Horological Meandering

Reliability - I haven't really had an issue that stood out, although related to your third question, I haven't had these pieces for too long either. I've only started collecting last year and the only piece I wear regularly during the weekdays is the Octa S, the other pieces get rotated on weekends. So, each piece maybe gets a day or two a month on the wrist which is clearly not enough data points over less than a year's period to draw any meaningful conclusions from.

As for headphones, compared to in-home Hi-Fi I find them to be a lot more intimate and up front - it's fun picking through the minute details hidden in the layers of the recording on a good headphone system. It's also versatile in that I don't disrupt my wife or neighbors listening to a live rock recording late at night... and I don't have to worry about room acoustics, speaker placement, etc. Over time, to suit my lifestyle I've adapted my home system to be a series of simple AirPlay based "ambients" - B&O A9, etc. - and critical listening confined to the headphone world. I think headphones also provide a much more objective field for comparing sources, amps, cables, and other pieces of equipment in the chain. That said, headphones mostly don't provide the kind of soundstage that good speaker systems can provide... although one can argue further that any soundstage benefits provided by speakers are artificially added onto the recording from the room acoustics (perfectly fine in case of studio recordings, since studios have no ambience to begin with), and the only "real" soundstage true to the recorded venue in case of live recordings are binaural recordings played back through a good headphone system.

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