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people found this helpful, as of 2023
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out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★★
The Truth.
I have owned these headphones for 6 months. I'm semi-audiophiliac. They've generally been my go to for listening to music. I'm only writing this review because I unlocked the truth i'd been missing out on for 6 months. That's my resume.
Here are my thoughts on why you should choose these over budget or more expensive headphones. ( & yes, you should, but read on.)
These are great no matter what you plug them into. I'll give them that. You will be generally impressed if you plug them into your iphone, android, mac, etc.. They're pretty darned good. The volume is perfect, the highs are there but tame enough while keeping truth. You won't blow your eardrum tweeter, but the highs are definitely there and serviceable to truthiness of the treble band. The bass is true bass. It's not overly exaggerated; these WILL NOT give you an ear massage, it will however give you pretty close to exact bass. That's actually a fantastic thing, learning to appreciate bass rather than it treating your ears as a trampoline is definitely an enlightenment.
I mainly use these with Spotify for my music diet. I'm a premium subscriber which gives me the rights to their high quality streams. These WILL expose bad recordings. Certain punk rock will not sound good as high quality electronic or high end produced modern pop. The ATH-M50x's keep the recording quality obvious, but I would go on to say that they're pretty forgiving at the same time. If you picked up a pair of AT's higher priced cans, you'd probably expose even more, and is that worth it? Ehhhh it's up to you, but these are the sweet spot for the price if you're really looking to find flaws in recording, ya geek.
The biggest take away for these cans is this: while plugging them into anything will get you great audio, what they're plugged into matters.
They will expose the the truth of the audio output of the device they're plugged into. An Iphone won't sound as good as plugged into a macbook pro which won't sound as good as a pc with a good sound card. I'd been running these on my dell monitors headphone jack, which runs into an nvidia 980ti GPU, which serves up audio through the mentioned audio jack. It was okay. Today I pulled out the long 3.5mm male to 2.5mm male (the connection on the ATH-M50's is 2.5mm fyi) that came with these and decided to plug these into my gaming pc that has a decent realtek soundcard...
Oh my lord panty dropping audio blissfulness, the gods have spoken, how the hell did I miss this, hot damn.
It awoke the beast. I cannot say more until you try these in a preamp (coworkers recommended) or something that pumps out decent audio.
These are a catalyst, you just need the correct crucible to handle it. You pair these babies with the correct output mechanism, and it will be one of the best 100$ range headphones you'll have ever have bought. Sky's the limit, just feed them correctly.
Since owning these, I've bought other Audio-Technica audio and recording devices. Have a set of their ATH-CKS55XBT blue tooth headphones : Audio-Technica SOLID BASS Bluetooth wireless stereo headset ATH-CKS55XBT
As well as the AT2020 usb microphone:
Audio-Technica AT2020USB PLUS Cardioid Condenser USB Microphone
It helps to live 3 miles from their main headquarters and warehouse, but my first venture with AT were these headphones bought from Amazon, and I haven't looked back. These can's established brand loyalty in me to AT. They are The Truth.
December 2016 · Electronics · verified purchase