John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

My guess would be neodymium magnets.

On the value side, I totally agree. Early 2000 offerings were just... sad, partly due to the over-digitalization (I own a Marantz from that time, which forces many optimizations, Dolby support and similar, but in the end sounds considerably worse than its cheaper predecessors).

For how I see it, in the last year there has been a huge increase of sound quality over price, probably partly due to the growing Chi-Fi competition (especially on headphones).

I bought some sad Sennheiser IEMs in 2015 for around €160, and in 2022 they sound like garbage compared to some €40 offerings from China IEM brands (KZ, TRN, ... whatever).

Also, awareness of Bluetooth and wireless sound quality has thankfully brought to something beyond extremely expensive devices that just sounded like excessive DSP and compression.

Hadn't noticed before but speakers haven't suffered the same fate as other tech where additions and improvements of tangential aspects haven't affected the core performance. A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. Your new printer might have Wi-Fi and bluetooth, but jams and leaks too often and probably has increasingly restrictive cartridge DRM.

A typical $30 bluetooth speaker has great battery life, is portable, usually rugged and often visually well designed too, and still sound as nice or nicer than I (non-audiophile) would expect from such a versatile budget device.

It depends: I think the advent of MP3 pushed the concept of psychoacoustics* into the spotlight and the smartphone "revolution" made it mainstream.

Therefore speakers just sound like they would sound good without being physically "better". But for example your average smartphone is just one update away from sounding like crap.

Neodymium magnets helped to make them more powerful wrt size, and I suspect newer materials also made easier building small full range speakers where one would have needed at least separate woofer and tweeter, which wasn't convenient in cheap devices. The membranes of many small speakers from portable devices look like they're made of two concentric sections having different consistency and optimized for higher and lower frequencies, so that the same speaker can reproduce a much larger spectrum. That's probably far from being anything audiophile, still much much better than the quality of any similarly priced speaker from say the 80s.

Yes, they did. What used to be considered very expensive state-of-the-art architecture is now pretty much universal: each driver with their own amplifier and electronic crossovers. The perfection of h-bridge amplification has been a major leap forward.

I suspect a lot of the improvements have come from advancements in simulation fidelity and optimization techniques. The raw amount of computing power for computational fluid dynamics has gone up orders of magnitude, and there's been a lot of improvements in machine learning over the last 10 years. 20 years ago, it was still very much an art of designing a shape, fabricating it, trying it, then refining it. Nowadays a lot of that refinement can be done virtually. Not that someone at Boss or whatever is an ML expert, but the person that wrote their CAD tools might have been.

Also, there has been recent emphasis on rather aggressive software based automatic/factory equalization and optimization for human perception rather than flatness. That's an incremental improvement, but like smartphone camera photos, it can really elevate the experience.

Yes. It's not just fancy magnets, but that helps. The industry got much better at modeling and designing dynamic speakers about 20 years ago. Low cost IC amplifiers also got a lot better in the last twenty years, and anything decent that's fully integrated (i.e. name brand connected speaker devices, airpods, the speaker in your phone, etc) is going to have shockingly good DSP equalization by the standards of even 2005-2010.

I don't know about headphones per headphones, though. All the audiophile-approved headphones I have around here sound much better than my airpods and my Bose noise canceling things for travel, and they're all 20+ year old designs. That includes the Koss Porta Pro (back on topic!), by the way, which I like a lot better than anything I've listened to that cost less than an approximate order of magnitude more. There certainly seems to be a market for headphones that cost more than a pair of Sennheiser 650s these days though.

I hope you are referring to their lifetime warranty and replaced them free of charge when they broke! Top company. https://koss.com/blogs/stories/use-koss-headphones-limited-l...

My first half decent pair of earbuds were the Spark Plugs and I had several pairs of PortaPros before I realised they were blasting whoever was sitting near me on the tube! Good bits of kit and exceptional value for money.

My first ever "wireless headphones" were a a pair of standard PortaPros with a cheap bluetooth DAC taped to the top of them, got many strange looks, but it was a fun setup!

I've also had multiple pairs and they've all broken within a year from sitting-at-desk usage. The frame is surprisingly sturdy but the internal/external wires are absolute garbage, not suitable for frequent travel at all. They sounded good while they were alive, though.

I have a pair of esp/950 which are getting a bit old in the tooth. Very nice headphones, but also very expensive. I've been dithering between buying a new pair of headphones without buying a new amp, if that's possible, or then just getting rid of the entire package and buying something cheaper.

Doubtful. You're probably into the range of diminishing returns with those. Switching will get you something different, and possibly more to your tastes, or more comfortable, not necessarily objectively better.

I personally love the sound of electrostatic speakers and would try an affordable pair of electrostatic headphones as a step up from that class of open-back dynamic headphones if I were in the market today, but I don't listen to headphones as much as I used to.

What’s “best” is, of course, quite subjective. That said, I tried a bunch around that price-point, and the Focal Clear was my favorite. I had the AKG k702s, and the Clear was a substantial step up.

Objectively, Sennheiser HD600 (closest to harman FR, low distortion, distortion is shaped to avoid midrange).

Subjectively, depends on the person. A majority prefers HD600, while some swear by the HD650, a colored (less neutral, warmer) version of it; I do prefer HD600 myself, while I've heard both extensively.

In terms of sound quality, I want to say any of the planar magnetic headphones. It's hard to beat the agility and clarity of planar magnetic with dynamic drivers without spending a lot more money.

But planar magnetic headphones tend to be quite heavy and bulky, and you might be willing to sacrifice planar magnetic sound quality for comfort.

We have one of these and 3 pairs of KPH30i. All fantastic headphones for under $30.

Cool thing about the KPH30i is that it has the in-line mic so they are perfect for work meetings as well.

You don’t need to go back and forth between a work headset and music headphones— just use this for everything and it sounds great !!

Impressive. I had 7 KSC75s over a 10 year span and all of them had broken wires after a year or two of heavy usage. Totally worthy it.

Sadly the latest one I bought had a considerably lower audio quality so I barely used it... And it still broke just by sitting around in a drawer.

Was news to me!