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📓 Wednesday, September 3, 2025 — 10:26 p.m.
I’m sitting in my comfortable bluish armchair from Ikea,
my laptop resting on the matching ottoman.
It’s covered by one of my old t-shirts —
I keep it there so my orange tabby, Simba,
doesn’t turn the fabric into his personal scratching post.
David Bowie’s Let’s Dance is playing.
I love the guitar work toward the end,
just before it drops with: “Let’s Dance.”
Lately, I’ve gone deep into this audiophile rabbit hole.
It started with one bright idea: find a way to focus.
To cut distractions.
Because I need to draw.
I need to write.
And I want to get better at both.
So I looked at my Bluetooth headphones and thought — nah.
I wanted something different.
Something to block out notifications.
Something to make music feel less sterile,
less “eh.”
I wanted sound that felt alive again.
Enter the day — about two weeks ago —
when I wandered my ass into Guitar Center.
Standing there, I felt something.
I wanted to feel.
To get out of my head.
See, I graduated in 2022 with a BFA in Illustration.
And on paper — oh, how good that sounds.
But the reality? I was never a “traditional” illustrator.
I taught myself how to draw,
and now I guess I’m going back to that.
Back to the kid who copied the cereal box characters,
who sketched Disney figures,
until finally I started drawing the people around me —
wacky, disjointed, sometimes inappropriate concoctions.
But I had fun.
Fun.
That same urge pulled me into Guitar Center.
Not just for headphones —
but to step into a different kind of artistic environment.
And there it was, glowing in the lit cabinet:
the Beyerdynamic DT-770.
Did I know shit about them? No.
But I’d seen them online,
talked up as some of the best “budget” headphones around.
Budget? Sure.
Until I decided to make them not budget.
I got the bright idea to have them modded.
I thought, how hard, how expensive could it be?
Well, it shouldn’t be hard.
But when you don’t know audiophile sound,
don’t know modding,
don’t even know what ohms are…
Yeah. You can end up in trouble.
I searched online for reputable places that could mod these headphones for me.
And I found one — only $53, not too bad.
The catch?
The place is in Estonia.
Where the fuck is that?
To the south: Latvia.
To the east: Russia.
Across the sea to the north: Finland.
Across the sea to the west: Sweden.
And right in the middle of it all: Tallinn.
That’s where my headphones sit now, waiting their turn to be modded.
A medieval city, cobblestoned and preserved —
but also digital, modern,
the place where my headphones would end up.
It cost me $102 to ship them there through USPS.
Oh — and I also needed a 4.4 mm cable.
That’s when I finally learned what ohms meant,
and realized I needed a DAC/amp
to give enough juice so the sound wasn’t just a whisper.
Cable: another $53.
iFi Hip-dac2 — orange, portable: $141.58.
Shit added up… quick.
Funny thing?
I could’ve bought them already modded,
direct from the same place,
for only $206.
So now I’m sitting here waiting for them to get back to me.
Listening to music through my new Sennheiser HD650.
I fucked up. Again.
I didn’t want to be left without headphones.
So, on impulse, I hit “purchase” on Amazon.
But on the good side —
I’ve been writing more.
Less distractions.
Started working on some illustrations.
And I’m having fun.
Let’s Dance.
(Oh, and why did I mod them? Because my DAC/amp has a 4.4 port staring at me. A couple hours of research later, I read it makes shit tighter and louder. Good enough for me.)
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