Thanks, but the truth is, a few months ago I "accidentally" tried a good old cabled Audio Technica, and suddenly I realized that I haven't really enjoyed music for a good part of the past decade. I'm back in the middle-ages, when it comes to music listening, and there is no way I'm switching.
There's no better noise cancelling than as much bulk around your ears and as thick a wall around your room as possible! I too have a wired Audio-Technica (ATH-M40x) and can highly recommend it. I got immeasurable pleasure out of discovering that many of my favourite pieces of music had entire lines that I never knew existed when still using lesser audio equipment!
Another suggestion of mine is to listen to CDs from the late 80s, when record labels considered 'digital' a mark of quality and actually followed through with the marketing. They tend to be the best, in my opinion - they have good dynamic range which nowadays is usually compressed out of the recordings to maximise loudness, and they had just started using 192kbs bitrates, which I consider to be at the upper level of my hearing ability. No help for new albums, of course, but hopefully those will have FLAC downloads available as some consolation!
I don't understand your "192kbps" remark. It seems to be a reference to some sort of lossy compression, but the context was audio CDs (from the 80s, even!). Audio CDs are all uncompressed PCM at 1411kbps, nothing else is possible - especially in the 80s! Lossy audio compression was in its infancy, and mp3 was not defined until 1991.
Yes, that was an error; sorry for any confusion. What I was trying to express is that the bitrates of digital recording equipment in the early 80s had become so high that the digital recording would be effectively indistinguishable from its analogue source. Yet, not long beforehand, the capacity and speed of digital memory was insufficient to keep up with the required ~44khz sampling rate required.
It seems that my confabulation of 192kbps was also a gross underestimation - apparently, the Sony PCM-1, which was released in 1977, already had a bitrate of 573kbps.
Have you ever tried the Tidal streams (https://tidal.com/sound-quality) in FLAC? Are those at all comparable to these high-quality recordings you mentioned?
As someone who grew up later in the MP3 era (90s), I guess I never knew what "good" audio ever sounded like. I'd love to do a back-to-back comparison of the same song, one in "modern" shitty no-dynamic-range and the other in a higher-fidelity version to see if I can notice any difference at all. Between my consumer equipment and my aging ears, I dunno if I'll be able to at all...?