You can score a very serviceable set of open-back over-ear headphones for less than half the price you’d pay for the fashionable trendy $300ish ANC/BT over-ears and get better sound too! As of the time of writing, the new condition open-back over-ear wired Sennheiser HD 599 is on sale for $130 with free US shipping at Amazon by Amazon actual with up to two pairs per customer at the sale price.
This is the black color scheme [not the Ivory] that is marked as an “Amazon Exclusive”. It comes with a 2-year warranty, replaceable earpads, and thank the Old Gods and The New [and R’hllor too of course ~ even though it does not have any red on it] it has detachable cables and it comes with two of them…
They average (both color schemes grouped together) 4.6 out of 5 based on 1360+ customer ratings and they have about 10% of that in peer-answered questions. When you drill down on the customer reviews by option, 185 of the 434 reviews are for the black option. Unfortunately it does not automatically calculate the rating when you select the filters/sub-options, so short of going through the 185 customer reviews manually to average them…
The HD599 is the headliner of the new HD-5?? [I can’t put the standard “X” in there because now there’s the Massdrop HD-?XX partnership] that starts with the HD559, then the HD 579, and in-between these two open-back models, there’s also the HD 569 closed-back. These were introduced at IFA 2016, that’s 3.5 years ago as of the time of writing.
PS: if you are not familiar, in recent months Amazon has switched to (sometimes) showing customer rating scores instead of customer reviews. The ratings include the customer reviews but also anyone who gives the product a 1-5 star rating without actually writing a customer review. It’s obviously easier to rate than to review. Even the customarily idiotic one-sentence useless customer review you see on Amazon is “harder” to write than just click or touch a 1-to-5 star rating 🙂 But I’m digressing…
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