I listened to a pair of the Beats (or whatever they call it) for $180 and I could not tell any difference between them and the $25 pair of generic brand next to them. In other words, save yourself some money and pay no more than $40 on a pair.

And what does beats have to do with this AKG? This k 450 is very highly rated and is awesome for the road because of the high quality hard shell case.

For the money, these are the best portable headphones I've ever heard. Light weight and well made. They do require a "break-in" period before the sound really opens up and comes to life so be patient, mine took about 20 hours of use (pretty typical for this quality of headphones). Depending on your source device I would also recommend getting a headphone amplifier to feed these a bit more power (especially if you're just plugging them into your iPhone). The Fiio E6 works excellent and is fairly cheap.