I'm gonna recommend you get the K702. I own three sets of decent headphones and I've EQ'd them all to the Headphone Harman Curve, and I like them in this order from best to worst (the worst is still very good though): AKG K702 > NAD HP50 > Sennheiser HD600. The main reason I like the K702 the best is for the excellent soundstage & imaging so they don't really sound like headphones to me, more like speakers. They also take bass EQ better than the HD600 whilst having a similar level of musical detail as the HD600, the HD600 sounds a bit too much "in your head" and is a bit harsher than the other two headphones (all comparisons done after EQ). I'd go with the AKG K702 and if you know you like the Harman Headphone Curve you can try the EQ that I did, which is based on Innerfidelity measurements, and recently Jaakkopasanen created a "Calibrated Harman Headphone Target Curve" for Innerfidelity measurements by comparing headphone measurements between the "Gold Standard" of Oratory's measurements with Innerfidelity measurements and was able to see where the differences lie & thereby create a Target Curve that emulates the official Harman Headphone Curve that Oratory uses....Oratory hasn't measured the AKG K702 so that's why you have to use Innerfidelity measurements and the "Calibrated Harman Headphone Curve" that Jaakkopasanen has devised:
https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq
My EQ for AKG K702: (negative preamp of
-4.8dB required)
View attachment 86752
I've compared this EQ against my Harman Curve Room EQ'd speakers (JBL 308p Mkii) and I think they sound very similar, so for me this is an accurate EQ of the AKG K702.....however different people have different HRTF's so a set of headphones or a particular headphone EQ will sound slightly different (or really quite different) when compared between different people, so headphones aren't a one size fits all situation.
I see you're on a MAC so I have no real idea if that can drive the AKG K702 sucessfully or not. The K702 is not a particularly hard to drive headphone, it's slightly easier to drive than the Sennheiser HD600 in my experience.....I do know that my K702 sounds horrible driven from my PC directly, but it sounds fine with my weakest DAC/headphone amp which is a Xonar U7 DAC/headphone amp that outputs a max of 1V.
If you're gonna be EQ'ing your headphones then I do recommend you get a DAC & headphone amp because EQ'ing requires that you use a digital negative preamp in the region of say -4.0 to -10.0dB typically depending on the EQ, so that can reduce power reaching the headphone by around half or more (-6.0dB is a halving of the power).
EDIT: One caveat to getting the AKG K702, they are known for having reliability issues associated with poor soldering of the wires in the earcups. The soldering failed on one of the wires in my right earcup after about 2-3yrs of daily usage - I then bought a soldering iron kit for only £16 and taught myself how to solder (in about 1hr) from watching YouTube vids, so I was able to open up the headphones and solder the wire back on. Five years on from my initial ownership all the wire solder points have now failed in the right earcup and so far I've replaced all wires and all soldering in the right ear cup and it hasn't failed since (there's 2 wires & 4 solder points in the right ear cup).....it's a relatively simple if fiddly process if you're a technically minded/practical type of person.
EDIT#2: If you're not gonna EQ then the Sennheiser HD600 is the best one to get out of the 3 headphones I own as it's the best sounding headphone I've ever heard straight out the box with no EQ, and it also doesn't have the reliability issues of the K702. In fact I might go so far to say that the HD600 is the one headphone that sounds better and retains it's best characteristics when
not EQ'd. It's particularly beautiful on vocal orientated music.
