Anyone in the market for a decent Music Headset.

Since i guess the majority on here have a mobile phone such as the Iphone or adroid and like music i thought i would post something regarding the quality of the ear piece that comes with the Iphone and Ipod.

Since apart from gaming i do have a passion for my Trance Music especially groups like Above and Beyond [check out the podcast on itunes for free]

Anyway i was in the market for some a nice closed cup headset for my Iphone and i happened to pop into HMV.

While browsing the head phone section my eyes were transformed to a rack with all these nice shiny boxes with prices that were quite simply amazing

Have you seen the Headsets called Beats made by Monster and Endorsed by Dr Dre,then if you have you will have caught my drift.

Did you then sort of collapse in the store at the price structure,i was so intrigued i called over one of the Hippies that actually worked there,you know the ones 25 piecing ,multi coloured hair,geeky looking

Hey im only kidding the guy was nice so i asked him what are so special about these headsets that cost up to £350 ..........Yes serious £350 .

He said do you want to hear mine which were like £180 i think of which he hurried out the back to get them,on his return i was very curious so quickly put them into my Iphone and sort out a trance track.

Now was i impressed...............Having owned quite a few different model headsets over the years ranging from Sony Ones to whatever costing no more than about £40 i have to say the sound was absolutely amazing but quite frankly at this price they had to be something special.

My next question was why the difference between your ones that i am testing at around £150 and those on the top shelf costing £350.......His reply was confusing as he said if i was i DJ then the top priced ones were more suited to my needs but to be honest the ones that cost £150 are just as good.

The sound and depth were like nothing i have ever heard before and i thought my £40 ones were pretty decent.

Anyway did T2D buy some..............................You decide

More than likely should have posted this in the Music Forum but i did not want any of my followers to miss out

Edited by time2die (Tue 21-Feb-12 14:11:17)

There's a music forum???

Well, I have often looked at reviews and suchlike for headphones and so know there is a whole other world of audiosonic bliss a million miles away from all the tinny toneless poop that usually passes as portable listening gear.

I have some Grado 80s headphones and they are open back and sounded great. But they are not the most durable and the cord got damaged and now they're mono so not much good. That's why I was so keen to get some more headphones for gaming and ended up with my current ASUS Vulcans, which are closed back but have good sound and nice bass. They were really good value too. I can't wear them out though as they look daft but you wouldn't want to wear full size phones out and about anyhow.

My Shure E3cs (earphones) are missing but I used to love those. I've since got some much cheaper Shure earphones but they're pink! Yes, pink! I got them as they were seriously reduced (as no one liked them in pink I guess). Sound quality is pretty good for the money so yeah, it's amazing what you can hear when you've got a good set of cans on over or in your lug-holes. I'd recommend reading some reviews though and buying online as HMV sell plenty of overpriced tat amongst the better stuff. I know you like your Apple stuff T2D, and they have a good selection of headphones last time I looked. The B+W were quite nice.

So, what did you buy then? My personal favourites still remain my old Grado's. I'd love to spend some serious money on a real audiophile pair but Grado don't have the build quality and I don't have the cash to experiment much either! I'm always blowing it all on other stuff, um. Too much tech and not enough dosh...



Ps. That hippy must've been proper nice to let some random customer like you try his personal phones on! I hope he cleaned them before he put them back on again...

I got a set of the red ones costing £180 i think and they even work with my vita apart from the remote control on the cord that does the volume and track.

Problem with all these small gaming portable devices is the Sound,there is just not enough of it and when your in your own little gaming world playing brilliant puzzle games like lumines with the trance/electronic music i want it loud and again the Vita just has not got the Volume.

Hey mate, red one what? A good tip for driving headphones that don't give too much volume is to buy yourself a little portable headphone amplifier.

I got one of these Fiio E5 for £21.44. It'll boost the volume levels and has it's own rechargeable battery built in.

All headphones/earphones (as with all speakers) have two main ratings that indicate how loud they will go - sensitivity in dB (decibels) and resistance or impedance (measured in Ohms).

So, your headphones will have two ratings that will help indicate how easy (or not) they are to "drive". A higher sensitivity means they will be easier to power and give a higher sound output and a lower impedance generally means a lower voltage is also required to power higher volumes. If you have a relatively low speaker sensitivity and high impedance you'll struggle to get decent volumes without a decent amp and plenty of electricity! I found all this out to my cost when I bought some speakers at a bargain price that I later found were hard to drive to decent volumes without sucking half the electric grid into my home to power them. (They were 86 dB and 8 ohms if anyone's interested.) Some people might say lower sensitivity and higher impedance equates to better sound quality and a more faithful sound reproduction (you hear the sound track/music as it was meant to be rather than how your telly/music system processes it) in case you were wondering why people bother with them.

