Well, first of all, Comfy, thanks for your input, I certainly appreciate it.
Secondly, most of the information in the first post has been superceded by this post (I should probably modify the original post). Basically, the headphone jack sucked, and I suspect that that was the problem, not that the K1000's were so much better than anything else. So I'm going to find my ASL speaker-headphone adapter thingy and try some cheaper headphones on her and see if she can tell the difference. The new criteria is that they can handle going loud for long periods at a time.