I listen mostly on headphones as (with young kids) having a larger separates system with floorstanders is a bit impractical.
I love these with my Meze Elite or Empyreans out of the DCS Bartok.
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Radiohead’s In Colours is great on phones, especially House Of Cards where the thump of the music sounds far better than my speakers can portray except at wall shaking volume!
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Great posting. I think that after their first experience with good headphones, every music listener was not able to do much with loudspeakers for a while. At least that’s how it was for me many years ago. Anyone who has listened to headphones on a daily basis for a long time has at some point noticed that something is missing: I’ll call it the physical, the vibrations, reflections and the interaction of the sound with the usual listening room.
Back to me: I quickly got tired of headphones because most of the recordings produced such unnatural sound fields, had a strong treble bias or sometimes sounded muddy and undefined. Then I bought expensive speakers of many different makes. Here the physical was immediately present and many recordings sounded powerful and space-filling. What was missing was the feeling of standing in the middle of the recording, the often subtle resolution of voices and sounds, the sound happening in the middle of the head. Many speaker systems followed, each promising to improve a detail - but it quickly became apparent that none ever came close to the three-dimensional sound field of good headphones. I was frustrated for many years, then experimented with surround setups and surround recordings. Somehow the spark didn’t jump over here either. Artificial studio effects do not replace a natural and realistic sound field.
A year ago I overheard a B&W D800 D3 in a hi-fi shop packed with dozens of speakers. I thought the music was coming from a surround system. A space-filling, almost holographic sound field surrounded me and, in addition, a physicality that I had previously only known from fat 5.1 setups. Long story short, 32,000 Euros is a lot of money for two speakers, but I haven’t listened with headphones for a few months now and I don’t miss anything - on the contrary! And, yes, the vibrating air and chirping of the cicadas at the beginning of “Caravanserai” fills my entire listening room before the music kicks in - physically.
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Wow, Bob James on Fender Rhodes is like Easter and Christmas to me! Thanks for this great tip. The recording also sounds heavenly in the stereo mix down over Tidal MQA 96kHz. The Dolby Atmos version over Apple‘s AirPods Max sounds interesting but artificial. I’ll look for the binaural version later bc. it‘s not available in Tidal.
Edit (after listening):
Wowowowwww! 81-year-old Bob James at the pinnacle of his art! It is so admirable how he reinterprets the lyrical character of Bill Evans’s “Nardis” in a way never heard before with ingenious chord progressions!
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By „he“ you probably mean Placido Domingo and not Rolando Villazón…
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Cheers Geefes. Yep it makes me feel pretty good every time i listen to it as well.
You must feel like a kid in a lolly shop with the B&W speakers as well. I’ve only got the Bookshelf B&W 606S2 as Mrs Ferg doesn’t like music on all the time, so use headphones a fair bit. HifiMan Arya, Yamaha LH700A and Sennheiser IEM 300’s.
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Well, I happen to own both of these. While in the beginning I was impressed by their both analytic and punchy sound I got tired of them very quickly because, due to belonging to the closed species, they tend to get uncomfortable micro-climate and soundwise.
I’m sorry but I don’t quite understand what you are trying to say. Can you please rephrase. Thanks!
Required for proper playback:
- top of the line headphones
- plenty of power to play LOUD
Available on Qobuz
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And here is another bombastic, overblown piece of 1970s music (and I mean that in a good way) that sounds great on headphones:
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Happy memories, thank you 
. I saw JT play this fully on 5th March 1972 (my birthday) and bought the vinyl, with original fold out cardboard ‘newspaper’ the day after (released in the UK on 3rd March 1972). Great album and fully agree that headphones do it justice, vinyl or 96kHz!
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Wow! Thank you
Sounds fantastic streaming from Qobuz in high resolution. Classic ECM sound: spacious, open and clean
Signal path (minus cables and connection types):
Qobuz-> modem->router->network switch->Windows PC running Roon core->
router-> network switch-> Pro-Ject Streambox S2 Ultra->Benchmark DAC3 HGC->AKG N90Q with convolution filters (Roon) and active noise cancellation (AKG)
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I have it playing now.
I like it. The cymbals make the headphones welcome for me.
Appreciate it.
A lot of great suggestions in this thread to add my “collection”; until my provider changes things up at least.
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