Would you spend £24,444 on a headphone setup?

mrk · 9 Dec 2019 at 19:29

Well neither would I, but Linus recently got sent a stack of boxes from Abyss who claim to make the highest resolution headphones you can buy, and the whole setup is even cheaper than the Sennheiser Orpheus...

I watched this with fascination, because knowing what Linus is like I fully expected him to dish out the brass tax, but you can tell he wants to throughout but the headphones do sound amazing it would seem, just.... the cost even for just the cans alone.

Still, if I had that kind of money to splash, there probably wouldn't be anywhere else I'd go.

mrk · 9 Dec 2019 at 19:49

That's all assuming you'd choose to live on your own! The whole premise of headphones is to give you that listening pleasure without disturbing those around you :cool:

So the sensible thing to do would have both speakers and headphones. Which most of us here have anyway!

mrk · 9 Dec 2019 at 22:52

and here I am with just a D 7050 and HD650s!!!

mrk · 11 Dec 2019 at 08:32

The points about what the human ear can hear vs diminishing returns are valid. As you get older the freq range the human ear is capable of hearing gets worse as most will know. So these super high resolution speakers/cables/amps etc must have a point where it becomes placebo and actually turns into an engineering effort to show what is technically possible, whether it’s audible or not to the human ear is an individual affair.

What is audibly different however is how sound is presented. The soundstage, noise floor (where analogue amps are concerned) are obvious points here.

But in my experience what makes the biggest difference is the mastering quality of the music being played. People rave about SACDs but as mentioned earlier, SACDs often have the best quality master to go off anyway so of course it would be great. RIP an SACD to FLAC and blind play to someone with a down to earth priced headphone vs one of these beasts and I bet most people wouldn’t be able t tell which cost 5 figures. What will be noted is the sound presentation, something which does of course vary wildly even on regular priced semi/high end headphones.