I tested it, and Spotify's EQ causes comically bad clipping at max level.

Critical listening is a learned skill, not some inborn genetic talent. I think anyone with healthy hearing should be able to tell the difference between good and bad if they take the time to learn to what to listen for, meaning anyone who can't simply needs to put in some effort. Does instrument X sound louder than instrument Y in this track, or are they equally loud? is hardly Kaballist esoterica.

I have no regrets about spending money on stuff that I use for hours on most days.

Can't give input on old vs. new, but I will warn that the protective grille is more delicate than you might expect, being paper-like. It's not a problem most of the time, but you need to be very careful with using the wire loop end of a hearing aid cleaner to scrape out debris, as poking the grille with it is likely to end with a punctured filter and a $200 fee for a 10-cent part replacement if your unit isn't covered under warranty.

Not sure whether their new cable is different, but the case isn't an issue if you switch to a flexible third-party cable without memory wire. I use a 2-pin from DUNU, although I'm uncertain whether that model's still being sold.

So Raycon's grift is ordering cheapo, low-quality, white-label buds from China with their logo slapped on, then using the power of YouTube marketing to charge people who aren't aware of this a huge mark-up. In general, if someone is trying to sell a physical product to you over YouTube ads, you're best off saying no.

For your first question, I wrote up a short test designed to make relative comparisons of headphones/IEMs as simple as possible, based on my own testing process derived from my listening experiences with a variety of gear. The BTR5 should be transparent with the ZS10, meaning it shouldn't audibly alter how the music sounds, and the difference between Amazon Music's V0 variable-bitrate MP3 and lossless FLAC isn't something I'd worry about unless you're an extreme stickler who can't live without flawless cymbal timbre at all times.

For your second, I'd say diminishing returns start hitting very hard at $250 for IEMs (Moondrop B2: Dusk) and $500 for headphones (Hifiman Edition XS, used Focal Elex, etc.). That said, chi-fi is still spiraling down in a pricing race to the bottom, which will probably keep on raising the quality-to-price ratio in the future.

The AI knows the truth: planars = more like plainers, rebadged white-label Alibaba products = real neutral hi-fi endgame

The first thing you should try is checking whether any audio "enhancements" are turned on in your audio settings and turn them off if possible. Your monitor might have such settings included, Windows has a setting to turn its enhancements off, and your PC maker might have bundled enhancement software along with the audio drivers.

Apple's USB-C/3.5mm adapter is the cheapest way to diagnose whether the problem is coming from the headphone end or the DAC end. Make sure to buy from the Apple store to avoid counterfeits, get a USB-C/USB-A adapter if you need one, and make sure to configure it to 24-bit in OS settings. It might sound quiet if you buy an EU model due to regulations, but you should at least be able to tell whether it still sounds off.

If it's the headphone end, the most likely culprits for a headphone problem would be either 1) that your headphone sounds wrong naturally and the previous output was changing the sound in a way that made it sound better or 2) that the earpads went flat and you only just started noticing. If your problem is boomy bass, my guess would be that your outputs have really high output impedance, as flattening pads on closed-backs usually rolls off bass. Beyer treble tends to smooth out and sound less sharp as the pads flatten, though, so I can't make 100% guarantees; if Beyer included another pair of pads, I'd suggest swapping to verify.

For the first, try installing Equalizer APO + Peace GUI (assuming you're on Windows) and using one of Oratory1990's EQ presets. For the second, see which pads Beyer intended for use with the 177X and look for a new pair. Aftermarket pads will change the sound, for better or for worse, so it's best not to skimp. I'd only recommend the first solution in your current case, but the second might be advisable if you have other issues in the future.

There's been a rising trend of new audiophiles who get all their information from bite-sized YouTube videos and thus don't know any of the exceptions to the basic rules.

IIRC, Andromeda bass drops by something ridiculous like 2 dB per ohm of impedance added. It's been documented and graphed, CA themselves recommend an IEMatch, and big-brain KB tuned at least the original while listening out of a Sony DAP with 1.5 ohm OI. It's nothing you can't simulate with a voltage divider like an IEMatch, EarBuddy, or UE Buffer Jack, though, so the $300 cables are still pretty pointless.

