BF2S Forums Headphone advice

Those Q701s are exactly the same as K702s, save for a fancy Q on the side. Save the cash and go for the K702s instead, if you look at those phones seriously. The only difference between those two and the K701 is color scheme and a detachable cable.

I have the 702s, and have for a year and a half or so, and I've got mixed feelings about them. Right out of the box, they sounded fantastic on instrumental (orchestral, jazz) and vocal tracks, and over this last summer I've fallen in love with them for electronic/synthesized music. The first, and most common complaint you'll hear about them is that they're thin on bass. It's a true statement, they're not bass-cannons by a long shot, but the toned down bass will allow you to pick up on detailed mids and highs more easily, which these phones are fantastic at producing.

The other major complaint goes something like this: they will show you the imperfections in studio mastering. If a track has a lot of mid-freq instruments (think rock/punk songs), it will sound muddled and a tad unpleasant on the K702s. It doesn't sound bad, per-se, and I'm inclined to believe that the fault lies in the style of music and not a fault of the headphones. As I've read, however, it seems other headphones handle those sorts of tracks better, but I can't think of a specific set off the top of my head.

A note on amping: I got a noticeably better, but not world changing, sound after buying an external DAC/Amplifier combo instead of plugging the K702s directly in to an xFi soundcard. The addition of a dedicated amp made a very, very subtle change to high frequency response that took me many A/B/X comparisons to be sure. It's there, but not worth purchasing the standalone amp. Get yourself a decent desktop DAC/Amp combo for a couple hundred at most and you won't be disappointed by the ridiculous diminishing returns over cost in audio equipment.

Finally, you can't predict a headphone's sound based on its spec sheet; headphones just don't work like that. There are too many unquantifiable features like the shape of the housing, the shape of the driver, the materials of both, etc, that affect the sound in different ways. The best you can do is read a shit ton of reviews and try as many as you can with different types of tracks and buy the one you like best. If you can't do that, buy from a store with a reasonable return policy because you can always try a set, return it, try another, and so on.

As a last note: I can perfectly understand anyone with experience in high end headphone audio disagreeing with any of the points I made about the 702s. This is just my experience with one set of cans, one DAC and two different amps. Again, the best you can do is read a lot of material from a lot of different people to get an idea of the setup you want so you can hear the sound you want.