Most earphones/earbuds for portable use will have higher sensitivities and lower impedance so they require less power from whichever portable electronics device you have with you so the battery lasts longer but having overly sensitive phones may not be the best recipe for producing good sound quality.

I don't think you mentioned the type of headphones you got but I suspect they are the large over the ear type, "cans" as they call them. These are traditionally designed to be used at home with the idea they'd be connected to a high power amplifier of some sort (your stereo system for example). Consequently, they're typically engineered with a higher impedance as the voltage used will be much higher on your home stereo than it would be on your portable PS Vita/iPhone/whatnot. This means, if their sensitivity isn't boosted there power output (the volume level) will be less and depending on the headphones, you may find you get weaker volume output and lower levels of sound especially from portable devices as we've already seen.

Whilst over the ear headphones certainly offer far better sound quality, depending on their design, some models can be harder to drive. This means you need a more powerful amplifier and I think, as I am no expert, most people will recommend you use a portable headphone amplifier. That Fiio one I've linked to is really tiny and you don't need to worry about charging or swapping out batteries as it'll power from any USB connection. There are many more on the market and depending on how serious you are about sound quality and how much you wanna investigate, you could spend hundreds or thousands on just an amplifier alone or just do what I did and get a cheap one for £20.

If you want to look for something else, you could try searching at Trusted Reviews or some such or maybe someone much smarter and better informed than me will happen by and put you right.

Edited by deleted (Thu 23-Feb-12 00:08:30)

Thanks for the tip Spook matey

The set i got are called Beats just like the ones i was talking about and they are really made for the Iphone/Ipad by Monster and endorsed by Dr Dre.

And i tell you now they sound awesome on my iphone but not so good on the Vita,there is enough volume but i want it even louder.

Dont think i need anymore to be honest but i will check out your links tomorrow and thanks in advance for all your writing.................I fell asleep half way through Only Kidding

Haha. Cheeky fugger. Nite nite then princess. Sleep tight! Don't let the boring techies um, bite.

Yeah, I've known about the Beats Dr Dre things. I think they're meant to be one of the very few celebrity product endorsements that are actually half way decent. Just buy a portable headphone amp if you want more sound ya 'nana. It's not hard!

I quite like NWA actually. Used to listen to them when I was a kid. Dr Dre was one of my faves. See how cool I am? I'm a wigga wiv attitude.

Edited by deleted (Thu 23-Feb-12 02:53:24)

Straight out of Compton..........

I two used to have all the Cds many years back but as far as rap goes i only like Eminem and sort of got bored with that type of music.

That's the one! Straight outta Compton was the first CD I ever bought in 1989 I think. I was a sprightly 16 years of age.

Sweet sixteen and bought my first proper hifi, which I've still got all these years later and it's finally going in the bin as I've not used it in the last 12 years or so since I got a computer. It has tape players and even a record player!

I have very little vinyl but I'm going to miss my (probably quite rare) special mix De La Soul thing. The bass on that was unbelievably good.

The only other NWA album I had was one on vinyl, the one before Straight outta Compton with Panic Zone on it. Loved that track and wasn't too fussed about the rest of the album. Compton was a brilliant album. I feel sorry for my mum though - couldn't have been a good day for her when I bought that album!

The Beats are good headphones but I think they are a little overpriced for what they are simply because they are endorsed by Dr Dre. I use KRK 8400's but they are for music production so they drain all the colour and warmth from the sound rather than adding to it like regular headphones to give you a true representation of the music. If I was to buy some normal headphones just for listening to tunes I would probably get some Sennheiser's or something.

Do you listen to much House music T2D? If you like Trance you might like quite a lot of House, particularly producers like Hardwell as it's not too dissimilar, you should check him out at some point

Love Orkidea and Above and Beyond and everything to do with Anjunabeats to be honest,Solarstone are another of my favourites along with to many to mention on here in the small amount of time i have.

Actually in the market for a new surround system since are Kef one has literally died after 5 years,went to a Bose store in Bicester today and went in to a demonstration booth and listened to the Bose Videowave system.


Awesome sound and i said to the guy were have you hidden all the speakers as the sound seems to come from every direction.

And then he told me that all that sound came from the 46 inch lcd television with 16 bose speakers in the back.

Did not really want a new Television but i have to say the sound of this was awesome and the ease of use with limited cables was also a added plus.

No the cruncher..................£4000 the price of a small car literally .

So we bought 2 one for the living room and one for the bedroom.............[im Kidding]

Edited by time2die (Mon 27-Feb-12 17:22:59)