By: ty240 (17-Jun-08)      Experience with product: 7

Strengths:	Extremely comfortable, inexpensive for high-end headphones
Weaknesses:	The sound quality is so good most of your mp3 collection will sound horrible

Full User Summary
The Beyerdynamic 880's are the best headphones for the money on the market today. The sound quality is excellent and it even works w/ my ipod (though I still recommend an amp). After breaking them in for about 60 hours so far, they already sound better than my Grado and AKC, and Sennheiser. Highly recommended!

By: pg581 (25-Aug-07)      Experience with product: 1

Strengths:	Very good sound, high build quality, and extremely comfortable.
Weaknesses:	Not particularly cheap for the casual listener, let a lot a sound through for being advertised as a semi-open design. Also, they would benefit from a stretching spiral segment in the cord.

Full User Summary
(Note: I am not an 'audiophile' by any stretch of the imagination, but I prefer to purchase solid quality products.) I recently started a new job with a very physically open cube environment and wanted some headphones to block some of the noise. I already had a set of canalphones, which were uncomfortable to wear for long intervals and made me virtually oblivious to the outside world, and an old, cheap set of closed over-ear phones, which block out just about the right level of noise but had very shallow cups, pressing against my ears on the inside and pushing the frames of my glasses inwards too strongly.The Beyerdynamic DT 880 headphones are semi-open, which really means that they let in and out just a -little- less noise than a fully open design. In retrospect, what I really wanted was a set of closed phones, but my last set was uncomfortable and sounded very poor, so I chose these primarily for their very plush cup design and good audio quality. This is the first set of headphones I've used that I can wear for several hours continuously without any sense of physical discomfort or audio fatigue, but note that the low 'clamping' pressure, thick cups, and non-negligible band weight can let the band gradually slip forwards if I lean with my face to my desk to write. In a quiet environment, they sound great (to my untrained ears at least), but they are probably too transparent for someone to use as a means of blocking work noise without cranking the volume. These are better suited to long sessions gaming or music listening at home.Still, I am keeping the DT 880s for use with my computer at my apartment, where they sound a bit better than, are much less intrusive to my neighbors than, and are equally comfortable to my Klipsch ProMedia 4.1s. I am impressed enough that I plan to try a set of DT 770s, which are closed but seem otherwise almost identical in design. Overall, I highly recommend the DT 880s, just not for what was my original purpose.Misc. notes: The DT 880s have apparently been redesigned in the last few years. They are in a padded fake leather case instead of an aluminum box and have a slightly different headband style. They are now probably not quite as nice as they once were, but I am still very satisfied. Just be aware of this when reading older reviews.