Yes…kinda, I’ll explain:

I made a MASSIVE headphone upgrade from 2013 Sennheiser Momentums using my PC’s stock headphone jack to a Hifiman Arya Organic on a Gustard A26 w/ LAN streaming and HQPlayer upsampling into a Ferrum Oor + Hypso. The sound quality is unquestionably better in every way, but there were a few specific issues that diminished my enjoyment of certain tracks.

For example, Alice in Chains is one of my favorite bands, but the brighter response and increased clerity made the guitar riffs less present and full. Luckily, I was able to fix this by adding a -3 dB Tilt EQ on top of my standard peak correction EQ to darken up grunge and metal tracks and get back some of the warmth I got used to. I also built a Bottlehead Moreplay tube preamp that I can switch on in my chain to add some extra harmonic distortion and thicken up the sound to my preference on rock genres. But without those modifications, rock music definitely felt wrong to my ears, despite my system costing 10x more.

Another issue that upgrading my system introduced was a soundstage quirk where my brain gets tricked into thinking that instruments and vocals originate from behind my ears. This can be disorienting because those same sounds stage in front of me when listening through speakers. Basically, it is as if I am standing on the stage with my back to the band instead of in the audience. I discovered that it was my Arya stock pads that were causing this issue. When I pad swap to Dekoni Hybrid Elite pads that have much higher dampening, the sound stage interacts less with my ears and gets pushed forward, but at the cost of sound body and definition in the trailing tones. I switched back to the stock pads, but now I have to either use some crossfeed or trick my brain into thinking I’m in a concert hall with reverb bouncing off the walls to get the the songs to properly stage in front of me. This was never an issue on my old headphones, which frankly, didn’t stage or image at all and just presented all the sound as roughly originating from a single point in my head.

A third issue I ran into is that some songs simply aren’t mastered very well, which is noticable and distracting on my new setup. For example, I loved listening to the OST for the game, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, on my old headphones. It was a low-budget indie game, but the songs were very clever. Due to cost, all the strings, etc., were sampled or synthetic, but you couldn’t really tell on poorly resolving headphones. My mind would just fill in the gaps and make the music sound grandiose. But on my new setup, it is painfully apparent that the instruments are fake, plus the dynamic range and intonation is bland. It breaks the immersion that I had invented when listening on my old headphones. To a lesser extent, some songs like Inferno by Thundercat lost a bit of their eerie character when you reveal the finer details of the mix. It feels a bit more mechanical or designed compared to the otherworldly quality that my brain attributed to it on less resolving headphones. It is like how I remember the original PS2 Ratchet and Clank game on a CRT TV being so realistic through my rose-tinted nostalgia, but when I booted it up 10 years later on a gaming PC emulator, the graphics were unbearable.

But all-in-all, I gained much more than I lost. I used to gravitate towards complex, fast-paced, and synthetic music like Dream Theater and contemporary jazz because all the richness of pop and acoustic music got flushed by my old headphones, making them sound boring and generic. Only music with innovative chord structure or rhythm was stimulating, so I kept searching for more and more technical music and then stopped listening to music all together. Now, I can go back and appreciate the timbre and texture of simple songs in a way that I never could before.