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The thing I've learned is that headphones and IEMs can sound completely different to different people, just because of differences in the shape of your ears and ear canal.

I bought some custom IEMs and had the opportunity to test ~10 of the super high-end options from several different brands. I found that there was no correlation whatsoever between price or even brand and how good they sounded to me. The technician I was working with said he observed the same thing all the time in the professionals he worked with. He'd have musicians on the same instruments in the same roles in the same group come in and all walk put with completely different products.

IEMs are the most personal but even headphones have the problem.

Because of this, my recommendation is that you make purchasing decisions in one of two ways:

- Learn how to EQ to get a sound you like. Purchase based on objective measurements like frequency response curves to find products that require minimal EQ to match your preference.

- Only buy after listening, or buy, listen and return if that's an option for you.

I recommend avoiding purchases based on reviews that make subjective judgements about the sound.

If you want to learn more, I like the videos/articles/forums of Headphones.com and Crinacle.

I came to the same conclusion a while ago. You can get a lot of mileage by tweaking EQ. For me almost all headphones felt flat until I tried a bunch of studio monitors. They are not portable but I’ve been using a cheap AKG K72 pair at home and it has been great. Your experience may vary but do try a bunch of options, as suggested by parent.

As someone who still occasionally mixes for a living, designs and builds audio hardware: Audiophiles are full of shit and this has been scientifically shown probably since the 90s (various AES studies conducted on the perception of CD quality).

Of course there is a difference between cheap gear and decent gear. But the difference between decent gear and audiophile gear is non-perceptible in a blind ABX test. And here is the thing: especially in the elctronics side (so amps) decent gear has become increasingly cheaper.

Audiophiles also tend to have downright naive claims about sound, like the silver cable sounding more clear and "silvery" while something with gold would then sound warmer and richer. All while they measure the same down to inperceptable differences. And of course the device with the walnut case sounds warm because wood is warm and so on.

It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.

> It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.

sometimes i remember about this space and laugh. i guess i found thinking i would find some data for a speaker i was looking for back in the days but it turned out into audiophiles typing their absurd: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php

another funny demographics is mechanical keyboard enthusiasts by rating sound of switches and discussing over minimal numbers of gf (grams-force) in same type of switches (linear, clicky etc.). often times there are videos showing sounds of hundreds of USD keyboards with owners hunting and pecking hahaha

Nothing you've said here is wrong, but maybe for some the wood accent really does affect an aesthetic to the experience. You're talking about objective measures of signals, the warm wood people are talking about subjective experience.

Yup, there's been a ton of experiments like this done over the years where people ran A/B tests between golden-ears audio gear and the cheapest garbage they could find, for example wire coathangers used to connect the speakers up. In blind tests, people couldn't tell the difference.

As others have pointed out, the biggest thing to focus on is the speakers or headphones, at least up to a point: $70,000 Woo-woo Labs Reference Monitor speakers aren't going to sound any better than the decent set of Wharfedales you found on eBay.

Unfortunately, (1) is not always true. I have in ears surpass some speakers, over the ears which surpass some IEMs, etc.

For (2), again it depends. Some companies build amazing things for cheap, some companies build crapshoot for tons of money. The trick is to find the sound you like for the cheapest price.

For (3), the simplest chain is the best(est) chain. I used to have a high-end 2x10 band eq which sat between pre and power stages. I removed it, and I'm happier. Unless I'm listening vinyl, I bypass loudness and tone circuits even.

There's a funny thing in audio. When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore. A good Hi-Fi system is meant to create enjoyment, not motivation to spend more money on more equipment or sources.

Lastly, for casual listening, even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail.

> When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore.

It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.

> even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail

My information might be outdated, but aren’t those the kind that sort of sit loosely at the outside of your ear canal (like the original iPod headphones)? If so, those are the one kind of headphones that I find basically worthless. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but in the iPod era I could never understand how people tolerated those when you can get vastly better sound for a few bucks. I figured the distinctive apple-brand headphones were kind of a status symbol.

AirPod pro sounds fine, though.

I personally dislike wearing isolated earphones for longer periods of time since they short-circuit the ear canal and I hear every bone in my jaw area and neck after some point.

3rd generation Airpods, while don't isolate, sound pretty epic for what they are. When sitting at home, I can listen to some music and genuinely enjoy it, and I like their non-isolating nature because it helps me to hear traffic around while walking with them. The only problem is, talking on the phone with them might get a little noisy for the other party, but I believe phone hardware filters some of it.

When compared to their rivals, they really have higher resolution, and enjoyable sound balance. Also, iPhone scans your ears with FaceID camera to profile them, so they are also tuned for your ears from get go. This makes positional audio really shine, too.

The original iPod buds were pretty flat and tinny. I used to use a pair Sennheisers (I don't remember the model but they were pretty high end) to be able to enjoy what iPods had to offer, back in the day.

1) I wouldn't 100% agree with this. It's not that speakers sound "better" than headphones, it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology (e.g. shape of their ears, ear canal) but the other things do. When you use headphones, you still use your whole ear canal but the sound is distorted by how the headphones interact with your ears, particularly the pinna. When you use IEMs, you only use part of your ear canal and skip the pinna entirely, so the sound can't sound as natural as speakers do unless you compensate to reintroduce the effect of the pinna/canal. This is all possible to varying degrees. EQ helps a lot and there are ways to measure HRTF as well.

2) Absolutely and it's constantly getting better.

> it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology

But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.

> they do interact with the environment.

Yup. Got plaster walls, vinyl flooring, narrow room, different sizes of rattling single-pane windows…

Neighbors with leaf blowers…

I really like my noise canceling headphones. :)

> The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk

Music lovers buy audio equipment to listen to their music.

