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Old 12-29-2012, 11:09 AM   #167 (permalink)
The Bullet
Music Addict
 
Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 454
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I probably posted in here before, but my headphones have changed since, so I return.


As I said before, I use to listen to Bose OE1s, which I thought were really good and detailed for being as convieniently small and lightweight as they were. The drawbacks were that they had way too much bass (even if the bass itself was superior), and the chord was ultra-short, even if you could walk into any Bose store and get a longer one for $5. Wore them for a few years before they completely started to break down. Eventually, I completely wore out the woofers on them to the point where I would have my iPod EQ on "small speakers" and the bass would still be almost inaudible, which says something when they originally had way too much bass. Wasn't my only problem either. There would be constant cracking sounds in my music. Ocassionally, there would be slight delays between the two earpieces. You get the drift, but they still lasted me a long time.


A replacement was needed. I got a pair of Grado 325s for the holidays that sound awesome. In terms of pure sound, they are far superior to the Bose headphones. The soundstage is way bigger, to the point where I constantly have to question if I'm wearing headphones. The sound itself is much more detailed, especially in the higher end, so that even the softest sounds in my music can be sensed. The bass, which is nice and punchy, is mixed properly, not overly, and there's an extra emphasis on the far high-end/harmonics that's really exiting and makes acoustic music in particular really fun to listen to.

The one area where they fail is that they don't block out sound, period. The music could be playing from a speaker 50 feet away from you. I mean, I know they arn't noise-canceling headphones, but I feel like headphones as a whole are expected to block out noise to some degree. (Or, maybe not. I'm not the biggest audiophile on here, as you can all tell.) Either way, I shouldn't have to crank them to full volume to hear music in a car, especially when these headphones are already pretty loud, not to mention expensive. Laugh at me, but I'm planning to build paper-mache earmuffs over these things (or whatever materials I can get my hands on) and see if it works. If that doesn't, I might buy a special pair of cans for traveling.


And then there's these $50 things that two of my family members have, which I occasionally borrow to double-check mixing my own music to make sure the bass isn't overwhelming on a high-bass system, since my other resources are bass-light grados and bosephones with completely broken woofers.

Last edited by The Bullet; 12-29-2012 at 11:10 AM. Reason: Bose picture wasn't working.
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