Comment by userbinator
14 hours ago
The elephant in the room is "chi-fi". There's been a huge growth in small Chinese companies with unusual names making amazingly cheap, yet great-sounding over-ear headphones, IEMs, and earbuds within the past few years, and the vast majority of these are wired.
I’m by no means an audiophile and it had been years since I owned a pair of wired headphones, but I picked up a pair of Linsoul 7HZ x Crinacle Zero:2 (yes that is actually the name) IEMs after seeing some glowing reviews online and I was absolutely blown away by how they sounded despite costing only 240 SEK (around 25 USD). Back in the early 2010s when I was more interested in hi-fi audio you definitely couldn’t get as great sounding IEMs around this price.
How long does it take from placing your order to receiving the headphones?
It took about two weeks to ship to me in Sweden from China.
I still find it hard to justify buying Chi-Fi. My HD650 still has no competitor in terms of style and cost efficiency, I wish I could afford HD800 but they sound very different. My IE80 from 2012 is very outdated, but IEMs are technologically inferior, and even the Chinese ones are not cheap. So I just put a USB-C cable on it and use it occasionally.
think their target market is closer to the £20 segment than the £200 segment
Nah, here's an example, Hifiman's planar offerings range from 50 USD to 8000 USD.
Can you recommend some brands with good quality over-ear headphones?