SniphzR

1 Yes, it is correct. Higher frequencies require more energy to travel through the air due to the short wavelength. Subwoofers require more energy because they use large drivers so have a more friction against the air than smaller mid and high drivers.
2 I can get some links and draw you a diagram but in the basic lamens terms thats kind of correct. Its also kind of wrong but I didnt want to over complicate the explanation. The fact is depending on wall height and thickness soundwaves at certain frequencies normally lower will just go over it. A standard fence will block a lot of high and mid but hardly any low. 
 
Your points
1 No shit sherlock, The "bass" needs a higher amount of power since low frequencies drivers are normally larger 10+ inches. The good amount of distance doesn't make much sense. Volume decrease is pretty standard until you start reaching major distance. which is why my example of a fog horn works, its not designed for the first mile of noise travel its like the 4th 5th mile where the low frequency is louder than the high. There's also something to do with the waves bouncing the low frequency as well but.
 
2 Thats true but only because of the plastic casing. If the speaker driver is bigger then 1/4 of the wavelength (i think off the top of my head) it will be directive. A standard 4 inch driver in a headphone would mean everything above 5kHz is directed towards the listener everything below is produced in omnidirectional, so everyone would hear that if it wasnt for the casing.
 
3 Nop theyre not tuned for hunting animals theyre tuned for human speech. Frequencies of human speech land perfectly in line with the sensitivity of the ear. The second part of that statement is correct. We do have a poorer hearing of lower frequencies.
 
 
 

https://dosits.org/science/movement/why-does-sound-get-weaker-as-it-travels/sound-absorption/
 
When you're on a train, the low frequency sounds blend into the background more easily.

Holy fuck, what is happening here? M50crap being recommended and other crap,  come on. It is a 400$ budget.
 
OP do you need closed headphones or are open headphones OK? 

Not exactly true, I've owned the AD2000 and it definitely has a nice controlled bass......I presently have the AD700X and wholehearted agree that bass is pretty weak, but the AD series has good and wide soundstage and imaging. If you have a chance, try the AD1000X and above, they do have much more present bass (compared to the AD900X and below). Seriously, female vocals on the AD2000 is to die for! I owned a number of higher end cans, and none has match the vocals (female) on the AD2000......kinda regretted selling it, but even I the treblehead here, just could not tolerate the hot treble on that can.

You necro'd a thread to post false info. Amazing

HD 650 kappa

"dying corpse". But a corpse is, by definition, already dead. 
 
Luckily it looks like your headphones have replaceable pads for both the ear cups and the headband. I'd suggest buying a new set and maybe washing the others. If the new ones start to smell, swap them out and wash them and keep cycling like that. 

Beyer DTs

He400i + Schiit stack v2/asgard 2 (if u dont need DAC)

My recommendation is to go with HE-400i & magni modi stack. Once you go ortho you never go back

G703 is brand new, its totally like g403, but with LIGHTSPEED wireless technology (which is idk what)

My experience is going to be going from B&O H5 and B&W P5 Wireless to my Audeze iSine 20s, but pretty much the precision, response, and separation of the instruments was spine-tingling. Listening to live recordings felt as though you were front row of the crowd and you could hear someone clap their hands 20 meters away all while you can hear the vibration of the strings from the bass guitar on stage. There just isn't any muddling of lows-mids-highs. 

I'll be honest, once you go planar you'll never go back. I would recommend auditioning them if you can so that you can find the pair you like best. All should be driven with an external amp/dac if you're planning on using a 3.5mm or 6.3mm jack. 
 
I have the iSine 20's and have auditioned the EL-8 and in typical Audeze fashion found the soundstage to be incredible (open back), tight punchy bass with plenty of depth and clarity, mids and highs are clear, well defined, and have a rich tonality without sounding metallic.
 
The EL-8's have the benefit of the Cipher cable to if you use an iPhone or iPad which means you won't need an external amp/dac. 
 
