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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit of a sound nerd, but the on-ear headphones are really underwhelming. No noise isolation, most likely low quality drivers... this would make for a pretty terrible VR experience.

Simply upgrading them to closed back, over the ear headphones would make a big difference - you'd be able to use lower volumes (at which point even cheap drivers aren't oto bad), and you'd be more isolated from the environment, similar to how the rest of the headset works with your vision.

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The earphones are detachable and you can use your own audio headphones. As I understand the quality of these are actually pretty good, and definitely better than "gamer" headphones that the target audience might have. The reason they are on there is because they want to be sure everyone who has the rift has a decent audio solution, because positional audio helps so much with tricking your brain into being immersed.

Palmer claims the headphones are very high quality. If you don't like them you can replace them with your own.

Oh yeah? I can't find where it says you can replace them with their own. That'd be cool though.

They showed them popping off to make room. Easy enough.

It was mentioned in the keynote event today that the headphones were detachable.

In the submission, it says the headphone arms can be removed.

The Crescent Bay prototype used the drivers from porta-pros, which are pretty good. The point of included headphones:

A) Based on Twitch and YouTube a lot of people didn't use headphones, losing most benefits of headtracked and spatialized sound. Integrating them makes them much more likely to be used.

B) Standardized frequency response and built-in DAC/amp means their HRTF (head related transfer function) spatialization tech can be tuned precisely, without worrying about the EQ of thousands of different variations. Though people are still free to use their own and lose the fine tuning.

Closed back headphones don't offer as much "soundstage" as open-back headphones. With open-back headphones things really sound like they're coming from outside of your head, which is critical for the 3d sound illusion.

So the way to signal that one is an evidence based aficionado of sound is to call yourself a "sound nerd?" In today's parlance, "audiophiles" are all deluded woo-woo proponents who are deserving of ridicule. (I find that to be a form of shallow prejudice: One can simply evaluate the science behind what someone is saying.)

I have no idea what point you're trying to make.

That people's reaction to essentially the same comment would vary vastly with the form of self-identification. I suspect people are downvoting my comment just because it contains the word "audiophile." The point is that the topic is subject to a lot of unthinking prejudice in forums like this.

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