I needed some headphones the other day. I was looking for a pair to try to and drown out the background noise at work.

So I went down to my local Best Buy, and found a pair of Sony’s for about $200. I figured this was the high-end. I mean, $200 for a set of headphones is pretty spendy, right?

Now when I drop a double set of benjamins on some audio tech, I want to make sure I’m getting my money’s worth. After all, you can’t stay a total pimp by just throwing the cheddar around all reckless-like.

So I wrote down the model number and went home to Google up the 411 on my new-found ear bling. I typed “headphone reviews” in the search box and hit “I’m feeling lucky,” confident that I was going to find that I was treading in some rareified audio waters with my $200 set of ‘phones.

About 30 seconds later, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

I found a Web site called — appropriately — headphonereviews.org. The guy who runs this site loves headphones with a passion that I didn’t realize existed. There are hundreds and hundreds of reviews on the site, and a couple of them were why my jaw was on the ground.

Consider the Ultrasone Edition 7 for a mere $3,000. Or the Sony MDR-R10 for $4,500. Not enough? There’s always the Sennheiser HE90 (pictured) for a tidy $7,500.

Just to clarify, these are not complete stereo systems. These are headphones. You know, like ear muffs, but with sound?

So, coming back to reality, I found out that my $200 set of headphones were pretty tame. While they sounded great to me, the people on this site have examined headphones to a degree I had never considered.

For example, here are some notes on a review for the $750 Grado HP1000:

The HP1000s have excellent bass extension. I can hear 20Hz test tones very clearly, and I get that hollow, cavernous feeling in my head and neck that you can get with headphones that have very deep (great extension) bass. The bass impact is also very good. It is not as bloated as the PS-1 or as overpowering as the deep bass of the L3000, but rather I find it to be quite realistic and neutral. It has excellent speed and response, the bass quality is also very good.

Uh…yeah.

The site itself is exceptionally well put-together. The design is simple, the fonts are large, and there’s a great search function that you can use to isolate headphones by type or price range. There’s even a wizard for those of us that don’t even know enough to make a reasonable search.