Of course, my MS1's are still the best.

I have *very* sensitive hearing (possibly due to a combination of gender and an ear operation at age 7),  I don't know that I will ever use anything else.

On second thought, it's an awfully subjective issue you've raised here...

Trash don't get the Beyerdynamic's, they're low and high freq heavy, the dynamics aren't right. The Sennheisers are closer what you want (which would ideally be some high end *NS-10s* :):) barf not, )But really the AKGs will fall apart on you in two years.

The 880s dont seem too bad though, comparing the freq responses. It's the open ear I'm sure that gives it the less weird bassyness.
I'm still thinking about which.

Right. Of course I wasn't planning on mastering only with them, just for composition so I don't irritate others around me. I have some decent cheap headphones too, was just looking at more of a keep it flat  and comfortable solution. Food for thought though.

I gave up on headphones a long time ago, and use --insert flat active speaker-- for checking compression and eq, then use a cheapo yet indestructible pair of Philips SHP2500s, so cheap in fact you can get a second pair for the vocalist your recording, and they have a built in volume control on the cable, for general phoning.

There's one cool pair of headphones specifically for vocal recording though I started using, the EX-29 extreme isolation phones because they almost eliminate bleed through. The high frequency response is piss poor though. I think theres better headphones out there with similar isolation specs though.

also they were half off on amazon when i got them. now they're like $100 off. (http://www.amazon.com/Shure-SRH840-Prof … S2CB0E2L5G)

I see Sennheiser HD650s get a lot of mentions on other forums so they're probably worth auditioning too.

*edit oh wait, the 880 are open ear and the 770 is closed. wtf is up with the 990. hehe.

Thanks for the input so far everyone. Writing these all down for investigation.

One of the big factors I found is driving them correctly.  I use a Musical Fidelity X-Can Class A valve pre which I got off ebay for $120.  Needed new caps but it's been incredible.  Just plug the DMG / Atari straight in.  I also use it from the line out of my USB sound card and use it to boost the output from the Mac.  Nothing quite powers cans in the same way as a high end preamp.  It has a transparent pass-though too and some of them have dedicated zero latency DACs in them too.

I've also heard really good things about Grado headphones, for good sound/frequency response.  You might want to look into those as well.

-  http://audio-technica.com.au/products/pro-audio/m50/

They sound awesome. Though they're -apparently- best for Djing more so than composition, they're really comfy, they last ages, and have a good frequency response.