what made you decide on the AKG K371?

Did a bunch of research and they seemed like the best fit for me. My budget isn’t super high and I’m a college student, so it was between these, the ATH m50x, and Beyerdymanic DT 770s. Just trying to get into the hobby without breaking the bank, as well as moving away from beats

going from bluetooth to wired will be the biggest difference. but you need to make sure your audio source is high quality too. if you are listening to low quality audio files then going to wired wont help much

I’ll primarily listen from my MacBook and phone. I also plan to rip my CDs too and convert them to FLAC

there's minimal diff between flac and 320mp3

You are going to notice a nice step up in sound quality and clarity. Probably a bit less bass but not by much especially if you drive the K371 with a strong source. AKG K371 is an excellent headphone and very comfortable too. Make sure to handle it with care though as they have been known to snap if not handled properly.

Just broke mine while putting these on my not enormously large head - that headband is not designed to last! But otherwise very capable headphones in their price range, so agree in full with your pitch.

Sounds great. Thank you

I would say that it’s probably only true for the very early batches. My first pair had a driver failure but my replacement has had no issues despite treating them a bit roughly. But I don’t get the issues with the headband snapping, I doubt it’ll happen with daily use unless you purposely try to break it. The main issue is probably with the earlier batches having loose hinges which is what many reviewers have pointed out and I also experienced it with my first pair.

one thing to keep in mind when ripping CDs is the compression levels that the engineers used when mastering the original recordings for CD releases

for the majority of the CDs' popularity (90s - 2010s), CD mixes (and the corresponding digital releases later) tended to be mixed st very high volumes and compression levels leading to what was literally called the "Loudness War"

basically, the songs on many CD releases will peak really easily and sound pretty distorted, especially with even decent audio setups (you may have noticed this already)

a good place to check if a CD release was affected by this madtering methodology is the Loudness War database

interestingly, vinyl releases are often mastered separately, so the vinyl releases and subsequent digital rips will not have this problem, sounding totally different

(this is not true for vinyl releases that are based off of the CD releases, which happens if the vinyl release is made way after the original album release)

A good example is when you compare the vinyl releases of The White Stripes' Icky Thump (2007) with the CD releases, the difference in the peaking and distortion is very clear (and this is considering Jack White's preference for lofi recording methods already)

edit: nowadays this is not much of a problem since streaming services like spotify or apple music use volume normalization to sidestep this problem somewhat

That’s really interesting. Never knew this was a thing. Thank you