Headphones vs speakers

I disliked headphones after trying 10 different one...

I used them for special occasion...

No headphones compare to a system/room well optimized...

But there is an exception....

my AKG K340 rival any system which is in a living room...

To beat it takes a well controlled acoustic room...

I know because i created one few years ago...

Now i did not have this room...Only a good acoustic corner created for near listening and really good...

For pure musical listening meditation my K340 are my choice even now rival my secondary well optimized near field corner  (timbre more natural, deep bass, holography out of the head) 

Yes i am lucky.... but i optimized them myself (a long journey) 

For example, soundstage is a hard one for headphones. My SR1a has the largest soundstage of any phone but it is not 2-channel.

This is very true...

A soundfield or soundstage related to any headphone must be linked to the recording acoustical spatial cues, and must never give a ready made once for all soundstage of his own...

Also the soundstage must for well recorded pieces especially give a speaker like sound with a very evident "out of the head" impression...

The difference between the K340 and all my other 10 headphones is precisely this...

Also the timbre experience is very hard to get right, none of my 10 headphones could do it...

Deep bass must be there too ...

 It is a huge order probably almost  no headphones at any price can give save one or two i did not know about...

But my experience is only with the K340 i never tried ,Raal,Orpheus,Mysphere ,Top Hifiman...

But i dont need to try them anyway ... Why ?  to improve a bit on a 100 bucks  top headphone ?

When i listen to the K340 i forget it is an headphone anyway...

This is rather an odd thread, like launching "cars vs motorcycles" ... on an automobile forum. Given that there are over 35,000 posts for speakers and under 500 for headphones, it's not exactly surprising that most of the (few) responses here have favored speakers. If someone posted "headphones vs speakers" on head-fi, the responses might just possibly be a bit different. 

As a few have pointed out, they're completely different listening experiences. Cars and motorcycles. 

A more interesting conversation might be to ask why headphones and iems have taken off in the last decade. There's a surge in the headphone market not seen in that of traditional stereos. A lot of this growth is young people, and I'm not talking about earbuds and iPhones. I spend time on head-fi and I'd guess that if we compared the number of posts by people under 40 in a given week, Audiogon might not exactly be crowing. We can be critical of their preferences (speaking as someone who has haunted stereo stores for half a century), but headphones is where the action is these days. 

I'm with the posters above who say both/and.  Headphones are a lot of fun.

@northman maybe it's odd to you but there are a lot of people who have downsized due to an array of circumstances- unfortunate or otherwise- and don't have the space for a 2 channel system with speakers. My cousin for one. So I'm here trying to get some info from those of you who have experience in this area. Sorry this post doesn't interest you and that you consider yourself to be above many others here who just so happen to also have an interest in music.

Holy cow, @fire_water. My post wasn’t about your original post at all. I was commenting on the responses. I think your post makes complete sense, and in fact I’m in the same situation you are. I recently lost my listening room and am pondering a headphone system. I was simply saying that the comments aren't really getting at the complexities. I’m genuinely sorry that you took offense. Heck, I'm sorry to anyone offended! I hate the toxicity of the internet and I never want to contribute to it.