Proselytizing about headphones

For Christmas I got some Sennheiser HD590 headphones. I've been wearing them a lot the time while working. The sound quality is so much better than, say, Bose computer speakers, that they are transforming my experience of music -- I just ENJOY listening a lot more. I'm also encoding using AAC at 320kbs -- in an A/B test I could hear no difference between the CD and 320kbs encoding.

I mention it because I am feeling that for years I was missing out because I didn't give sound quality much priority in my office space. I found that I wasn't listening to music there that much and wasn't sure why. (I can't listen to music with vocals in any case when I'm working because it's too distracting, and sometimes any music at all is too distracting, but much of the time it is helpful for concentrating. Right now I'm listening to Billy Cobham's Spectrum.) I now think that if you don't have the quality, a real part of the enjoyment goes away. At one point I got some Grado headphones that have good sound quality, but weren't comfortable enough for extended use. The "Sennies" are extremely comfortable as well as great-sounding.

And they are sensitive enough to be driven by an iPod or laptop output -- most audiophile headphones lose too much sound quality if you do that because they weren't made for it.

In any case, the overall message of this post is that if find you aren't listening to music as much as you might have expected to, and you don't have audiophile-level sound output, that might be the reason.