Just chiming in with an alternative perspective on headphones.

I personally disagree that anything higher than $200 is a waste. Diminishing returns is subjective relative to one’s enjoyment, but I think I’ve landed on a few headphones around ~$300ish I am very happy with.

I own headphones significantly more expensive than that, but I wouldn’t call them a waste of money since they bring me tremendous joy and they are better at reproducing sound to my preferences than my cheaper pairs.

But for me, if I had to somehow objectively quantify my joy-per-dollar between some of the really good ~$300 pairs and my top of the line pairs, it wouldn’t be so significant that my quality of life would be dramatically altered.

There’s not much variety in terms of genre at that point 😔

I’d be looking at highly moddable games types—something like Gary’s Mod, maybe? I personally wouldn’t want to play an FPS forever. But I’m not sure what games these days have super strong mod communities that frequently genre-bend. Maybe something like GTA?

I finally got around to using an old PINE64 SBC and that’s worked well for me. Have thought about getting an Orange Pi5 with the RK3588. I’ve seen them on Amazon and AliExpress and I’ve been mostly eyeballing 16GB variants but they’ve come in around $70 to $150ish depending on the amount of RAM (4-16GB). There’s a 32GB variant but that’s overkill for most of my use cases.