Is headphone listening a primary or backup for you when listening to music?

90% system , 10% headphones. I have a desktop rig on my nightstand with Audeze LC-2’s , so pretty modest overall. I have physical issues and use my cans when I am needing to lay down or can’t sleep at night. Regards , Mike B. 

Is headphone listening a primary or backup for you when listening to music?

Neither. It’s a minor curiosity interest so far with a tube amp/DAC and DAP for SS, Audeze LCD i3 planar and Focal Clear headphones.

I am a bucket list audiophile catching up by trying a variety of top Sonics

I have a pretty good dedicated headphone listening system that I put together specifically for relaxation and critical listening sessions that I use 90 plus percent of the time. 
 

@soix, “I’ve got both, and while headphones are nice they cannot put performers and performances viscerally and as big and spatially in the room like a home system can — not even close and not substitutes at all”. 

 I think that there’s a difference between viscerally feeling the music that one’s listening to and when one is listening through a really good headphone setup. The cost to be able to hear micro details in recorded music with speakers means you either have to be driving a lot of air, or you’ve spent several tens of thousands of dollars to even come close to the detail retrieval of many top tier headphones on the market today. 

I think that there’s a difference between viscerally feeling the music that one’s listening to and when one is listening through a really good headphone setup. The cost to be able to hear micro details in recorded music with speakers means you either have to be driving a lot of air, or you’ve spent several tens of thousands of dollars to even come close to the detail retrieval of many top tier headphones on the market today. 

@adasdad You can talk about micro details or moving air or whatever, but headphones just can’t do what a home system can — it’s just physics and they’re very different listening experiences.  Apples and oranges.  And it doesn’t take all that much money to put together a very respectable home system with plenty of detail that can physically place visceral images in a large 3D stage these days, and headphones just can’t do that no matter how much you spend.

I listen to headphones about half the time. I have Stax 009s, Audeze LCD-X, and Audeze LCD-XC. I really like the Stax phones but I have to fire up the tube driver amp (Stax SRM T1S) and wait a bit to hear them at their best. It's just so easy to grab the Audeze phones and listen through my Benchmark DAC1.