Great post!
My own system save for the dac is vintage from 1978 and 1988, payed 700 bucks, and will shame many system listed on virtual system page...
I am pretty sure no headphone can sound as my K340 optimized at any price...
Audio industry is run by profit not mainly by audio ideals...No company will design an hybrid as the K340 today... I asked to one big company of headphone and they tell me : too difficult, too complex too costly and they even tried... 😊 I could if i wanted to upgrade my two other pieces component, so good they are, but not this one headphone...
Then i concluded that some vintage piece rival anything today... At least the K340...
I make incense offerings prayers at each listening sessions for Dr. Gorike the acoustician physicist founder of AKG and designer of this K340...
By the way if you buy one and dont like it, dont be surprized, i did not fall in love without 6 modifications because it is very difficult to drive it well...it is a marvel but not for beginners who buy, plug and play... it takes me 6 months to figure it out... but i will die with it...
btw I was in a friend’s house high up in the mountains a few weeks ago and noticed his system, the first time, it was placed so obscurely. It consists of all 30-40-50 year old components. He couldn’t get more than $1000 for it on any marketplace, mostly because it was all dinged up, worn, blemished and wasn’t much to look at. I asked him to turn it on, he opened a cabinet with 100s of records and told me to pick one. It sounded incredible. I guess it must have been the synergy, the room, the decades of experience of fine tuning things (he is a musician). It was significantly better than a lot of 10-20-30K systems I have heard.