They sound great! The only thing is, one requirement is that they need to be over the hear. UGH.
The good news is there is still a lot of great options for over ears in your budget. Do any of the headphones mentioned so far appeal to you? If not, what are the objections? Or are you still planning on holding out until the Panda is widely available?
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Well it sounds like maybe the AKG K371 or the like and aim for the Harman might be a good thing to try.?? The explanation was thorough but I’m not entirely sure I understand everything MaynardGK said. First who/what is AKG K371 - I have not heard of this (I feel really dumb but - is that an abbreviation of a brand or the brand is AKG)?
His explanation about bass heavy headphones I completely understand and know myself, that is why this is difficult. I HAVE noticed a pretty big bias against Deep Bass - and though I DO like bass (and it does feel as if I should feel shamed about that) I don’t think I’d be happy with what everyone keeps calling a “v - shaped” sound signature - because of the mids and possibility of screechy highs. I also keep wondering - because of this possible “bias” are they calling some headphones “v-shaped” when they are not really - they are just heavier on bass than they like?
Does he mean that maybe the best solution for me is to get one of those headphones and an amp or is it a tuner and use that to adjust the sound signature to what I’m listening to?
Please understand, I am not a BEATS headphones acolyte. If that type of ‘sound’ was acceptable to me I wouldn’t be here.
I do agree, no matter the choice, it IS going to be a roll of the dice somewhat.
Still not my ears, but my brother is in the audio industry (not headphones) and he was sent a pair of what looked like LCD II headphones a while ago and had never tried them. He tried them for me and had my Dad also try them - with and without an amp. My brother (with the exceptions of Swing & Reggaeton) listens to nearly all of the same music as I do. My Dad is more restricted in Genre’s and does have some high pitch hearing loss. Neither liked the LCD II headphones. My main take away was that what they described sounded like muddy low to deep bass. Is that a fairly common opinion for those? Should that give me a direction? (That is WAY more than I would want to spend anyway).
Sorry to ramble…
PS - I don’t know if it matters but I have seen a few videos where podcasts/reviewers have mentioned trying to get more women interested in audio. Since my user name is pretty ambiguous, I thought I would say, ‘hey I’m female and I’m interested’! LOL!! 
Thank you so much again!
The K371 is a headphone made by AKG
Yes. The “Akustische und Kino-Geräte Gesellschaft” is known for their microphones and headphones, and by the name AKG.
They got purchased by Harman which was bought by Samsung.
Thought I might add something useful in here 
This song here has some insanely deep bass (Lorn does that a lot):
I like that particular song best in the wierd combination “Panasonic RP-HD10” (kinda wierdly flawed Headphones, very comfortable though) fed from my Emotiva BasX A-100 (which I have lightly modded).
No shame in liking some extra bass.
If you want bass quantity, rule of thumb is closed back.
I also own PortaPro’s. They have absolutely no business sounding as good as they do.
Concerning “sharp highs”, you might be looking for what is called a “warm” signature. Imagine a V, but the high part removed.
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I would definitely go with the grado gw100s. They sound fantastic and are about 250$. Check zeos’s review on them as well for more info. Also welcome to the club man.
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I think you will find that this forum is very accepting of all audio preferences! That’s why we recommend experimentation. Because most of us do not believe in such a thing as an ideal target for everyone. Audio is EXTREMELY personal and subjective. You may not know what you like until you have heard it. I personally love having headphones that can pump out deep, rumbling, textured bass. If it’s lacking in certain genres then the headphones will feel light and anemic.
I believe the K371 is a pretty easy to drive headphone and would not absolutely require an amp, however almost all headphones benefit from an external source. They will reach a decent volume easily off your computer or phone, but the quality of audio will not be as good as using a separate DAC/Amp or dedicated portable audio player. And as for your question about tuning. He is not recommending you use something to tune the sound (that would be an equalizer or DSP). When @MaynardGK talks about Harman tuned headphones he means the headphones themselves have been tuned by the manufacturer to a certain frequency response curve. In this case the Harman target curve.
The nice thing is, there is a good used market for quality audio gear. If you don’t like something you can always sell it off on our buy/sell thread or somewhere like eBay.
We are happy to have you! We try to be a very friendly and helpful group so feel free to ask any questions you want. No judgements here. It’s true you don’t tend to see very many females in this hobby for whatever reason, so welcome!
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They most certainly do not. But that’s why we love them.
