It's time to level up headphone tech | Hacker News Reader

It's time to level up headphone tech

chrismaury.com

129 pointschrmaury45 comments

While I agree with the general sentiment expressed (people buy poor quality headphones that leak music and proceed to seemingly obliviously blast their music for all to hear), please consider investigating higher quality headphones & their tech.

From a well known audiophile guide to headphones:

"In general it's best to avoid products made by Skullcandy, Bose, Beats, or Monster unless otherwise specified...These companies spend a lot of money on advertising and looks rather than quality. That isn't to say these companies haven't put out headphones worth buying, the Monster Turbine Coppers are actually fantastic IEMs, it's just that a lot of the time you're paying a premium for the name."

The same guide recommends the following in the $300-500 budget range: IEMs: Westone UM3X, Sennheiser IE8, Shure SE535, Audio Technica CK100

Open: Sennheiser HD600, Sony MDR-SA5000, AKG K601, Sennheiser HD650

Closed: Audio Technica ATH-ES10, Denon D5000, Ultrasone Pro 900

Box stores like Best Buy are consumer goods stores. If you want to buy a mid or high end DSLR, you won't find it inside a Best Buy location. If you want to buy mid or high end headphones, you won't find them inside a Best Buy location. If you want to buy a mid to high end computer monitor, you won't find it inside a Best Buy location. I suspect this is true for many, many niches.

Here's the guide in question: http://www.head-fi.org/a/headphone-buying-guide

Head-fi is a great resource.

I tend to run IEMs myself, my target being good fit, good sound, and blocking background noise.

I started with Shure E2Cs and moved on to Westones. With IEMs, it really comes down to preference of fit and sound signature. Westones are my preferred between the two, though going for the higher end, while sounding great, I can't quite justify...

I also recommend checking out the [semi-open] Beyerdynamic DT 880 pros (~$300). They're really crisp, with great clear bass reproduction, and have an amazingly 'analytical' sound with their wide soundstage.

Absolutely one of the best pair of headphones you could get if you do any sort of audio mixing work, but they're really nice for casual listening as well.

> amazingly 'analytical' sound with their wide soundstage.

You sound like a HiFi journo.

Techie here:

Sennheiser HD-25 II's here. Paid 35GBP new (on offer one fine day). I can run the cable over with my desk chair 100 times a day for 8 years and they still work like the day they were bought...

I guess that's because I'm also a musician and do a lot of audio mixing work. I figured since we were on the subject of 'quality' that would imply having good sound, which for me means a pair of headphones that lets me clearly analyze what's going on in a busy mix.

but hey, for basic every-day usage, I like my $15 JVC Marshmallows just fine. I havent tried your HD-25s, but Sennheiser does make some good 'bang-for-your-buck' products, and I especially like their PX 200s (except for that silly volume control they have).

I have used the HD-25s since my DJing days, they're fantastic IMO.

IMHO, the DT880s are overrated for the price. You are better off getting similarly priced Sennheisers.

I got them because they were closed, and I expected to be able to use them in public without outside sound leaking in. In practice, they let in about as much sound as the open Grado HP-1s that I used to have.

The HP-1s are much more analytical and accurate for mixing work. (yes, I know that they now cost a lot more than $300, but they didn't cost that much more when I first bought them back in 2003).

For public listening, nothing beats Etymotic ER-4P IEM with foam tips. They block out -40dB of sound with no noise canceling technology, so there is no distortion. I don't know of any other IEMs that block out that much noise (there may be other ones today, but back when I bought them they blocked out the most noise).

As far as best sound, I think the AKG K-1000s were the best sound (and a bargain at their original MSRP), but the requirement to use full-size speaker amps to drive them was tedious.

Unfortunately it's a bit hard to find places that let you try out high-end headphones around here, so I'm sure there are plenty of other comprable headphones. Which Sennheisers would you recommend that are comprable to the 880s? I know of the HD650s, but I didn't have anywhere to try them out, and a lot of reviews I came across mentioned that they were a little on the warm-side and better suited for smooth music (I work with Metal). Plus, I got my 880s for about $270, and the best deal on 650s I could find was still close to $500, which was out of my price range at the time...

