Tbh you're better off buying one expensive set of headphones than several mid tier cans

To be fair, quite a few closed backs have better soundstage than the HD600

I dislike the Moondrop tuning and I'm wary of their QC so I didn't bother, especially since I already have the Final A4000 and this fucker blew my mind so hard I don't really look at IEMs anymore, I could use it as my daily driver for the rest of my life and be happy about it. It's so similar to my HD800S that I use the same EQ settings for both

The next best thing would be Tangzu Shimin Li but it has too much drawbacks for me, imo KZ is still the king for budget options with their Zs10 Pro X and likely the PR1, tbh everything under 80-100 is so similar that going for the cheapest really isn't going to mean losing on sound quality. The step from a Chu @20$ and a CRN @40$ is minuscule, while going for a VR3000 @80$ is a night and day difference

KZ CRN

I'm kind of a treble addict so I don't mind it, but yeah a better balanced and cleaner 800S sounds really damn good to me

I've been tempted of buying an 800 after getting my 800S, thus post clearly doesn't help me fight that urge

Nothing prevents you from enjoying your music with better headphones. Sure, you might be missing on air, details, realism with mp3. But if those better cans have good rumble and make you bop your head more often, that's more important.

I went the highest resolution possible route, with ultra high quality flacs, upsampling, and a can of HD800S, and yeah it's a good improvement. But I can listen to mp3s on my phone with IEMs in the street and still have a kick ass time, it may not be audiophilia but whatev

If you're just EQing to fit your ears, like adjusting minute upper mids energy, treble peaks etc it doesn't really affect performance, maybe the soundstage suffers a bit but that's it. I've found that, however, playing with the bass REALLY impacts performance, adding just a few dBs will drastically change the details and characteristics of the mids. Usually I EQ the bass only when playing at very low volumes, and turn it off when listening during daytime at normal volumes

It acts on the volume in a linear way, where the volume scale (decibels) work in a logarithmic way. Meaning you'll get a ton of volume at max, then it'll drop off quite rapidly and from 50% down to 0, it's fairly quiet. You can see this behavior in guitar volume pots, which are also classified as linear or logarithmic