Harman and Dr. Sean Olive are reshaping headphone sound (2025)
crutchfield.com
crutchfield.com
A better headphone/speaker in ideal room might be able to deliver better reproduction, but beyond that with lossless digital source and spec-conformant player, the result should be equal. Any fancy cabling, power supply, shielding (beyond what's required by the spec) shouldn't affect the result in anyway noticeable by the ear.
This would occur to some degree even on my electronics that were running on a DC battery separate from the home's circuit. Less intense fluctuations still showed up in spectrograms when recording music.
The eq-adjustments you'll find online often have adjustments ranging from 1 to 6dB in different frequencies. That's enough to notice.
Comparing settings/devices, it's very easy to notice. Just play some music on your laptop/phone speakers and move the device around a bit, and you'll hear striking differences in highs and lows.
However in isolation, I think most people wouldn't be able to say if a particular sound source is "good" or "bad". It takes a while for you to clock that, no, it's not the teams/zoom call that has bad quality, it's your headset that's dropping mids.
But can they notice the difference on a random track, not on special test audio? Probably not.
> Just play some music on your laptop/phone speakers and move the device around a bit, and you'll hear striking differences in highs and lows.
My laptop has speakers directed downwards, so putting a palm under it (to reflect sound upwards) increases the quality.
On the other hand, one can conduct blind tests that show that many phenomena cannot be reliably differentiated by a listener. Different listeners also have different levels of ability to discriminate sounds and sound quality. So when testing audio equipment using listening tests, one needs to consider the panel of listeners that one uses. Typically there are trained panels of listeners (who have received basic training and shown statistically an ok ability to discriminate) and "consumer" panels which are just random people off the street. The two groups will give very different ratings -especially for "medium" sound quality equipment.
For info on the former, see any decent book on psychoacoustics. And for the latter see for example Sensory Evaluation of Sound (Nick Zacharov et al).
This is why mix engineers have multiple sets of speakers, so they can periodically reset their perception. Additionally, it is well documented that the top scoring speakers on Audio Science Review (where people who think linear reproduction of audio is the only job of a speaker) do not align well with the top tool choices for audio professionals, and this is not because they are governed by supersition.
There is not currently a metric for many of the things that become essential as soon as you start listening critically and having to make binding decisions from your perception - will it fatigue me, is the speaker lying to me, dimensionality, etc. Saying these are problems with your listening environment is punting on the problem of the actual duty a speaker is required to fulfil.
I don't see why an audiophile, who is a critical listener, should be any different. They're obviously doing it without a generated artefact from their listening, so there's no data based feedback loop for the quality of their experience, but it's a hobby, so everyone's preferences have value.
But it's never about just what's objectively or even statistically best. Certain modern music is optimized for being played and recognisable on crappy phone speakers or low quality bluetooth ones. And then there's the loudness wars, where the music was objectively of lower quality (due to clipping etc), but sold better due to psychological effects. or whatever it was about.
"DOCTOR Olive! I didn't spend 6 years in evil audiophool school to be called Mister, thank you very much."