The 595s, 600s and 650s are all great. Personally I'd go with a 600 or 650 bought used off another head-fi member who happen to be the first user. Both can be had used in like new condition for around $300. Keep an eye on the for sale forums there. The market for them is pretty liquid and it shouldn't take more than a week to find one in great condition.

Both the sennheisers and the DT880 benefit from an amplifier. A decent small desktop amplifier can be had for $150-200. Go ahead and buy the amp used on head-fi. They don't really depreciate in value with use like headphones and can be sold later for the same price.

An awesome headphone rig with used components can be had for about $500 total ($300 on the headphones and $200 on the amp). Beyond that point it really is subject to diminishing returns and gets highly subjective and bikesheddy. This is coming from someone that sold his Grados and AKG for more than $3000 for both. As I said, I now just have IEMs, but when I buy another headphone again, my plan is to get the HD-650s used from a first owner or if I'm feeling particularly giddy and very flush with cash maybe the HD-800 used from a first owner that can be had for a $1000 if you keep your eyes peeled for them. Either way, I intend it to be my last headphone purchase, because it's easy to get caught up in the equipment and forget about the music.

Also, I wouldn't mix with any closed headphones, metal or otherwise, except maybe those two top of line sony models that are both discontinued. I never mixed myself, but everyone I know who did stuck with open headphones in a quiet room or studio monitors for serious audio work.

TBH, until they stop making disposable, easily broken headphones with non-repairable connectors, I'm not going to pay over £10 for them.

I have signed up for this KickStarter project though: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/legendary/earbuds-time-t...

NB: I'm not an audiophile - most of my listening is podcasts.

I've had the same pair of mid-range Shure's for 4 years. I take appropriate care of my gear though.

The "beats phenomenon" is a fashion thing, not an audio tech thing. People pay $400 for beats because it makes them look cool and shows they are not poor. Much like a Rolex is not about telling time.

I think there is a market for headphone tech, but I would look to the market for Bose noise-canceling headphones as a proxy, not beats.

There are some seriously large markets for headphone tech and they have nothing to do with being able to drown out the noise of a 747 engine or the background noise at a starbucks.

Take a look at the C4OPS headset system by Silynx[1]. The C4OPS and others like it are headset systems for combat communications. There are a lot of sounds in combat; some of the loud ones (gunshots/explosions) you would like to hear at a lower volume / with less fidelity and some quiet noises (teammate whisper/footsteps behind you) you would like to be more aware of.

[1] http://sofrep.com/4246/act-of-valor-radio-comms-2/

Its easy to say Beats is purely a fashion phenomenon, but I think the headphones actually sound very good for the genres I listen to, to my ears. It shouldnt be forgotten that these genres are the most listened to by the target demographic as well. I think What HiFi summed it up perfectly "Brilliant at what they do well; if you like that, you’ll love them".

Existing hearing aids have directional microphones, can distinguish between talking and background noise

Not very well - they can perform well enough to make speech intelligible (and it doesn't take much, human hearing is geared toward recognizing patterns) but the quality is fairly low. That's fine for hearing aids, because low-quality intelligibility is better than no intelligibility, but the technology is nowhere near ready for the quality that consumers with normal hearing would expect.

This might make a decent research project for the MIT Media Lab or Fraunhofer Institute, but it's an idea that's a long way from being ready for primetime.

I got a fairly advanced hearing aid recently and originally thought they might be useful for listening to music too, like a good pair of headphones. This turns out not to be the case. Hearing aids don't have any bass. When listening to music, the best thing I've found is to use a regular speaker system along with hearing aids that allow some sound to go through them (the earpiece should have a reasonably large vent hole, rather than acting more like an earplug). Also, the DSP algorithms are tuned for speech so I got mine programmed with a "music mode", which turns most of that off for listening to music.

