A long time ago, my boss bought me a Sennheiser headset to use for conference calls at my work-from-home job. Specifically, these jobbies.
(EDIT: here's a picture)
They have been, hands down, the best headphones I've ever owned for any purpose, and half the reason I know this is that, inevitably, the pads eventually wore out and I've had to make do with whatever I could find. Until this year when I finally learned that, no, they're not meant to be thrown away as soon as the pads wear out; you can just buy replacement pads for dirt cheap. So I did. I bought ten of them.
And, barely a month later, I got the cord tangled up in my chair and destroyed it. So that's it for my favorite headphones and, with them, any reason to have those extra pads.
But the worst part is, not only has this particular model been discontinued, apparently so has everything else remotely like it. 90% of the market now is those tiny headphones you shove all the way inside your head and give you ear infections (and have a battery life of about five minutes if they're wireless), or giant cans that clamp onto your head like a vice and make you feel like you're in a sauna even in the dead of winter and sound like you're in a cave. The remaining 10%, assuming they don't also clamp onto your head like a vice despite claiming to be looser and more comfortable, have pads covered in that thin vinyl that starts disintegrating about a week after you start using them (as opposed to the foam pads themselves which at least last a few years).
Am I just looking in the wrong places? Surely there's still a market for headphones like mine, right? The best case scenario would be to find ones with the exact same size of driver so that when the pads wear out, I can just pop on one of the replacements I already have, but I'm sure that's asking too much.
(EDIT: here's a picture)
They have been, hands down, the best headphones I've ever owned for any purpose, and half the reason I know this is that, inevitably, the pads eventually wore out and I've had to make do with whatever I could find. Until this year when I finally learned that, no, they're not meant to be thrown away as soon as the pads wear out; you can just buy replacement pads for dirt cheap. So I did. I bought ten of them.
And, barely a month later, I got the cord tangled up in my chair and destroyed it. So that's it for my favorite headphones and, with them, any reason to have those extra pads.
But the worst part is, not only has this particular model been discontinued, apparently so has everything else remotely like it. 90% of the market now is those tiny headphones you shove all the way inside your head and give you ear infections (and have a battery life of about five minutes if they're wireless), or giant cans that clamp onto your head like a vice and make you feel like you're in a sauna even in the dead of winter and sound like you're in a cave. The remaining 10%, assuming they don't also clamp onto your head like a vice despite claiming to be looser and more comfortable, have pads covered in that thin vinyl that starts disintegrating about a week after you start using them (as opposed to the foam pads themselves which at least last a few years).
Am I just looking in the wrong places? Surely there's still a market for headphones like mine, right? The best case scenario would be to find ones with the exact same size of driver so that when the pads wear out, I can just pop on one of the replacements I already have, but I'm sure that's asking too much.
