Some really good stuff there, thanks.

I've experienced some scope creep of late. I splurged on a used pair of SE846. The new ones are insanely expensive. This was risky as I've done it before and got counterfeits; it's typical for thugs to embezzle the headphones from a music store, sell the individual drivers online, then use all the stuff that comes with it combined with cheap shitty Chinese knockoffs so that your $1000 stolen headphones becomes an $1800 haul off of eBay.

These are genuine. Through an odd twist of events we had some 215s, some 535s and four different cables (and two different preamps) to play with and while I was expecting the 535s to be better than the 215s and the 846s to be not nearly better enough than the 535s to justify the $500 difference, I was shocked and annoyed to discover that thousand dollar headphones sound about a thousand dollars better than $100 headphones and about $950 better than $500 headphones. They're really good.

But now I can tell the difference between a 128k MP3 and a 320k MP3. And I can bloody well tell the difference between a 320k MP3 and FLAC. And oh yes, children, I can absolutely tell when you put an inexpensive DAC between the file and the driver.

And then you sit there going "are these good? Oh shit, these are good, OH CRAP NOW I HAVE TO LISTEN TO ALL MY MUSIC AGAIN"

It's weird. I've probably listened to Massive Attack's Risingson a few hundred times in my life, often on very expensive systems. It's one of my "ring it out" tracks. But I hear it differently now - the chords aren't the same because I heard them through ridiculous drivers right in my ear canals and now when I hear it I hear the chords as if they're different notes. The effect persists when I listen in the car, when I listen to my little bluetooth box, etc. The psychoacoustic expectations of the song have permanently shifted.

And now I have to download everything as FLAC again and seriously, begrudgingly consider fucking TIDAL because Google Play Music has been suckin' hard for a long time and isn't going to be getting any better and also, I hear how cheap it is now.

Anyway. The audiophile phuckheads have their magic playlists so here's a taste of the tracks that have been in heavy rotation because they're just so damn good.