 

anything you do will only change it very minutely and you will only notice it if you listen back to back and memorize every sound. plus maybe your girl friends hearing just bad. when audiophiling only do it for yourself not other people since they have different preferences and ears 

let her only use them for a while and then let her use lesser headphones, that is probably the best way for her to notice, since we humans notice a bad thing more than a positive thing. It is also possible that she just have bad hearing, my parents can't hear a difference between a lot of my headphones.
 
Also where are you in the world?

The question is, do YOU hear a difference? If you are not buying the headphones for your girlfriend, who cares what she thinks of them.
 
It's certainly possible that your music is the limiting factor here. If you listen to modern, heavily compressed pop, there just isn't much in the way of detail to reveal with better headphones. Same goes for if you are using a compromised audio format, such as low quality mp3.

I dont know if they are still there but massdrop has that sennheiser headset for $120 which is a no brainer price

i would go with the dt 990 if i had a dac that could power them the flatter frequency response curve for me is important as it will sound clearer which is better for games than some mush bass headphones that drown out the important sounds like foot steps grenades or things of that nature. actually the hd 650's arnt too bad but their frequency responce is on the warmer bass side and if thats what you are into then they would work great. as for the other ones i havent tried them so i dont know.

You would need a Female RCA to male 3.5mm Y adapter. If you're splitting just one connection, you'd need a Female RCA to male 3.5mm adapter. You're better off buying it at a dollar store instead of trying to make one. They're really cheap and I'm sure you wouldn't need to spend more than $3-$4 for one.

So FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is just a container (or codec) for a digital music file, just as mp3, AAC and WAV are codecs. All it really determines is the quality of the stored file in relation to the original file. An example of this is if you buy a CD, we can then take this as a reference for any encodings we make. If i take the CD and encode it to a FLAC file and an mp3 file there will be differences. The FLAC file will, when decoded and played, produce a bit for bit identical output to the original CD, this is due to the lossless aspect of the codec. The mp3 file will, when decoded and played, produce an approximation of the original CD, it will not completely replicate the original file, and any lost data can not then be recovered, this is known as a lossy codec.
 
In relation to Tidal, the quality they brand as HiFi is a FLAC encoding of a 16bit 44.1kHz original. This is equal to what you get from a CD, so it is likely they get a encoding directly from the music label at the same stage they create the CD files.
 
The quality of any music produced and made available is wholly determined by the quality made available by the producers. From there, we can only use what they've given us and use lossless codecs to retain that information.

FLAC is lossless compressor / codec - it compresses the sound like ZIP or RAR or 7Zip, it's just smarter about it, specialized for audio.
MP3 and AAC are lossy compressors / codecs - they look at the audio and decide what your ears won't notice easily if it goes away, and remove some of that information to reduce the file size.
 
The pros of FLAC are : there's no quality loss, what you get is exactly what the artist wanted.
The downsides of FLAC  is that the file size is bigger compared to lossy codecs and the amount of data that has to be downloaded for each second of audio can vary a lot : a second of sound with silence or just some person speaking would compress much better and could use let's say 100 kbps , but the very next second where somebody would clap or maybe some drums start beating could take a lot more data, let's say 800 kbps
 
In comparison, when you're using codecs like MP3 or AAC you're basically configuring a bitrate - let's say 256 kbps vbr, meaning try to stay around 256 kbps give or take about 10% - and the audio codec will constantly look at the seconds of sound and decide what pieces you will notice less if they're missing or distorted, and throw those away to reach the desired 256 kbps.
 
Because you know the bitrate will be constantly around 256 kbps, indeed it's better for companies like Apple or Spotify to predict how much bandwidth to buy each month and how many computers they should have available for people to connect to. For example, they know a server with a 1000 mbps internet connection could in theory serve a 256kbps +/-10% aac stream  to around 950 * 1000 kbps / 300 kbps = 3150 people at the same time.
 