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OK, ilikecheese, you’re turning out to be one of those newcomers who actually want to understand things instead of just clicking buy, buy, buy until bank balance <= 0, lol. A lot of your questions can actually be answered more simply by using visuals, strangely enough. Here’s a visual:
I’ve crammed a lot of information into one image, so let’s take a bit of time to digest it. From left to right is the range of human hearing from the deepest bass to the shrillest treble. The piano keyboard has keys for a good chunk of that range. And the human voice, from deepest male bass note to highest coloratura soprano note is marked off by the two blue lines. Instruments like the cello, upright bass, bass guitar and tuba can go lower than the lowest human voice, so would fall to the left of the vocal range. Instruments like the oboe, flute and piccolo can go higher, so would extend to the right of the vocal range, but still no higher than the piano.
An accurate frequency response happens when each sound from bass to treble that is produced at equal loudness is heard as equal loudness out of the speaker or headphone. This is illustrated by the green line. But for technical reasons, for a headphone to actually re-create that subjective equal loudness experience, it has to generate somewhat louder sounds in the low and high ends of the frequency spectrum, as shown by the red line.
For headphones like a typical Beats, in order to get the most bass possible, a big compromise has been made. The bass elevation only starts tapering off well into the non-bass range. Compare the red line between the two blue lines in the first picture vs the second. You see that this results in the human voice and most instruments having their characteristic sound (timbre) distorted, so the lower pitches are louder than they should be and the higher pitches are relatively quieter than they should be. In addition the peak on the right is even louder than it needs to be to accurately reproduce high frequency sound. (This is actually a good thing when it forces bass lovers to keep the volume down so the screech of electric guitars and such-like don’t drive them crazy.)
As I stated in my last post, this v-shape is not a bad or good thing. It’s up to the individual to decide whether the mid-range compromise is acceptable in order to get that bass range goodness. Now, going back to Harman:
Here, the bass is elevated but only to the amount that research indicates is acceptable to the majority of people, and it tapers off before the mid-range starts. After that it follows the accurate curve fairly closely.
And, again, Harman isn’t some kind of ideal frequency response. Instead, we now have three “ideal” frequency responses to choose from: A) accurate, B) bass-heavy v-shaped and C) acceptable compromise for those who want an extra helping of bass but not at the expense of messing around with the mids.
OK, re-reading your last post, there’s the LCD-2 to talk about. Here’s what you heard:
This time I’ve used an actual frequency response measurements graph from a reputable source (instead of simplifying them by hand). The green line is how an LCD-2 measures and the grey line is the same Harman curve from the picture above.
The jaggedness of the green line isn’t unusual for a headphone and the human brain doesn’t make that jaggedness so obvious for listening to music. The main thing is that on the right where the Harman and the accuracy curves rise to form a gentle grey hill, the LCD-2 hardly bothers to budge off the same average level of loudness as it uses to the left. (The engineers at Audeze haven’t found a way to retain the good things they like about how their headphones produce sound while still getting them to rise in the high frequencies. They even provide a software app called Reveal, that corrects for this problem.)
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I understand this is more of a joke but the best way to really understand and get involved in audio is direct experience, and typically the only way for most people to really do that is to buy and try (and sometimes abuse return policies lol). You can indeed look at some measurements and estimate what you may like, but it really isn’t going to tell you much of anything compared to hearing it yourself, just my 2c. Of course going overboard or a rash purchase is never ideal, but sometimes you do just need to find something that is solid and interests you, and go for it. If it ends up being something you really enjoy, great! If it ends up being something you don’t like, if you buy from somewhere with solid return policies or good resale, you can get rid of it and then learn from what you liked and disliked to better guide you to something you might enjoy more. This isn’t really trying to diss a measurement focused approach either, the best way to understand how measurements work is by using measurements to complement your subjective experience (not supplement), and that also takes more hands on experience as well
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It’s also a recognition that some of us are not comfortable with buy/return or even buy/sell. Plus, others don’t have the financial independence to do so, as in still living at home during those tedious days of our youth.
Glad you added to your initial statement, but I can still well imagine circumstances in which buy/return is a real hassle due to parents or spouse.
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Of course, it’s never ideal to spend money or have to deal with returns either, but it really the only way to do it tbh. You don’t have to spend alot to get some nice things either to try out, but the cost of buying and trying is honestly going to be something you find is a necessary evil in this hobby. In the end this hobby is about finding the best sound for yourself, and there really isn’t a way to do that without having things to listen to in the first place and decide for yourself
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Can we at least agree that a quick glance at a reputable frequency graph can save us from an obvious mistake from time to time, when the contradictory voices of forum members and YouTube reviewers are a jumble in our brains?
I’m not agin what you’re sayin’ any more than you are agin what I’m sayin’. Just want to retain what I feel is a measured balance. So, in the still living at home scenario, I would start by prepping my parents to the idea that there’s a good reason I might have to return this headphone I’m campaigning for. It’s not just youthful caprice.
