Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcades
Close to Audiophile quality good enough. yeah i would love to get lost in the music and ignore the outside world. That's why I pointed to the two headphones I listed. They seem small enough I can put in my car and from what I can tell the Bose as a carjack ability that I can recharge in my car. I don't know if the Sony has that or not.
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Well no wireless headphone will be close audiophile quality, so FYI there. If you want better mobile sound with a wireless headphone when wired, then you can get an external DAC or DAC/amp to plug into your phone like the Dragon Flys, Chord Mojo, iDSD nano black label, etc. That also gives you the ability to buy some high quality wired headphones and drive them from your phone.
For wireless noise cancelling headphones you've got the usual suspects which I'd rank this way:
* Sony WH-1000XM2
* B&O Beoplay H9i
* Bowers & wilkins PX
* Bose QC 35 2
* V-moda crossfades
* Sennheiser Momentum
The top 3 will all provide excellent sound, the Bose are best at noise cancelling.
What's not on this list is my beloved B&W P7s - for me these are the best sounding wireless on market, but they're hard to find now. They're not noise cancelling, but they're quite isolating and oh lord are they great for EDM, Deep House, and anything with a beat. You WILL PARTY. If I air travel, I bring the P7s. I'm considering getting the H9i just for wireless variety - the rest just didn't have a sound profile that appealed to me and I find noise cancelling to be mostly useless - I'd much rather have (my version) great sound.
I would say those top 3 are all great sound but more "neutral" whereas I find Bose to flat. For me the Bose were so bad I put them back in the box in under 2 minutes and that might not be fair, but the P7s ruined me. They are not neutral, but way "warm" with a suppressed treble. They not bass heavy crap like beats, but more bass heavy awesome - super clean. They are extremely forgiving and will make any recording sound great. When I go from the P7s to just about any other low-fi headphone including any on this list I almost cry. Audiophile quality wireds like the Senn hd600/50/60s or Massdrop's Fostex Th-x00 will show you the shortcomings of the P7s, with the THx00 provider a similar profile but much more resolving (those all require decent DACs and Amps)
The P7s are directly responsible for me spending thousands on mid-fi audio gear. Later on this year I'm probably going to buy one of Zach's hand-made ZMF Atticus headphones ... I'm kinda waiting for him to bring back cocobolo wood, but I'll take paduk or purple heart.
Anyway, a few other notes:
Hi-Res Music
As defined as anything higher than CD quality (16/44), is mostly worthless unless you've got $15,000 of headphone gear and 5+ years of analytical listening experience. That said, even the best paid spotify / google play streams are 4x+ crappier than CD quality and you can definitely hear it with decent headphones. Basically if you're under CD quality you'll be missing an emotional component to the music which you can tell once you start going back and forth. The emotional piece, once you realize it, becomes addictive (see $$$ above). Personally I used Tidal Hi-Fi which steams at CD and higher, and I shockingly really like Tidal. I don't like Jay-Z or any of the marketing bullshit around the company - it's a bad brand for me ... but I really like the app, the Mac app, etc and the quality can't be beat so ... I'm in on Tidal and would definitely recommend it. On a PC it allows you skip your PC's shitty DAC and send a "bit perfect" stream down USB directly to an external DAC. nice!
Bluetooth Encoding
They matter. AptX (AptX-HD isn't needed), or Sony's LDAC are good, but your device needs to support them as do the headphones. Personally I can hear a difference between aac, AptX, and SBC and have an almost 100% blind test success rate. For me there's a difference. with AptXHD I wasn't picking it any better than random chance.
Sorry you asked?