For $200, I'd hand them a secondhand Dusk or some other IEM instead. For $0, I'd just tell them to try oratory1990 EQ.

For the weebshit-tolerant, I use these test tracks among others to dissect a transducer's sound characteristics. I don't know whether I'd call the experience mind-blowing or life-changing, but I find it handy for separating the good from the meh.

Integrated audio quality can be a crapshoot, but being blown away by a gaming headset just because you switched to a transparent DAC does make me think placebo might be involved.

Phantom improvements in audio quality resulting from expectation/confirmation bias are embarrassingly rampant in audiophile land, and no one is fully immune. Unless you put in the time to do your critical listening reps, you will struggle to distinguish between real and imagined differences in sound quality, and you will still have to actively concentrate to discover them if you do. When I started out, it took me 15 minutes of A/B testing just to realize that S and T vocal consonants were completely inaudible on a pair of $5 chi-fi shitbuds.

My advice for people new to this stuff would be not to buy anything more expensive than the basics (e.g. the Apple dongle) if you don't understand the underlying principles behind how they work. (Reading Head-Fi reviews and manufacturer marketing copy doesn't count)

The old blog of NwAvGuy, the designer of the classic O2 amp, has a lot of info about the DAC/amp side:

https://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/headphone-amp-impedance.html
https://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/headphone-impedance-explained.html
http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/gain-and-headphone-ampsdacs.html
http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/09/noise-dynamic-range.html

Crinacle, the final boss of IEM reviewers, has written his own set of articles on the transducer side on the "Important Articles" section of his website:

https://crinacle.com/

Precogvision, the midgame boss, also made an intro video with accompanying article:

https://youtu.be/jQrKDDBDJII
https://headphones.com/blogs/buying-guides/everything-i-wish-i-knew-before-getting-into-audio

Oratory1990 is this sub's resident person who gets paid to do this stuff, and you can find info and ask questions on his own sub, /r/oratory1990.

If you want to go full nerd, you can pick up Floyd Toole's Audio Reproduction, but the content there mostly relates to loudspeaker acoustics.

The Sonion EST and its timbral consequences have been a disaster for the human race

I've had one go bad and screw up the sound before. There's no ESD protection apart from the plastic casing, so the DAC can potentially accumulate damage in an audible way. The difference between it and the replacement I got was night and day.

Frequency response, as a physical property of a headphone or IEM, dictates what you will hear (barring deliberately added DSP or exceptionally poorly designed edge cases). That doesn't mean that graphed measurements of said frequency response will necessarily tell it to you. The two are different things, which is the source of much confusion.

The tracks I most use to tell apart good headphones from the not-so-good:

• Night Club Junkie by YUC'e. The percussion notes starting at 1:14 cover the entire treble range at once and reveal instantly if there are any detail-killing peaks or holes. Makes a nice, crisp, even TSK! sound on well-calibrated speakers and top-end gear, but the consonants increasingly become underemphasized (TsK!) or outright disappear (TK! or K!) as you go down in sound quality.

• Kiseki Musubi by Hololive. The passage at 2:53 features fast tempo, a buttload of instruments covering the entire audible range from 200 Hz up, and vocals to potentially mask it all. Notes are crisp and clearly separated/audible on the upper end of mid-fi, while they're squished together, blend into each other, are drowned out by the vocals, and/or sound like mush on anything below.

The location and magnitude of that peak can potentially change each time you insert your IEMs, as well as over time while worn if they start slipping out due to ear canal movements, sweat, or wax. What sounds right to you now after EQ might sound off tomorrow or even 2 hours later. Also, good gear is generally tuned with that resonance in mind, which can cause simply chopping off parts of that peak without making other changes to compensate to throw off the treble balance and hurt timbre or imaging.

If you're not sure what you're doing, unless there's either some nasty vocal sibilance (harsh S and T consonants) or an unpleasant piercing or metallic quality to percussion instruments like snares or cymbals that makes them painful to listen to, it would be best to leave that peak alone.

