I know two people who have this pair:

-  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.

I'm on Beyerdynamic DT770's and love them.  Recently borrowed a pair of T5p's where are also amazing (until I give them back in March!).  Everything is crystal clear on both pairs and they will sit for 7 hours at a time on my head before I get hungry and realize I've spent that long in the K-hole.  The T5s have a little more magic in the way they handle the low end (so clean) but the 770's are stll very solid and hardly leak a thing (which is great for tracking... in the recording sense!).  Both are flat-ish as far as I'm aware; and certainly are fine for mixing and composition.

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.

Hmm interesting. The Beyerdynamic's seem to look super comfy! And really nice response too. Do you know what is suppose to be the major difference between the 880 and 770? The graphs I'm looking at seem to indicate that the 880 is a hair better- for whatever graphs are worth.  I know the 990s are open ear, but for the extra annoyance of other's hearing me, it doesn't seem to get much benefit.

*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.

Last edited by Trash80 (January 8, 2012 4:49 am)

Grados sound pretty distinct though (i.e. not "flat", per se). You might not like the sound balance which some complain is too harsh in the high-end, although I own a pair of Alessandro MS-Pro's and they really are just perfect imo. Additionally they fit very differently to a lot of other headphones and you might end up wanting to change or modify the pads for extended periods of listening.

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

I have a different (slightly lower end) pair of AKGs, the 240 MK II, they're good quality, but very slightly bassy, possibly to compensate for being semi-open? I dunno, but they are good.

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.

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.

Had my Beyerdynamic's on from 6pm - 2am... hardly noticed.... it certainly has comfortable covered :-)  Ears are a little warm though (mine are the closed model) but not enough for me to notice until I took em off.