After I mentioned that I was no longer happy with my Dr Dre Beats Studio headphones in a recent blog post, The Coding Zone, a mysterious package arrived from Amazon. It was a pair of pristine Sennheiser HD 650 headphones; a kickass gift from my friend Noah Kagan of AppSumo. Thanks Noah!

I'll expand on this later but I think it's not that the Beats are horrible headphones -- I once reviewed and loved them -- but that my taste in music has changed in the last 2 years and I now prefer a flat sound rather than overly emphasized bass. In other words, I like listening to my music now, not only feeling it, which is the bread and butter of those battery-powered bass monsters.

I have only had the Sennheisers for a few days, and it supposedly takes anywhere from 40 to 200 hours to properly break them in (high-end headphones require some time for the cones to loosen up. A properly broken-in pair of headphones is described as having 'warm' and 'clean' sound), but I am pretty close to being blown away. It's my first pair of open air, reference headphones so I have a lot to learn. I just ordered a USB DAC/headphone amp and these are 300 ohm headphones that require a bit more power than my MacBook Air wants to pump out. They work just fine with the Air, of course, but max volume definitely lacks a punch. After a bit of searching I ordered the ~$70 Fiio E10. The E10 also has a better DAC than my laptop so that should help clean up the sound.

More on what these headphones are capable of after I break them in and the Fiio arrives!

Thoughts? What's your headphone situation like?

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