Sorry to revive this old thread, but the kid in my soul wanted to blurb a bit about my own headphones, the
Sony MDR-F1…
The MDR-F1 is an interesting design which they call Full Open Air -- they do not “cup” your ears. Rather, the drivers are suspended in the middle of the air, directed perpendicular to your ear canals. The design helps to produce highly neutral and accurate sound since it does not alter the acoustic property of your auricles; basically, they are extreme-near-field loudspeakers so to speak. Maybe I am just ignorant, but I am unaware of similar designs from any other manufactures. They are solidly constructed in alloy yet extremely light weight (7 oz or so), and by far the most comfortable headphones I have ever tried; I can listen to music for hours and hours without any fatigue or auricular pain. In fact, I often forget that I am wearing them and start to walk away, only to be reminded by the pulled wire! I am not a big fan of Sony products in general, but this one is a gem; I can highly recommend them if any of you happen to be in the market of hi-fi headphones, assuming that you do not need isolation from ambient noise (these provide zero isolation).
By the way, I personally find that good headphones are quite useful tool to check how a given recording is “meant” to sound with respect to tonal balance. Obviously, headphones cannot provide the same soundstage reproduction as that from in-room loudspeakers. But I understand that carefully designed headphones are, as long as they are correctly worn, very flat in the frequency response (except that there are a small number of brands that seem to intentionally “color” the reproduced sound in order to differentiate themselves from others). Similarly, I think a good pair of headphones is useful as a reference for what you may consider as the “neutral” sound rendition.
Cheers!
