A good pair of headphones really makes a differense but dont forget that as someone allready said that amplifier is also important. I have a pair Sennheiser HD595 headphones and they sound very very dull and powerless without a good amp but a good amplifier does make a big big differense. And many of you were criticising old IL2 sounds and I do agree, they were far from perfect but were really not that bad when you had the hardware to hear them properly. My whole appartment was shaking when I flew a P38 at full throttle (2xDali Ikon2 as mainspeakers, BK Monolith DF+ as sub) and all that I can say is it had a really really great immersionfactor. Many of the old and new samples are very low frequenses and not that many of us have the right hardware to listen to the sounds.