Best Open Back Headphone?

R0nie

Honorable
Oct 21, 2013
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10,630
So i have been looking for a open back headphone for the past couple of weeks to upgrade from my hyperx cloud 2 which i have been using for last 2 years. After going through a lot of guides and articles i have finally narrowed it down to mainly 3 choices
1. Sennheiser hd 599
2. Beyerdynamic dt 990
3. Audio Technica ad 700x
now i mainly use headphones for gaming, mainly fps like r6s,csgo,bf and i listen to a lot of rock music.Which one of them would be suitable for my purpose and if anything is better at that price range then feel free to suggest.
And my mother board is rog maximus vii hero which has supreme fx sound card so do i need an amp/dac to run them?i have absolutely no idea about it, any advice will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
 
That motherboard has a high gain amp, so it should be able to drive two of those particular headphones, the Beyerdynamics you've listed are 250 ohms I think, which does require a fairly beefy headphone amp. I think, ASUS claims up to something like 109 ohms in their control panel for your motherboard, if you set the amplify level to "powerful".

(edit add)
Regarding which sounds best is an extremely subjective question to ask. One example of current "audiophile" headphones is the Sennheiser HD660s. The reviews on that model goes from "ear bliss" to "worst Sennheisers ever!", depending on which experienced reviewer you'd ask. If you don't have a chance to try any of them in a store you'll simply have read/look around on various reviews. Z Reviews is a fun guy to listen to on youtube, with a lot of earxperience, I think. InnerFidelity is another site with more "serious" (less screaming more numbers) reviews. They probably say very different things about all three, you'll just have to figure out what you think is most important to your ears from that. :)
 
I agree with duck here. As someone who owns a pair of 600's with a schiit 2 amp, I must say that you'll be happy with whatever pair of headphones you end up buying. The audio experience is varied, yes, but the important part is that you'll be experiencing a noticeable improvement in audio quality. If you're a basshead, you might not like the 600's, but they're VERY GOOD for acoustic/orchestral music. The DT 990's are very accurate and true to the recording. Again, refer to Z-Reviews for an in-depth analysis.