Ask HN: What's your daily-driver headphone model?
I&#x27;ve switched across the board to wireless for the most part. I use a number of different headsets based on location, so here are my choices for various settings.<p>Work:<p>Bose QC35 -- sound quality is somewhat compromised but the NC and comfort levels are second to none. Bose customer service is also excellent, particularly if you buy (and therefore can return&#x2F;exchange) through a branded store.<p>Out and about:<p>Airpods, with foam covers. Without the covers, these were very convenient headphones that wouldn&#x27;t stay in my ears for the life of me and so sounded thin and leaked noise. Then I added old-school thin foam earbud covers; Amazon sells some that are donut-style with a hole that exposes the light sensors, and they still fit in the charger. They don&#x27;t compare to my audiophile headphones, but they sound &quot;pretty good&quot;--about on the same level as my SoundMagic E10s, maybe a little better. More importantly, now I actually will use headphones for 20-30 minutes at a time on walks, whereas before it was too much of a hassle to carry a fat case around, wedge them in my ears, etc.<p>Home, in living room:<p>MDR-1ABTs. I don&#x27;t actually like these as much as I should for what I paid for them. The pads are thin and hurt my ears. But they do connect to my Sony sound bar using their LDAC low-latency&#x2F;high-def protocol, so I use them for late night viewing.<p>Console:<p>Playstation Gold or Platinums. I have both. The Golds are more reliable about connecting to the dongle. The Platinums fit over my PSVR headset. Neither sounds great for anything but games, but they integrate tightly into the OS.<p>PC&#x2F;Mac:<p>SteelSeries Arctis 7. No blinkenlights, and they sound very good for pretty much everything. They&#x27;re comparable to my wired Sennheiser PC360s (basically a 55x&#x2F;59x with a mic) but even cheaper. That said, buy the add-on leatherette pads from Steelseries--they make a world of difference for isolation and sound quality. They shouldn&#x27;t sell these without those pads TBH.<p>Audiophil(ish):<p>Keeping in mind I like &quot;fun&quot; headphones and not monitors, I oscillate between Plantronics Backbeat Pro (one of the best sounding BT headphones I&#x27;ve heard with a phenomenal range and hellaciously cheap, but fugly and with round pads that don&#x27;t really fit anyone), V-Moda M100s (add the fat pads to these too for comfort and sound; they&#x27;ll last forever--built like a tank), and Master and Dynamic MH40s. (by far the nicest pair aesthetically with real leather pads, and they sound great if you can get a good seal, but I&#x27;m not a huge fan of cables anymore).<p>Gadgets:<p>I do have a JDS labs O2 amp+DAC setup. I use it with the M&amp;Ds and the M100s sometimes since those are the two cabled headphones still in rotation. However, Apple headphone outputs have historically been good enough to not really benefit <i>that</i> much since all my headphones have lowish power requirements. Planars or some other &quot;need a bunch of juice&quot; headphones would be different.