There are other limitations - the hearing aids don't support bluetooth directly (the antennas are too weak). Instead you have to use a streamer where the antenna is built into the lanyard that goes around your neck, and the quality is suitable for voice only. Since I don't make phone calls much, bluetooth support turned out not to be worth the trouble.

Don't get me wrong - the tech is pretty interesting, and I'd love to be able to program the DSP. But you need to know about the limitations when extrapolating.

Sound leakage is an inevitable consequence of good sound quality. Put simply, those excess soundwaves ultimately have to go somewhere, and it's a choice between jettisoning them into the environment and annoying people, trying to absorb them in the body of the headphone and losing quality, or trying to produce less of them in the first place, also losing quality.

Very cheap headphones leak sound because they are very cheap and their designers and users don't care either way. Expensive, $500+ headphones leak sound because they are meant to be used in a music production context as a substitute for a $1000+ set of speakers, where one doesn't care about leakage.

If you are walking around campus, sitting on a train or generally doing anything except sitting in a chair with your eyes closed then it is pointless buying a very very expensive set of headphones because your physical movement and the input from your other senses will influence your perception of the music to an extent greater than the noise floor of the less expensive headphones you could've bought.

To be honest, headphones schmedphones. High quality monitor speakers are more exciting. There's a limit to what you can achieve with those tiny drivers. Far better to covet things such as this:

http://www.genelec.com/products/main-monitors/1036a/

Flat response from 19-22000hz at 136db. Oh dear.

If £20,000 is a bit much for you, consider something like this:

http://www.adam-audio.com/en/pro-audio/products/a8x/descript...

Both (mostly) true and missing the point.

The point of the article was to say that with the current capabilities of smartphones, and televisions, etc, if we could wire it all up to a piece of equipment similar to a hearing aid, it would improve our lives. Sound quality really is a secondary characteristic to this for the purpose of the article.

Fair point. I was just trying to address some mentions of sound leakage here and in the article, and to point out that with audio a lot of the time we are up against physical limits.

This is something I've put a lot of thought into over the last couple of years, but I've never gotten around to figuring out an actual model or design.

My basic premises are:

* hearing aids are commonly moulded to fit the individual, and thus have exceptionally good noise rejection.

* They are designed to be worn for long periods of time without discomfort.

* The ability to selectively attenuate/amplify certain signals would be very useful.

* Being able to pre-process incoming audio would be extremely useful for suppressing transients (say, gunfire, nearby aircraft, roadworks) to protect the user.

* A phased microphone array could be used to provide directional selectivity, and to determine and recreate the position of the original source.

* You can transparently mix other signals into your normal hearing, such as music, phone calls, games, etc.

In terms of tech, there's really 3 things to figure out:

1. Can you achieve good isolation (external noise attenuation) whilst providing high quality audio playback? Ideally the quality would be indistinguishable from not wearing them, but physics might disagree.

2. Can you build a relatively compact microphone array with positional discrimination capabilities at or beyond the human ear?

3. Can you build a DSP with the necessary discriminator/transient suppression/mixing capabilities within a realistic power/space/heat budget?

4. Can you build the whole thing into a per-ear unit or headphone unit, with wireless links to some sort of controller, plus sources for input (e.g. a phone or music player)

5. Can you make money out of it? (Given how useful it could be to especially police/military, I'm going to go with 'yes')

> * hearing aids are commonly moulded to fit the individual, and thus have exceptionally good noise rejection.

> * They are designed to be worn for long periods of time without discomfort.

There are already headphones you can get that are moulded to the individual ear. Touring musicians use them on stage for monitors.

The problem with this is that extended hearing aid or in-ear headphone usage is not really the best thing for your ears. Your ears are supposed to ventilate. It's especially problematic if you have an ear infection.

Yes! Thanks for the post.

I really enjoy scifi books that focus on how technology can integrate and augment the human body. Though these books often talk of brain implants and genetic modification, the path to that destination (if we do achieve it) will almost certainly start with non-invasive versions.

