Getting into the "Audiophile" hobby without money.
I'm a musician, so, of course, I love headphones. I like good quality ones, so for the past couple of years I've been switching headphones occasionally until I settled on a pair of Philips SHP9500 as my main pair when recording and working.
Recently, I got a music player which really pushed me to listen to more music, which I haven't done in a while, and I've been having fun with it. I've been listening to a lot of albums, even ones that I used to like that I have forgotten about (Joe Brooks' Constellation Me and Ringo Deathstarr's Mauve certified bangers IMO) and listening to different kinds of music made me want to try different earphones to listen to.
My problem is that buying gear is expensive, my music gear is relatively inexpensive, like my guitar and stuff, but with how much things cost in my country, these might as well be gold bars, so it's hard for me to get a lot of different headphone pairs without being bankrupt.
So I turned to the cheapest alternative… Earbuds! I've already been a big fan of earbuds, like the wired variant. A couple of years ago, I even had a local guy custom make an earbud from me. So I thought, hell, these are inexpensive. Let me get a pair or two for my new music player.
And holy, I got like a $5 Faaeal Iris CE and a $12 Moondrop Quarks, and these are insane value. I had the most fun listening to music, and it really got me excited to try more earbuds because of them. And then I found out there are even cheaper versions of these earbuds, so I got the $2–4 pairs, and I was more blown away by how good they sounded, like they have no business being this good. So I now scoured Reddit threads and Head-Fi forums which I didn't even know existed before that and looked for recommendations and immediately did some more research and got even more earbuds. Now I have like 6 more earbuds in my online shopping cart, and I'm looking for even more that I'm willing to spend a little bit more, but I'm open to discovering even more dirt cheap earbuds. I know brands that aren't more popular in the earbud circles, like Fransun and Fengru which are like very cheap Chinese brands, but I'm more than happy to get them. I am even looking into like the garbage tier Sony and Philips earbuds that everyone hates just for the sake of having them.
My next step into this hobby is learning how to re-cable and mod these headphones. I'm even looking into things like metal-built replaceable cable buds, but I want to be able to do DIY projects too, so I'm doing more research about how hard it is to solder new cables and stuff into these, and I'm so excited to get started with it.
It's just so fun to discover that, in a hobby where it can easily be so expensive and snobbish, and there's a side where people just enjoy the cheap and almost garbage-tier stuff that, in my opinion, sometimes even outperform more expensive ones (I'm looking at you JBL, I've spent years in my youth spending a lot with your expensive headphones that a $4 one can beat). And it gives me more excitement to listen to my music. It's hard to explain, but it did change the experience of listening to music for me.
My favorite pairs are the NICEHCK Traceless, and the Faaeal Iris Ancestor. Surprisingly, the cheapest ones are my favorites.
How about you? What headphones are you listening to your music on now?
-A