My DT770 and qudelix are primarily for watching movies.

You would need either a different amp/dac that receives optical or a different media source like a media PC to play media from/attach your qudelix.

But really you are wasting money by not just using Bluetooth to your qudelix. You’re not going to notice a difference, and from a technical perspective I’d be surprised if a high quality stereo BT transmission is the compression/quality bottleneck when streaming movies anyway.

At worst I would buy a standalone BT transmitter with higher BT standard/better radio if your TV is lacking.

The pleather pads are designed to offer a tad more isolation as 32 ohm are the “mobile” version. I personally don’t mind them at all for comfort (they currently have black velour on them though).

The pleather replacements are harder to find and need to be sure they’re the “fenestrated” version and not the extra isolating version made for DT770M.

The genuine regular velour pads fit the same and don’t alter the sound much. EDT 770 are what you’re after.

Take note that the pads have a surprisingly large effect on the tone. I put 880 pads on mine out of interest and it sounded god-awful. For this reason I would stick to genuine DT770 pads rather than cheap aftermarket ones.

I’m pretty impressed with them.

They are my first of these chi-fi in ears (most of my 'phone listening is a DT880 through a tube amp or DT770 when mobile).

Response across bass frequencies is dead-on for me. The only thing I do for EQ is a small bump around 6-7k (from memory) that balances out the upper mids and treble to my taste.

I liked the foam tips and small hole silicon, the big hole ones lost all bass no matter which size. Bought some spinfit CP155 and they fit my ears better which seems to have increased detail while maintaining a nice frequency balance (this stuff is probably all anatomy dependent).

They’re definitely good enough that I don’t feel any great desire to seek out anything better.

Buying stuff is addictive.

There is no “mid-fi” “tier”, “endgame” or “journey”. Just stuff that sounds subjectively/objectively good or not for a given budget. Those things are more appealing to the “buying stuff is addictive” consumerism nature of hobbies (non-specific to headphones/audio gear).

As with any nerd hobby, many opinions on forums are simply repeating what others have repeated rather than first hand experience.

Never tried 6xx but wasn’t a fan of HD650 compared to DT880.

No doubt they’re competent, but the snowball effect of being a common first foray into hifi, the praise/purchases driven by internet popularity have probably placed them on a bit of a pedalstool.

Not liking what is most popular doesn’t mean you lack an ear for hi-fi. Personally if I consider the harman curve or FR tunings/eq profiles created by popular community authorities what is popular often sound dull, stodgy and bloated to my ears.

I’ve never had an issue with them but that seems to the common failure point if they do fail. Easy fix at least.