Works Components headset works great and is a lot cheaper than Cane Creek etc. And it exists now for standard 1 1/8 head tubes rather than at some indeterminate time in the future.
I doubt you’d notice a -0.5? difference, but a -1? is noticeable, ime anyway.
to me all this talk of angles is a misnomer..
surely all changing angle does is alter how your weight is distributed front to back on the bike?
No, if you slacken the head angle, it slows the steering and makes the bike more stable feeling at speed and on steep descents. It’s obviously just part of the whole handling balance, but it does a lot more than just shift weight distribution on the bike or two bikes otherwise identical but with different head angles would handle just the same. But they don’t.
If you take a twitchy race hardtail with a steep head-tube, you can change your weight distribution all you like and dampen down the steering with wider bars etc, but it will still be a steep and twitchy race hardtail.
Anyway… just fitting a longer fork or a deeper head-set lower cup/talle crown race will slacken the head, but it’ll also cant the seat angle back slightly which will move your weight backwards and, potentially, screw up steep climbing ability and weight distribution on the bike. The nice thing about an angle-set is that it actually makes the seat angle correspondingly steeper, so your weight is kept forward, so climbing should be unaffected or even improved.