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Comment by rdtwo | Hacker News Reader

What are the best headphones in the under 1000 range? Has there been a lot of improvement since I got my akg 701s

Doubtful. You're probably into the range of diminishing returns with those. Switching will get you something different, and possibly more to your tastes, or more comfortable, not necessarily objectively better.

I personally love the sound of electrostatic speakers and would try an affordable pair of electrostatic headphones as a step up from that class of open-back dynamic headphones if I were in the market today, but I don't listen to headphones as much as I used to.

Yeah definitely, I had heard that hd650s paired with a nice amp were about as good as you could get for under 3-4K wasn’t sure if anything made it to market that’s been really revolutionary. Really my problem is music discovery. Spotify doesn’t really do it for me, it just finds more of the same and never invites me to branch out.

I built the nwavguy O2 kit from jdslabs and like it. It does perk up the Sennheisers and would probably work well for your headphones.

I don't hear a lot of difference between the Apple headphone adapter and jdslabs' "Objective DAC". The $10 Apple adapter might even be better than the ODAC, but it only works with my phone.

I haven't used Spotify in years; I think I never reinstalled it when my old laptop died in 2018. I could never get past the audio quality of their free tier, and never tried the paid tier. Maybe it's better now. Their recommendations back then for me were really odd; I can understand why some people would complain. I am about the only person that likes Amazon's streaming service but their recommendations are just bland-to-bad. I've noticed Pandora channels have become much more repetitive. Maybe the whole industry has been pushed by their metrics to some horrible least-common-denominator point.

There's an argument that discovery is an unsolved problem that doesn't pay. There was a discussion a while back on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29474762

Objectively, Sennheiser HD600 (closest to harman FR, low distortion, distortion is shaped to avoid midrange).

Subjectively, depends on the person. A majority prefers HD600, while some swear by the HD650, a colored (less neutral, warmer) version of it; I do prefer HD600 myself, while I've heard both extensively.

What’s “best” is, of course, quite subjective. That said, I tried a bunch around that price-point, and the Focal Clear was my favorite. I had the AKG k702s, and the Clear was a substantial step up.

In terms of sound quality, I want to say any of the planar magnetic headphones. It's hard to beat the agility and clarity of planar magnetic with dynamic drivers without spending a lot more money.

But planar magnetic headphones tend to be quite heavy and bulky, and you might be willing to sacrifice planar magnetic sound quality for comfort.

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