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I can certainly agree that one should do their research before they blindly buy. With that being said, I also want to add that frequency graphs only point out one out of many aspects that would make a headphone enjoyable, tuning.
It does not tell the buyer anything about sound stage, imaging, timbre, speed, dynamics, punch, and so many other things that one may enjoy. Research is encouraged, but one will have to try it out eventually. Nothing will beat that experience.
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Personally no but for the sake of not derailing the thread yes lol (although the no comes more from experiences with the higher end side of things, in the budget realm it might offer more use where a poor frequency response is more likely to kill the potential of a headphone)
Finding a balance is always good. Doing your diligence into research and putting some effort into finding what may suit you through combined experiences from others along with some more technical information is worthwhile, at some point you do just have to pull the trigger even if you aren’t 100% sure (and also just because something looks ideal for you from what you have heard and seen, it doesn’t mean it will be, most people really don’t figure out what they truly want until they’ve gone through enough to find out). But yes do your research and don’t buy on a whim or a single opinion, value both subjective and more technical information equally, etc etc
Correct. And also just because something looks ideal to a target or response doesn’t mean it will actually be ideal for you
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I find frequency response is about the least interesting part of a headphone sound, I look at them occasionally, but with all my headphones the only one I find the FR jarring enough to stop me enjoying them is the T50RP3, which I strongly dislike.
To me it’s all abut timbre, resolution, staging, separation, and speed (faster not necessarily better).
I’ve bought a couple of headphones I needed to listen to for 20 minutes to get past the frequency response, but I’ve never really had an issue swapping between them afterwards.
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I would absolutely agree in the high end although when it comes for more budget headphones, imo the frequency response does tend to play a larger role in how something may end up preforming as the lower end headphones typically don’t end up having higher preforming intangibles and a poor frequency response can more hobble the budget headphones that don’t have much else to make up for it. For example while a 58x isn’t a super high technical performer, the frequency response and tuning is very refined and mature for it’s price, which does tend to make it a worthwhile listen over worse tuned but higher resolving headphones in the same price bracket imo (whereas with most of the higher end headphones they typically all have mature frequency response and the other aspects like spatial recreation, timbre, dynamics, presentation, time domain things color the headphone more than the frequency response)
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I’ll agree with that, I would argue the 58x, like the 6xx but less so still has great midrange Timbre, and the while the staging is intimate, separation while not $1000 headphone levels is good for the price point.
I think what you are saying is more true coming back to budget headphones after listening to higher end stuff than it is experiencing them during the Journey.
Plus while not budget headphones like the Nighthawks or the GJallarhorn look to have terrible FR graphs and people shouldn’t discount them for it.
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Yes, and this is another thing I should have pointed out, as well as the necessity for ears-on time having to happen at some point. But the flip side is that FR (frequency response AKA tuning) is different from the aspects you list in that no one can seem to agree about how a given headphone’s tuning actually sounds. (Beyond the most basic aspects, at least.) While for sound stage, dynamics, etc. Most reviewers seem to have much better agreement.
Ilikecheese has already indicated, as in her impressions of the LCD-2, that FR can be a serious issue for her. A position I readily sympathize with. Unlike Polygonhell and M0N, who can do something I truly envy. I cannot adapt to one headphone’s FR vs another in 20 minutes or 20 years. A lifetime obsessing over which musical instrument to purchase and living with my mistakes has robbed me of this gift. And I’m assuming there are other people in the same boat, for whatever reason.
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Yes that is the perspective I am coming from
For sure lol. The hawks can be had for a very reasonable price though
Hmmm interesting, I never really noticed this but I might agree. Although for me FR vs tuning are 2 different things, FR to me is more raw focusing on the frequency response of the headphone, whereas the tuning is more the combination of the FR along with all the other aforementioned aspects coming together to decide how the headphone is colored imo.
There is more info I would like to know though, as in what amps were used, what was the source material, and also how long was the listen? Those are all very important things to know as without an amp the lcd can sound pretty poor tbh (same thing with a poor quality amp), if the source was at least high quality spotifiy and a decent quality recording, and potentially the most important thing of how long of a listen was it? Typically only a few hours of listening isn’t enough to really get that brain burn in and get used to the sound signature, first impressions can be very misleading. Not saying that the impressions were wrong or anything (there really can’t be wrong impressions since it’s subjective anyways), just feeling like there are more things at play than a fr mismatch when it came to that demo but idk. Also depends on what revision LCD 2 it was since there are many and they all sound different, especially the fazor vs prefazor
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Sigh. If the hobby were easy it wouldn’t be fun.
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