If you’re listening to lossy or low res music services like Spotify, pandora or Apple, and/or Tidal at their lowest quality or the one where you can store the most songs in the least amount of space, headphones aren’t going to make a difference.

The better headphones you get, the more you get out of the music. But if there’s nothing to get out of the music because it’s been compressed out or so little data from low sample rates, there’s no point

But true. I really wish sometimes that I couldn’t hear the difference between lossy or CD or records or hi-res digital. It would save me a lot of money

Sennheiser 424

What is the y-axis?

This is just the atmos marketing gobbledygook. It’s digital signal processing to fool you into hearing things in space. I don’t think it’s good for existing stereo sources and, for new releases, it’s just like surround sound.

It’s entirely dependent on what the amp is driving and how it was designed

I can’t listen to any lossy format music for longer than a few minutes, but I’ve never had ringing. I just get irritated