I think that smartphones with ubiquitous internet and gps were the first big step in this direction. Some of the next steps will be discrete/invisible headphones that we can always be wearing, glasses/contact lenses with a display, and (hopefully) some sort of easy input method that doesn't require talking out loud or looking at a screen. Combine this with the ability to record and search our entire lives (if we so choose) in addition to the internet and we're 90% there with easily foreseeable technology.

Thank you! This is the point I was trying to make in the article. I don't think I articulated it all that well. The technology exists, it's just branded incorrectly.

I regret that I only have one upvote to give.

There's one big problem with continuing to make headphones smaller- until we can connect directly to the nervous system, the smaller the 'phone, the harder it will be to maintain audio quality. (At least using traditional audio reproduction methods)

The only thing that crops to mind other than nerve stimulation would be mounting a driver on your eardrum. Think of how a piezoelectric transducer works, and replace the discs with your eardrum.

> Some of the next steps will be discrete/invisible headphones that we can always be wearing

I just ordered Sony Ericsson WM600 bluetooth receiver (35 EUR with shipping) for my miniature Klipsch X10 in-ear headphones (they are amazing, btw). Will make an ideal discrete set, I think.

Ultimate ears UE-7 IEMs, custom molded to the listener have excellent noise rejection and eliminate the need for any sort of noise-cancelling microphone/DSP hardware as they're molded to your ears and block out the world.

If you want to do mastering with IEMs, the UE Reference monitors were developed with Columbia studios and are extremely accurate.

Forgive the fact that UE was bought by Logitech, who manufactures less than stellar user interface devices. Ultimate Ears are amazing.

I'm not even sure what the poster is looking for here. Simple physics get in the way of most of the lower cost designs. You can't block out the world without a proper fit (molds), you can't pack a ton of circuitry into the IEMs without size being a factor, and it requires tuning and alignment to make these devices accurate.

There's a reason why UE's are expensive - Someone has to hand build and align them. It's worth it.

http://blog.logitech.com/2009/06/11/behind-the-scenes-ultima...

I'm not sure headphone tech is in need of levelling up, or what the auther thinks is: "Existing hearing aides have directional microphones, can distinguish between talking and background noise, and connect pretty seamlessly with other devices."

What good is a directional microphone and why (and lacking a microphone, how?) would a headphone distinguish between voices and background noise? My headphone already connects seamlessly using an ubiquitous connector. It's wired, yes, but bluetooth options do exist and I'm quite happy not having another battery to worry about.

As far as I know, there is already some crossover between in-ear headphone and hearing aid technology. Excellent in-ear phones are available for less than 100 USD. Some people don't know of them, some people don't want to spend more than 20 bucks, some people prefer over/on-the-ears.

"What good is a directional microphone and why would a headphone distinguish between voices and background noise?"

Lacking any context there is no way to answer your question. Tools do not have any intrinsic value, a tool's value is derived from its application to a problem.

It seems as if you are approaching headsets purely as a means of music reproduction. There are many applications of headsets where audio fidelity is not the only/primary concern. The reference to augmented reality in the first paragraph seems to imply that the author is concerned with more than just how crisp Jerry's guitar sounds at the beginning of Fire on the Mountain. Don't get me wrong I love crispy guitar solos but they are not the end all be all of headsets.

For a really neat and demanding headset application take a look at the C4OPS headset system by Silynx[1]. The C4OPS and others like it are headset systems for combat communications. There are a lot of sounds in combat; some of the loud ones (gunshots/explosions) you would like to hear at a lower volume / with less fidelity and some quiet noises (teammate whisper/footsteps behind you) you would like to be more aware of.

[1] http://sofrep.com/4246/act-of-valor-radio-comms-2/

The article (which I quoted and which serves as the context for my post) refers the the state of headphone tech, not headset tech. He only ever talks about headphones, and the brief introductory reference to another blog entry about AR seemed fairly beside the point and the theme isn't picked up again.

I guess he might have been talking about headsets, although once again I'm not sure the tech is in need of an innovation boost from the hearing aide industry, it seems to progress just fine, even outside the realm of speciality gear for more efficiently killing people.

"even outside the realm of speciality gear for more efficiently killing people."

