifiman Sundara headphones. I'm glad to say that I was not disappointed. They aren't super great in the bass department as reported by rtings.com, but soundstage is pretty frickin' amazing as is overall sound quality. Plus they are very comfortable. And this is using headphone jack from Macbook Pro (Schiit Modius and Magnius won't arrive for another 3 weeks or so) with Spotify at highest quality setting. By the way, this playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWZtZ8vUCzche is indeed very good for checking out how your headphones perform.
Anywho, long story short, TL;DR version, I found rtings.com to be pretty accurate in their headphone assessments and was wondering if others have found the same. And yes, I know that Amir has done some reviews like of the Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pros that contradicts rtings to some extent. I however found the site to be extremely invaluable in selecting headphones that fit the parameters I was looking for.
Initially I was wanting closed back cans for the isolation and improved bass, but I've already been down that road with the OPPO PM-3 headphones, which are quite good, so I decided instead to focus on soundstage and overall sound quality. Triangulating based on the Harman curve list and soundstage/sound quality/comfort ratings on rtings.com I eventually settled on the Hifiman Sundara headphones. I'm glad to say that I was not disappointed. They aren't super great in the bass department as reported by rtings.com, but soundstage is pretty frickin' amazing as is overall sound quality. Plus they are very comfortable. And this is using headphone jack from Macbook Pro (Schiit Modius and Magnius won't arrive for another 3 weeks or so) with Spotify at highest quality setting. By the way, this playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWZtZ8vUCzche is indeed very good for checking out how your headphones perform.
Anywho, long story short, TL;DR version, I found rtings.com to be pretty accurate in their headphone assessments and was wondering if others have found the same. And yes, I know that Amir has done some reviews like of the Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pros that contradicts rtings to some extent. I however found the site to be extremely invaluable in selecting headphones that fit the parameters I was looking for.