Audiophiles buy music to listen to their audio equipment.

> provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music

I love that you ended your rant with an audiophile myth :)

Lossless isn't even diminishing returns better. People can't tell the difference in an ABX test.

For 3) I would argue all that stuff is where you should spend the least of your money. The biggest improvement comes from the speakers or headphones themselves.

Dumb question but what's the difference between headphones and over the ears? I looked it up but I'm still confused

Not a dumb question... I phrased it badly. I was referring to over the ears as something like Koss Porta Pros or similar.

Then I think I disagree with the specifics of that statement, or am I reading this wrong? The porta pros have to sound better than the average IEM, or think of the KSC 75 for another quite nice option in that space. Especially for the price. And I'm not even sure that speakers sound better than headphones most of the time.

+1 though for the thought that the medium makes the biggest part of the sound quality.

Interesting, even with Yaxi pads I could not get the Porta Pros to my liking. Compared to the average IEM I thought the IEMs sounded much cleaner and more technically accurate. Stepping up to something like Letshuoer S12s absolutely blew them out of the water (more expensive, I know). Maybe I just falsely attributed that to an inherent advantage of sealing off the ear canals. Will give the Porta Pros another try.

Porta pros specifically seem to be a subjective thing, many describe them as a bit muddy, while some like that as an easy listing mode. The KSC 75 though really impressed me, for me they replaced the ath-m50x. Less base (partly because of no clamping pressure, I read, so changeable with a headband). I do have a cheap chinese hifi IEM I do like and would understand if someone preferred that one to the kSC 75, to further complicate things, but I stuck to them.

Also read positive things about the moondrop old fashioned, to mention an alternative to the porta pro in a very close form factor, not the strange ear clips that are the KSC 75.

I'd argue that the additional space should give the form factor an advantage, though sure, being closer to the ear might also be one. And no doubt, given the huge popularity of IEMs the technology must have seen a lot of progress, so I might be wrong.

What is an average IEM for you? I had a Porta Pro in the past, but IEM got so much better in the last 10 years that your statement made me curious

Fair point. It's a huge field and I have no defensible option there. I was thinking of the wireless Anker IEM and the various older ones that accompanied my phones, even though as mentioned in the other comment I'm aware of higher class (and sometimes even cheap) IEMs that do exist. But still, I wouldn't generalize it like that, I really do like the KSC 75 a lot and think those kind of headphones are too often overlooked despite their quality, which collides with classifying them so low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones#Ear_adaption

#2 - Can be. Or it might actually make a difference.

We had 2 "living room" setups for a while, upstairs and down. We eventually realized how dumb that was, and condensed to 1.

Doing that, we stopped using some really expensive speakers and started using some that were 1/5 the price because we couldn't tell the difference.

Then, one day, I brought those expensive speakers down and set them up. Wow. There was a definite difference after all. I'm not an audiophile and can't tell you what that difference was, just that both of us could immediately tell the expensive speakers were better, and we were not going back to the cheaper ones. Nothing else in the setup changed.

Also, I eventually upgraded the receiver to something that could better drive those speakers. An upgrade from $600 to about $900. And there was a definite difference there, too. The older box should have been enough, but it just wasn't.

Do I recommend that someone on a budget spend $4000 instead of $1500? Nope. It's not enough difference. But for stuff we already had, or for someone that really cares, it's definitely better.

You can't make a bad speaker good, but also: people spend lots on gear, but forget the room. The room can break a good speaker easily.

Also... 'good' is something you first need to agree on when talking with people. Some people like to have 'distorted' playback (compared to the original), because they "like" that better. That is the moment retailers can sell objectively worse but overpriced stuff.

Genelecs for instance are very detailed, neutral etc (there is a reason you see them everywhere in professional settings), but consumers don't necessarily have an appetite for 'objectivity'.

Your hot takes are all wrong. Especially your last parenthetical. I mean, I'm not doubting that you may have forgotten to turn on lossless audio! But what I think you're implying, that lossless audio is clearly distinguishable from 256kbps-ish streaming audio when played over bluetooth, has not been supported by many listening tests of AAC even at much at lower bitrates.

The equipment definitely makes a difference but you're right about diminishing returns. In fact, at a certain point it's zero returns and all gimmick unfortunately.

That said, you don't need to break the bank for good stuff and it does make a huge difference. There's also a lot of marketing out there for bad equipment. Apple air pods and beats headphones and more.

I don’t have Airpods, but I turned on my stereo the other day after listening to music through the speakers in my monitor and it was quite a difference.

I get the aspect of "shiny things are shiny and I like shiny things so I buy them" but the things that piss me off, like actually genuienly make me mad at the whole thing are actual scams like "audio tuned" ethernet switches or "designed for music" SSDs. These are actual products that sell for a lot of money, and they physically cannot make any difference to the audio played from/through them. It's worse than snake oil.

It's worse than that, some of them are actually dangerous! Amazon seems to have removed this review but here's a copy of the original text:

  1.0 out of 5 stars

  Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2010

  We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

  PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.

  DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

  We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marvelled. Then the… whispers… began.

  Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.

  No, no, please! I don’t want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!

  WHY CAN’T I FORGET THE WORDS???

  We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

  Do not use the cables!

  8,955 people found this helpful

My teacher said headphones were superior to speakers, easier to control

honestly if you use speakers 90% of the sound quality is in your room and where you put your speakers, not the speakers themselves. the room is where your money should go.

for the speakers, get active speakers, as big as you can, and connect them to a dac that costs more than 100usd, and you're good to go. after that it's diminishing returns land.

also by virtue of you having 2 spaced ears, stereo speakers will have sound cancellations (in the ~1k hz region? i dont remember very well) for mid signal.