Even if so, I'd suggest trying out different ear tips first to change the depth the IEMs tend to end up seated at in your canals, although do be warned that nozzle size will lead some tips to be incompatible with your IEMs. Foam or Ostry tuning tips (often listed as "turning tips") also used to be commonly recommended for attenuating excess upper treble on chi-fi.

>12 kHz can change a lot depending on how you wear headphones, and YouTube has a lower high-frequency cutoff that could reduce the impact that has on the sound. Try putting the XS on differently, maybe angling it forwards or backwards.

e: Wearing glasses or having long hair could also potentially roll off the low end and exacerbate any shoutiness, so watch for that. Also, make sure you turn off EQ before trying anything so it doesn't influence the sound.

Now you're learning that there's more to technicalities than general tonality and that the relationship between FR and sound is very complicated. Keep on doing that.

I don't really care. The Crinacle dictionary has been perfectly adequate for judging and unambiguously describing the sound of virtually everything I've listened to, and I can correlate the terms both with what I hear in my test tracks and with FR elements such as pattern/magnitude of treble notches, upper treble downslope, and 5-8/10-16 kHz treble ratio.

Anyway, this post is about the reductionist big brains who constantly chant Harman curve as a thought-terminating cliché, and critically examining the terms that audiophiles use to describe sound isn't going to help with them at all.

Subs have their own issues involving group delay, which can easily exceed audible thresholds.

Bloated bass with notes that lack crispness and bleed into each other is something pretty much anyone who's listened to the crappy stuff should have heard before. It's hardly subtle.

Excess mid-/upper bass is part of what causes it, but a lot of it's related to subtle issues with treble presentation that are hard to point out on a graph, especially if you don't know what you're looking for. "Slow bass" is handy shorthand for all that.

This is basically how I EQ the Variations to give it faster transients: https://i.imgur.com/E2tHn2C.jpg

The main problem with these EST tribrids that gives them their wispy treble character and slightly smeared transients is that the upper treble rise/fall past 10 kHz isn't properly present. If you listen to cymbals on them, you can easily hear that the shimmer lasts for too long and starts bleeding into other cymbal strikes because of that treble overextension. The slight dip at 10 kHz gives a bit of extra depth (and by extension, better layering), with the 5 kHz notch being necessary to make sure the imaging remains coherent.

Browsing the /r/headphones front page every day doesn't count as paying attention. Crinacle and Precogvision have posted detailed articles on how they perceive and evaluate technicalities.

Communicating ideas by language effectively depends on everyone involved possessing a common baseline of experiences, particularly anything involving the senses.

Without that, you're stuck wrapping everything up in abstractions such as PRTF accuracy that don't entirely correspond 1:1 to what's actually going on (What do you mean, this IEM has a deep-sounding stage? Doesn't it bypass the pinna entirely?), and there's only so much you can do to explain to someone who's never seen before why, say, painting all of their walls hot pink is a bad idea.

Clearly, more people need to continue this pattern of dropping a letter and changing a vowel. If someone's willing to be Anacle, we can finally have Uncle gushing about the cavernous depth he experienced of the Anole's soundstage.

You're careful with ear tip selection when writing your IEM impressions, yes? Higher-end IEMs in particular tend to incorporate the ear canal resonance into the tuning and so depend on being listened to at a specific insertion depth to maintain a coherent presentation, and I've seen some impressions posted by others who most likely weren't mindful enough of that. Headphones like the HD800S that try to model loudspeaker/ear acoustic interaction can also sound like blobby messes if you don't take care to find a sweet spot relative to your ears to position them at.

My advice would honestly be to avoid making a video like this if you feel the need to crowdsource advice from Reddit. You should either be recording your own thoughts or citing research you've found on your own for the bulk of an audio guide for beginners.

For reference, this (with accompanying video here) is an example beginner's intro written by someone with knowledge and experience. What you absolutely don't want to do is make a video that's just a worse version of this with bad advice and misinformation randomly sprinkled in from Internet randos like me.