Upgrade from Dr150?

robnut · 23 Oct 2010 at 20:17

After having my dr150 for ages and modding them far too much they are a bit worse for wear. Still sound great but the housing has a few holes and scratches.

What would be the next logical step staying with open circumaural? I have a large head and ears so prefer the oval design cups tho i did have some superlux 668b and they were ok apart from the headband making my head sore.

Budget upto £150. (early xmas from the gf)

Marsman · 23 Oct 2010 at 20:36

Tough one that, I have wondered that myself. One stumbling block, is the price of headphones in the UK. Audio Technica ATH AD700's are £110 on average here, but in the US, they can be had for half that.

An obvious choice would be a 2nd hand pair of HD600's, but you will need an amp as well to drive them. I wonder how well the FiiO E5 would be with them. Uriel is the man to ask, he has used quite a few headphones, and he also owns a FiiO E5 and the HD600's.

Uriel · 23 Oct 2010 at 21:43

HD600s are a reasonable upgrade from DR150 but they do need a decent amp. They do not reach their potential with a FiiO e5. In fact, all my portable amps have been rather disappointing with them. I'm currently using my Mackie mixer's headphone out to drive them and I'm not sure that really does the job properly. There's people running HD600s with several hundred quid's worth of amp and I've not had chance to try that yet.

Without good amplification, the DR150s and HD600s are incredibly close. It's only really with a decent amp that the HD600 pulls away and stretches into its potential.

How much of an upgrade are the HD600s though? They are better than DR150s but they cost over 3 times as much. They aren't 3x better sound wise. Not even 20% better to be honest. In some music it can be hard to pin down the difference. There are moments when the HD600s stretch a little further though. Maybe something like a double bass in the background could give an example. On the DR150s I hear the note on the instrument. On the HD600s, listening carefully, you can hear it being plucked. In terms of build quality and materials the HD600s are a vast improvement over the DR150s though.

Another set of headphones to look out for would be HD580s (the HD600s predecessor). Material quality is not quite up there with the HD600s (HD580s are mainly plastics, HD600s are carbon fibre and metal) but the sound quality is very close. If you see HD580 Jubilees they are practically HD600s by another name.

HD595 and HD555 are not an upgrade from the DR150. The Goldrings are at least as good as the HD595. Haven't heard much that I would say actually bridges the gap between the DR150s and HD580s.

robnut · 23 Oct 2010 at 21:48

I have a Aune dac/amp fed by the xonar dg. Fed some ns1000 with nc on beyond loud. Ill keep an eye out for the hd600 (seen them for £200 new) and the 580. I could just buy the dr150 again and micmod them once and do it properly the first time

Uriel · 23 Oct 2010 at 21:51

When I'm talking about amplification, I'm not referring to how loud the headphones go. Inadequate or poor amplification usually has no problems making headphones go loud enough. The issues lie in keeping the sound clean, and allowing headphones to perform to their full degree of speed, accuracy and dynamic range etc rather than volume.

If the Aune dac/amp managed to make the NS1000s with NC off sound much like they do with NC on then that's probably a good sign but not necessarily indicative of decent performance with HD600s.

robnut · 23 Oct 2010 at 22:00

Yeah it made them sound the same if not slightly better, it gets great reviews all round. Might see if i can try some hd600 before i commit.

robnut · 12 Nov 2010 at 00:15

Small bump, Still aint managed to listen to the hd600 but they are on sale atm for £169.99, I am confident my amp can give them justice, are they worth the £169.99 punt??