The rise and rise of headphones
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
I was skeptical of how this works - how do you record what the headphones sound like? This must surely be fake. However here is the making-of video and it really put into perspective for me how detailed sound engineering can get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnK1Gq7txYA
Still Beats are much better than 99% of the headphones people use there, especially cheapo in ear models, and most everything the mass market used with their "walkmans" in the 80s and 90s.
I use mainly Sennheiser HD650 for audio work but for listening the soundmagic's are pretty nice. I use them with Comply foams to block out some noise and get a tighter fit/better bass
If I'm planning on actively listening to music or doing production work, I use my nice speakers or a pair of monitoring headphones. But that's a much less common scenario for me.
It's fine if you want to buy them for the looks, but know that you are not getting the best sound quality achievable for said money.
That's actually far truer than you might think: http://gizmodo.com/5981823/beat-by-dre-the-inside-story-of-h...
If I want to know how a piano sounds, I'm going to listen to an actual piano. If my recorded and played backed piano sounds any different than that, it's not 'how a piano sounds like'.
Apart from that and having owned HD600s, ATH-M40x, E-10s and a pair of AKGs, I'm in agreement with the parent and most of the following posts. Don't buy beats, any of the mentioned headphones here will blow you away for a lot less money.
I'm unable to understand this kind of logic
a) Good headphones only bring marginally better sound over mediocre ones for most of the source material and format people hear (not to mention if you listen to pop hits, they're often mastered to sound good to mediocre headphones in the first place).
b) Appearance matters. Being trendy and following fashion is good for your social life (yeah, other people are often that shallow: don't fight it, hack it to your benefit).
c) For most people their social life is way more important than something like better frequency response. So optimize what's actually important to you, not what should be important in theory.
Heck, I'm a heavy DAW user and I have AKG and AT monitor-grade headphones, but I'm still tempted to get a pair of Beats, a) to hear mixes through a headphone "in vogue" producers of pop/hip-hop/r&b optimize for, b) for the fashion part.
(And no, "everybody has one" doesn't diminish the fashion factor, except to fashion snubs people who you'd want to avoid anyway. Fashion works better when you conform -- to put it another away, nobody was seen in a bad light wearing Nike because "tons of other people have Nikes").
I have to disagree here. Perhaps it's just me, but when I listen to my music downloaded from iTunes over crappy headphones, then over my good headphones, there is a tremendous difference. I can hear synth beats, quiet drum hits, vocal inflections, and guitar riffs on the good headphones which are lost to the muddled and over-driven bass in bad headphones.
And this is with recent music by Taylor Swift, Adelle, and Avicci.
> Appearance matters.
Thankfully, companies like Sennheiser have started to make tremendous leaps in these qualities. Of course, they're starting to drive up their prices as well, so that's a bit of a backslide...
> So optimize what's actually important to you
Agreed. Though it wouldn't hurt to expose folks to more good sounding headphones, so they can make a decision on actual data. If I didn't have headroom in my home town, I wouldn't know what truly good headphones would sound like; my experience would have been limited to Boise and Beats.
I wouldn't call friend someone that recommends me something like that
Why do you automatically assume that the most important thing about headphones is "look" for everyone?
Also, if you care about the social signals, don't buy Beats if you don't want to look like someone with more money than sense ;) (Mileage obviously may vary between environments, but it seems like the one things most people know about headphones is "Beats aren't good for the price", even if they never really looked at the topic in detail)
My go-to headphones are the HD201, which you can get for about $30. They're the best headphones/earphones I've ever used, but I'm no audiophile, as you can tell from that fact.
Beats look a lot better, for once.
Even better, they sound good too.
I have a pretty good monitoring environment and headphones. What cues do you listen to to differentiate 320?
This is the only reason to get a different DAC. These DACs have lower output impedance than most DACs under $500.
Edit: http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/iphone-5/audio-quality.htm
I'm pretty sure that Apple's x86 systems use the same HD Audio codecs everybody else is using. They may or may not have better analog output amps (if they have any, but iirc at least some laptops have such) but as for using better DACs - links or it didn't happen.
1: http://en-au.sennheiser.com/stereo-headphones-travel-lightwe...
2: http://eu.audio-technica.com/en/products/product.asp?catID=5...
How do you define headphone quality? Do you think that this definition is the same for everyone?
So why buy beats? The appearance argument is ridiculous, you can get cheaper, better headphones, that look (and are built) better. Beats don't excel at anything, they just make you look like a fool. I guess that's a feature!
For a lot of people, how headphones look is far more important that difference in sound quality they won't be able to perceive.
But... Spotify streams at 320kbps (Vorbis), which is WAY more than enough until you start spending $500+ on your setup.
Why is that even relevant?
