Headphone Heights

Welcome to Headphone Heights, the place for all your ear bud discussion

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RE: First Pair of headphones advice

Posted by PAR on April 18, 2020 at 05:33:24:
Once you have decided if you want closed or open back headphones, on ear, over ear or in ear, there are two main considerations:

1. Ensure that the headphones re comfortable to wear. If not I guarantee that after your initial interest you will put them aside more or less permanently to gather dust. People have different sized heads and ears so it is impossible to offer any broad recommendation regarding this criterion.

2. Ensure that your amplifier's headphone socket will drive them. Unfortunately many (most ?) headphone manufacturers are not good at providing proper specifications like impedance and sensitivity. I had a little difficulty in tracing the specifications of your headphone socket and , when found, in interpreting them. I think Yamaha specifies output as 470mV into 470 ohms. The other interpretation of their spec is that the socket has an output impedance of 470ohm which would make matching to a headphone difficult. I would just try to avoid cans with unusually high or low impedances.

Buying headphones strikes me as a difficult purchase full of risk to the purchaser. Few stores offer demonstrations yet you will have no idea what a given headphone sounds like, or even if it will work satisfactorily with your equipment, without trying. Basically you need to be able to return if not liked or just be prepared to write off the cost.

Were times different I would recommend attending a show like CanJam to get a feel of what is available but unfortunately that is not possible at this point in time.

Sorry I cannot just say "buy a pair of X".