However, they're not using mp3 or aac only for this reason.
 
iTunes and other big stores of music used people with AAC  and MP4 - Apple originally used AAC not because it was the best but because it was one of the formats that allowed for easy implementation of DRM (anti piracy measures) ... and because the alternative back then MP3 was still suffering from the bad image it got from p2p file sharing lawsuits (kazaa and others).
 
People are so familiar with AAC and MP4 that a lot of them wouldn't understand what this FLAC is about (or for example Opus audio which is higher quality than mp3 or aac or ogg vorbis for example) so pretty much only the hip people, the tech knowledgeable people would know about FLAC and its benefits. Any store that wants to sell stuff now pretty much has to also offer AAC or some other popular format.
 
MP3 is now patent free unlike AAC, companies no longer have to pay license fees to compress music to MP3 legally.. but even so you won't see it used more often these days. For a company like Apple, the few millions of dollars they may pay in licensing fees for AAC are a drop in the ocean and worth paying because this whey they're not confusing their buyers by changing the format to MP3 and not paying a few % more in bandwidth costs (as you'd have to use 320kbps mp3 instead of 192-256kbps aac to retain quality)
Like I said, Opus audio is much better than all lossy codecs (aac, mp3, vorbis, ac3) but you won't see Apple move to it soon for the same reasons i explained above.
 
 
Tidal basically banked on the fact that their audience was/is teenagers and 20-40 years old people that will know about FLAC , but stores like iTunes also sell to much older people who only know about AAC
 
It wouldn't be that much of an extra cost for a store to allow downloads in FLAC or some other lossless format. It's basically 3-4 times the bandwidth for downloads.. which are rare, you download an album maybe 2-3 times after you bought it. 
 
Streaming, it's another story... because you can also have people who simply forget the stream running and fall asleep .. I know I sometimes leave Soma.fm playing in background while I read a book in bed and fall asleep waking 8-10 hours later with the stream still playing.  That's a lot of bandwidth I wasted for that radio.
 

Probably, thanks, 1 answered

Philips SHP9500 is outstanding in that budget as ive heard

Philips SHP9500 is outstanding in that budget as ive heard

Headphones:
AKG K701 AKG K612 Pro AKG K550 Audio-Technica ATH-AD900x Audio-Technica ATH-AD700x Audio-Technica ATH-AD500x Audio Technica ATH-MSR7 Beyerdynamic DT990 Beyerdynamic DT880 Beyerdynamic DT770 Philips SHP9500 Sennheiser HD598 Sennheiser HD558 Sennheiser HD518 Superlux HD668B + velour earpads from HiFiMAN Mics:
Antlion ModMic 5.0, 4.0 Massdrop MiniMic Neewer Clip on Mini Lapel Microphone Sony ECMCS3 V-MODA BoomPro Zalman ZM-Mic1 People are probably going to recommend HyperX Cloud (which is sonically the same as Cloud II and CloudX), but I do not recommend it because it has a small soundstage, inaccurate imaging and the fidelity sounds very muddy. A much better option for a similar or the same price is Superlux HD668B with replacement earpads of better quality and a ModMic. The headphones have a big soundstage, accurate imaging and good clarity and detail retrieval.
Open-back headphones have perforations/grills that allow sound to pass in and out, so outside noise can be easily heard and people around you can hear much of the sound coming from the headphones. The benefit to this is generally a big or huge soundstage.
Closed-back headphones have solid outer shells that largely isolate sound from passing in and out. These should be considered for gaming only if isolation is needed.
Other important properties for gaming are accurate imaging, good separation and high detail retrieval. Soundstage is how well distance to sound sources is portrayed. Imaging is the location of sound sources across the soundstage. Separation is filtering out individual sound sources from a range of sounds. Bass is good for immersion but diminishes detailing and awareness.
If you get headphones with a big soundstage, there's no difference to little difference in how three-dimensional the environment/space sounds like when comparing stereo to virtual surround sound. Due to compression, virtual surround sound degrades the fidelity and diminishes detailing and separation.