This surely does not rule out the possibility that certain classes of compression artifacts are lost only on low end headphones, but I really would not give compressed sources a free pass on wonky headphones. If you listen to compressed audio, you don't want post-codec inaccuracies.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/huma...
I ended up with a pair for home, pair for travel, pair for work, and a pair that go in my laptop case. I gave the other pairs to friends and family.
Headphone preference is just as much a personal preference as it is picking the 'best' ones. Some just aren't comfortable on certain shape/size heads or ears. You might just not like how certain pairs sound.
Conversely, from listening to Beats I've found them to be overly cheap feeling and the sound quality isn't on par with their competition.
I'm sure this has been discussed on HN before.
The rest are simply concerned with scientific measurement of the system. Does it produce a reasonably flat sound in frequency and phase that remains undistorted at volumes at which they listen to music.
The latter camp will highly rate headphones (or any other piece of audio equipment) that can produce a the full bandwidth of human hearing while keeping distortion low over a useful range of amplitude.
Comfort, cost, and construction quality would also be considered in the ranking.
On the whole, though, there absolutely is a sort of "audiophile" who spends thousands and thousands of perfectly good dollars on completely ridiculous paraphernalia, because a combination of placebo effect and escalating commitment convinces him that it makes his music sound better. I don't have time to dig up a complete selection of background for you, but here's a good place to start, with a fair selection of jumping-off points for further study:
http://goodmath.scientopia.org/2011/12/30/audiophiles-and-th...
The major difference between the fellow described in this article, and the more usual sort of placebo audiophile, is that this fellow happened actually to be an electrical engineer, and thus capable of demonstrating to himself that he was full of it. Unfortunately, such acumen seems to be rather rare.
... oh wait.
What I look for is simple: comfort, durability, isolation (in both directions), neutrality. In that order.
Comfort - I swear by circumaural designs. Some people apparently don't have a problem with pads resting on the pinna, but I find this painful after an hour or two. Isolation is also worse with supra-aural designs.
Durability - most headphones break quickly. The cables are usually the first to go, around the strain relief on either end. I've had some pairs that used a 1/8" minijack on one of the earpieces, making the cable replaceable - until the jack failed and couldn't be replaced without breaking open the earpiece. Good headphones will survive any reasonable drop; really good ones will survive being drop-kicked.
Isolation - if you can't hear the signal over environmental noise, why bother monitoring? If you're recording or working in a theatrical environment, you don't want your headset audio leaking out either. In an office setting, nobody wants to hear your music, no matter how awesoem your jams are. Closed-ear designs are the way to go.
Neutrality - Relatively flat frequency response. But this is way down the list of priorities for me. A great sounding set of headphones that breaks after 2 months, or is uncomfortable to wear, or doesn't block the sound of your workstation's fans is not a great set of headphones.
tl;dr - Beyerdynamic DT250 is my headset of choice. My current pair is almost 15 years old and the only thing that's failed on them is the pleather on the headband, which has fallen off its fabric backing. Still on the original earpads and cable, and they're as good as the day I bought them. Stay away from consumer brands and models; like fast-fashion clothes, they are not built to last.
(This is also why you should buy your cookware from a restaurant supply store, not williams-sonoma.)
I purchased a set of HIFIMan cans with planar drivers on sale for around $500, and I haven't looked back. They sound better than any other >$1000 cans I've listened to, bar none.
That said, they offer no isolation whatsoever, so you do need a quiet environment in which to use them.
The most telling parts are about getting the details from faint instruments, especially at lower volumes. For example the opening part of Beethoven's 9th has very faint sound of violins, and it's often missing on consumer-grade speakers. Ideally I would also compare how wide is the stage and thus how well the instruments are separated, but I don't have the budget for that kind of equipment, if that exists at all.
For my budget, I ended up getting a pair of studio monitors Event 2020bas for speakers, and Etimotic Research as in-ears headphones. YMMV.
I'm not sure any headphones can give you a proper 3D sound stage of the sort that you can get with good loudspeakers (especially the LS3/5a). For that, I use recordings of Shostakovitch's string quartets to see how well I can locate (and distinguish between) four instruments.
Although I'm not fond of it as music, Ravel's Bolero is also a good test track for headphones, because of the way the same theme is repeated by many different instruments.
I use Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b noise-cancelling headphones, but I don't think there's one headset that suits everyone, any more than there's one pair of speakers, or one car....
Any particular recording you would advise? I mean a specific record of known-good quality, preferably on iTunes, Amazon, or similar. I often find myself spending a lot of time listening to different records of the same piece, just to make sure I get a good one.
One strike against this set is that most or possibly all of the CDs have been produced from LPs. Having bought the vinyl versions (twice!) many decades ago, this is good for me but not so good for you.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shostakovich-String-Quartets-1-13-D/...
One thing about newer recordings is that they may well be closer-miked and not have such a "natural" sound stage.