A community for discussion around all topics related to headphones and personal audio.
Cognitive behavioural therapy or talk to someone close to you for advice on impulsive behaviour.
No, I'm not joking. Impulse spending and rabbit holes are relatively common problems for ~~gearheads~~ anyone, and there are tons of free and paid resources out there to help you specifically with this situation. Better nip it in the bud before you discover some new gear fascination that are way more economically draining than just headphones, like cars and such.
Stop the FOMO π€―
As someone who has heard bother the Ananda, Arya and 6XX (along with many other headphones). The Arya is not an objective improvement over the Ananda, its just different (but not that different).
Above this price point you start hitting huge diminishing returns and esoteric tunings. Just stick with Ananda. If you don't like them, sell them and get something else. Owning the Ananda and Arya is like owning two identical cars with slightly different trims.
Just have some self control and think, they are just headphones there are more important things to spend your money on. The 6XX and Ananda is a good combination of two very different sounding headphones to have and anything more expensive is either a sidegrade or a slight upgrade that you will never think is worth the money.
Reading these comments has been eyeopening. If one person tells you you're drunk, they might be wrong. When several tell you you're drunk? You're probably drunk.
Re-reading my post, I can kind of see this weird sense of 'but but there must be something better!' And as others have pointed out, the reason for doing any of this is to listen to the music we love.
The fact that this behaviour isn't limited to just headphones (my deep dives on technical outdoor clothing, eg) is clearly a sign I need to just STOP SHOPPING for a while.
I don't *need* all these things.
For context, I grew up in a well-off house, then we lost everything (long story), and I grew up basically actually hungry for a lot of my teens.
I'm now earning a significant amount as a published author on Amazon, and felt I finally have free capital to spend some money and finally enjoy things in life.
But I can see now that I'm going in the wrong direction with this. I'm trying to patch up and heal all that stuff from years ago with stuff. If I accumulate enough stuff it will shore me up emotionally. Convince me that I've 'made it' or something.
OK, I'll stop now. This isn't really what this sub is for, but sincerely thank you to everyone for helping me figure some stuff out.
If you have an addictive personality and are prone to FoMo, you should handle that first. That's just good life advice. If it's bad, talk to a therapist.
To be very pragmatic, I think that if you slap a set of ZMF suede upgrade pads on your 6XX, and maybe lift the bass and treble a little bit with EQ, you have yourself covered pretty well. You could try the Anandas, but I recommend sending them back when you've tried them and enjoy what you already have. Save the money for something substantially different. Hifiman headphones break more often than they should, so those are a dodgy thing to spend money on regardless.
I thin the next step in your "journey" should be to learn to EQ and read and interpret data. This is the way to get a better audio experience and make more educated purchases in the future.
Skip budget-fi, mid-fi and buy an end game headphone and stop it. From that point, you will be more serious because you will lose a lot if you sell them.
At some point it will stop sounding better but all of this depends on your own tastes.
Please post your credit card information so that we do an intervention by sucking your bank accounts completely dry in order to stop your purchasing compulsions. It is either this or we will have to perform very painful electroshock therapy. Your choice.
Going to audio shop cures my addiction to purchase the expensive one.
But gave me another disease of purchasing cheaper stuff instead.
"oh wow, this is surprisingly good"
Stop being a consumer whore. You are wasting money on things that arenβt improving your life. You are chasing the feeling of getting something new to fill a void you have In your life. You posted here to get confirmation that itβs ok, Iβm suggesting to log off, return and sell what you can and see a therapist.
This is a deeper problem than just headphones man
Convince yourself to at least take a 6 month break. Donβt watch videos or read this and any other audiophile sub. Stay away from the entire subject, and enjoy the gear you have.
Come back after those 6 months and ask yourself if you still feel the same way.
I am the same.
I caught myself ordering the focal utopia 2022 when I had already ordered the HD660S2 just a week before... and they hadn't even arrived yet...
find new music instead of new gear. you can keep searching and digging for free instead of looking for the next thing to buy
The validity of my following statement is unproven and may require criticism as I don't have access to various headphones and equalizers.
I imagine someone with OCD could get a headphone with an easily manipulatable frequency response when EQ is applied to emulate any other headphones they want with the exception of the fixed soundstage, transient response, imaging, detail retrieval and perhaps THD, though again, I don't have enough information to confirm the validity of this idea and perhaps I could create a post about this later, but if my statement is valid, I presume based on my current limited headphone knowledge that an HD800 series headphone or a Stax electrostatic (like the Stax SR-L300 + Topping EHA5 for 750$) + EQ and speaker emulation software would be the ultimate performance to cost ratio, they both have a good transient response, detail retrieval, THD level, and an easily manipulatable frequency response curve when EQ is applied, and they can both get excellent soundstage performance when using speaker emulation.
I prefer Anandas to Aryas (not considering the new Organic etc variations). Enjoy them for at least 6 months before getting anything new and try to go somewhere to test stuff. That's the best cure for wanting to buy everything when you know how small the differences can be.
That said I have +50 headphones up to LCD-5 so good luck xD