When it comes to buying earphones to listen to music, I’ve never considered myself an audiophile — just some poor bastard afflicted by OCD. In elementary school, I downloaded a song called 《爱就一个字》 from 商都信息港 at 33.6Kbps. It was only 3MB, 128Kbps if I recall correctly, and at the time I thought the sound quality was absolutely mind-blowing. Then in high school I bought Sony’s “perfume bottle” player and downloaded albums from Ukoo.net. 192kbps VBR was already considered good quality back then. I couldn’t really tell the difference, but one time I downloaded a 128Kbps song, gave it a listen, and something felt off. So I figured I’d buy a better pair of earphones. I saved up and got the Sennheiser MX500. Put them on and instantly felt I’d wasted my money: “This is no different from my old 10-yuan earphones!” I saw people online saying these had “good bass extension,” didn’t quite get what that meant, so I asked my classmate Lu Da. His answer: “Ah, that? It’s just the sub-bass effect, man. When it hits it’s not boom-boom-boom, it’s more like there’s a bit of echo and springiness to it — pong pong pong.” I sort of half-understood. Then one day one of the MX500’s drivers died, and I had to grab a stock earphone that came with a PDA. Maybe it was slightly better than the 10-yuan ones I’d used before. Put it on, turned on the music, and immediately something felt wrong. “How does this sound so different from my MX500?” And that’s how the tragedy began.