FYI, this discussion is made possible because of DARPAnet and other innovation boosts drawn from the realm of "more efficently killing people". So handwaving/ignoring tech.mil seems a little short sighted at the very least. But let's return to:

"What good is a directional microphone and why (and lacking a microphone, how?) would a headphone distinguish between voices and background noise?"

How about headphones for factory workers? Construction workers? Soccer moms/dads who want to listen to a book on tape while little johnny and 25 other 5 year olds clamber up and down and all over metal playground equipment? Scientists on safari in africa or bird watching in the amazon? News camera man operating in a nousy environment that needs to hear what the reporter is saying while monitoring the police-band/other coverage/updates from main news desk?

That's five examples that I can think of off the top of my head. But its not clear what field you are restricting the discussion to. That is why I asked what you meant by "what good is"? Without a problem/application it is impossible to identify the value of a technology.

What would the directional microphone do in those circumstances?

When I came up with the list I was considering your initial question about a directional microphone and "why distinguish between voices and background noise?" So some of my examples were not restricted to directional microphones only. Given the new constraints:

Factory workers: Increase awareness about the sounds of the machinery the worker is operating and ignore the sounds of nearby machines. In a more hostile/mobile environment where the worker does not need to be so in tune with their own machine the directional microphone could provide the same benefit as it does with construction workers.

Construction workers: amplify noises from directions where the worker is not looking and therefore increase awareness of threats from blind spots.

Bird watching in the amazon: Isolate/focus scientists hearing in the direction of the bird that they are observing. Thereby reducing the possibility that they attribute sounds/songs from other birds to the bird they are observing.

News camera man: increase ability to hear sounds in front of camera man and/or directions from reporter/crew members while reducing distraction of environmental sounds.

Why are you moving the goal posts?

I have wondered about this as well. Certainly the combination of an in-ear device and some external sensors would be killer at parties. Look at someone and tap your ear, they get a ping that you'd like to chat with them and you enable a conversation.

For the UX folks it would be interesting to design a chat UI where the inputs might be things like head tilt, nods, shakes, taps, and voice.

The smarts don't have to be in the hearing aid either. My phone and my tablet can be the 'processing' power with the WiFi/4G connection.

I've been thinking about this very thing.

Accellerometers and gyros in the headphones linked up to Openal for a 3d computer interface that doesn't require sight.

I recall President Laporte doing an interview at CES with a company producing headphones that already perform this functionality, and then some. I can't recall the name at the moment (CES was basically 85% headphones, too many to recall), but I know the TWiT CES coverage is up on the YouTubes for anyone less lazy than I.

"President Laporte"? Please tell me that is not the dude from screensavers. Is this really something people say now?

It's a running joke, because he was voted President of the Internet in a TechRepublic poll a few years ago.

Phonak has done a good job of balancing hearing aid business with Assisted Listening platforms, including an iCom system for TV.

http://www.phonak.com/com/b2c/en/products/accessories/commun...

Aren't there plenty of very good headphones out there already? Just look at an Audiophile forum (and they won't be recommending Beats. That's just marketing/hype/stupidity).

I have a pair of Shure SE535 earphones and they are fantastic. Perhaps the ergonomics could be improved, but I cannot imagine how the audio quality could be better.

I don't think the point is audio quality. Hearing aids do more than just have good audio quality; they serve multiple purposes, like connecting to phones or TVs. Presumably, one could build vastly better headphones by making them easily connect to whatever device you want, wirelessly.

For example, many gyms have TVs playing, and have a small FM radio station so you can tune into the audio with your MP3 player. Perhaps wireless headphones could support this seamlessly. Or your headphones could pick up an audio track played at a national park or tourist attraction, giving an audio tour.

We can do all these things currently, but they require hacks. Perhaps headphones could support them natively instead.

Perhaps headphones could support them natively instead.

You're basically talking about expanding the use of telecoil technology.

Or Apple's Airplay

not to mention that if I can get "hearing aids" made for music but still looking like hearing aids I can look confused and yell "HUH!?" every time someone I don't want to talk to says something to me.

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