Phoenix said:
Yeah right now I'm looking at something sub $200 or thereabouts. For me I need them to be accurate and comfortable since I'd be wearing them in 10-12 hour shifts. Accuracy and range are important to me because I once composed some music (Jazzy Orchestra that was floating around here a while back) and while it was fine - when I heard it on some real good (expensive as hell) headphones at the office I started hearing all sorts of artifacts and ambient noise that I didn't even realize was in it
Now the V6 - are people talking about the SOny MDR-V600?
no the mdr-v600 aren't the same as the mdr-v6 (i know, rolleyes sony :/). the v600s are pretty famous for being terrible sounding. the v6 aka sony 7506 (professional model #) are good closed studio monitors, huge bass, shrill highs, midbass hump but it's not too bad. i can attest to them being great for video work as they're built like a tank, and you can get a good seal, but they're slightly supraaural if your ears are big. 70-100$ (69.99$ at fry's iirc, slightly cheaper on the web)
for 200$ and your choice of music, you're going to be in the high end closed studio headphones - beyerdynamic, AKG, etc. i don't have a lot of experience with these. your best bet is to ask at head-fi. take the advice with a grain of salt though, there are some recording engineers there, but it's mostly audiophiles, a good 20-30% of which are complete loonies.
what you probably want is a large, closed circumaural with good isolation and high detail with as little coloration as possible. if you were ok with open headphones (little to no isolation) i would suggest the sennheiser HD580 which is almost exactly what you want, but open, paired with a small amplifier. the upside to going closed is that you probably won't need the amplifier. the downside is that it tends to be much harder to find a flat, uninvolving closed headphone because enclosing the diaphragm makes it harder to reduce distortions from the headphone housing for physical reasons that are really beyond me (reflections in the enclosure or something i guess)
i will say that i've heard very good things about beyerdynamic and AKG's high end closed headphones.
in addition to
http://www.head-fi.org/, here are two vendor websites you might find helpful
http://home.t-online.de/home/meier-audio/ and
http://www.headphone.com
one last thing to keep in mind: the margins in high end audio are very large. this is both good and bad. on the down side, prices are high, but on the upside, there is some very good service to be found. the perk you might want to look into is the mostly standard 30-day in-home "audition" you can get, basically a 30 day moneyback guarantee. so pick a phone, live with it for a month and if it doesn't suit you, you're only out cost of shipping. in a 200+$ purchase this could be a lifesaver.
hope that helps. good luck finding the right headphone!
ETA: here's headroom's suggestions page for full size closed:
http://www.headphone.com/layout.php?topicID=13&subTopicID=71
i always forget about the HD280. some people swear by it over the V6 because of the V6's shrill highs. i steered away from it when i was looking for a closed phone because it's not quite the tank the V6's are.
