The rise and rise of headphones

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/the-rise-and-rise-of-headphones-why-the-set-you-buy-isn-t-just-a-question-of-sound-quality-but-a6756396.html

by e15ctr0n • 11 years ago

31 67 11 years ago

independent.co.uk

wyclif• 11 years ago

How do audiophile consumers rate and rank over-ear headphones? I'm wondering what criteria they use. I'm talking about good quality cans for listening to music, not fashion statements.

I'm sure this has been discussed on HN before.

rnmjr• 11 years ago

Have a look at the information available at http://www.head-fi.org

arvinsim• 11 years ago

This. I rely on this site since I don't have that good of an ear. To get my bang for buck, I check out their recommendations.

rplst83• 11 years ago

Generally speaking, the audiophile world falls into two camps. Those that think particular makes and models of audio electronics and speakers are somehow "magic" and those that simply want their systems to measure "flat". The first camp are the ones that used to put weights on their speakers, used "magic" green markers to color the vertical edge around the outside of a compact disc, and would spend tens of thousands of dollars on a plinth for their turntable or a magic tube driven preamp.

The rest are simply concerned with scientific measurement of the system. Does it produce a reasonably flat sound in frequency and phase that remains undistorted at volumes at which they listen to music.

The latter camp will highly rate headphones (or any other piece of audio equipment) that can produce a the full bandwidth of human hearing while keeping distortion low over a useful range of amplitude.

Comfort, cost, and construction quality would also be considered in the ranking.

andy_ppp• 11 years ago

There are also two sorts of hacker news commenters, those who divide people into two camps and those who don't. :-)

comfycans• 11 years ago

I'm not an audiophile (as I understand the perjorative, anyway) but I have spent a long time (20+ years) wearing headphones professionally. Yes, often at a desk, but also in the field or in a theater monitoring recording or playback.

What I look for is simple: comfort, durability, isolation (in both directions), neutrality. In that order.

Comfort - I swear by circumaural designs. Some people apparently don't have a problem with pads resting on the pinna, but I find this painful after an hour or two. Isolation is also worse with supra-aural designs.

Durability - most headphones break quickly. The cables are usually the first to go, around the strain relief on either end. I've had some pairs that used a 1/8" minijack on one of the earpieces, making the cable replaceable - until the jack failed and couldn't be replaced without breaking open the earpiece. Good headphones will survive any reasonable drop; really good ones will survive being drop-kicked.

Isolation - if you can't hear the signal over environmental noise, why bother monitoring? If you're recording or working in a theatrical environment, you don't want your headset audio leaking out either. In an office setting, nobody wants to hear your music, no matter how awesoem your jams are. Closed-ear designs are the way to go.

Neutrality - Relatively flat frequency response. But this is way down the list of priorities for me. A great sounding set of headphones that breaks after 2 months, or is uncomfortable to wear, or doesn't block the sound of your workstation's fans is not a great set of headphones.

tl;dr - Beyerdynamic DT250 is my headset of choice. My current pair is almost 15 years old and the only thing that's failed on them is the pleather on the headband, which has fallen off its fabric backing. Still on the original earpads and cable, and they're as good as the day I bought them. Stay away from consumer brands and models; like fast-fashion clothes, they are not built to last.

(This is also why you should buy your cookware from a restaurant supply store, not williams-sonoma.)

radiowave• 11 years ago

All true, but as far as listening to music goes, it's a pity the DT250s don't sound better - to me they make the bottom end sound like the proverbial bag of hammers. I tried the DT150s, which sound better but I didn't find nearly as comfortable over long periods, and eventually settled on a pair of DT770 Pro, which seem to me to be about perfect for comfort, and a good balance of sound quality and isolation.

falcolas5• 11 years ago

To offer a counterpoint - I use a set of cans with no isolation at all. I prefer the broader sound stage (it feels more like an open air concert than a band in your bedroom) that the open cans offer.

I purchased a set of HIFIMan cans with planar drivers on sale for around $500, and I haven't looked back. They sound better than any other >$1000 cans I've listened to, bar none.

That said, they offer no isolation whatsoever, so you do need a quiet environment in which to use them.

DenisM2• 11 years ago

I compare live performance of classical music at Seattle Symphony with good recordings of the same piece as heard on speakers and headphones.

The most telling parts are about getting the details from faint instruments, especially at lower volumes. For example the opening part of Beethoven's 9th has very faint sound of violins, and it's often missing on consumer-grade speakers. Ideally I would also compare how wide is the stage and thus how well the instruments are separated, but I don't have the budget for that kind of equipment, if that exists at all.

For my budget, I ended up getting a pair of studio monitors Event 2020bas for speakers, and Etimotic Research as in-ears headphones. YMMV.

scholia2• 11 years ago

This is a good system, though I tend to use my own MP3 player and a couple of albums that I know really well from my hi-fi (which has small but high-quality studio monitors). The key point is to listen for details and the separation between instruments. If you just listen to the music, the human ear/brain is far too good at filling in the missing bits...

I'm not sure any headphones can give you a proper 3D sound stage of the sort that you can get with good loudspeakers (especially the LS3/5a). For that, I use recordings of Shostakovitch's string quartets to see how well I can locate (and distinguish between) four instruments.

Although I'm not fond of it as music, Ravel's Bolero is also a good test track for headphones, because of the way the same theme is repeated by many different instruments.

I use Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7b noise-cancelling headphones, but I don't think there's one headset that suits everyone, any more than there's one pair of speakers, or one car....

golergka8• 11 years ago

I work professionally with audio to some extent, and I can hear the difference between 320 and wav in some cases (on my own home setup, of course) — but if a layperson asks, I'd advice them to buy Beats instead of professional monitor headphones which have better sound quality for less money. It's simple: if you can't tell the difference between 192 and 256, and are going to listen to Spotify stream anyway, it makes more sense to invest more into the appearance than in sound.

Oletros4• 11 years ago

It's simple: if you can't tell the difference between 192 and 256, and are going to listen to Spotify stream anyway, it makes more sense to invest more into the appearance than in sound.

I'm unable to understand this kind of logic

coldtea4• 11 years ago

It's simple:

a) Good headphones only bring marginally better sound over mediocre ones for most of the source material and format people hear (not to mention if you listen to pop hits, they're often mastered to sound good to mediocre headphones in the first place).

b) Appearance matters. Being trendy and following fashion is good for your social life (yeah, other people are often that shallow: don't fight it, hack it to your benefit).

c) For most people their social life is way more important than something like better frequency response. So optimize what's actually important to you, not what should be important in theory.

Heck, I'm a heavy DAW user and I have AKG and AT monitor-grade headphones, but I'm still tempted to get a pair of Beats, a) to hear mixes through a headphone "in vogue" producers of pop/hip-hop/r&b optimize for, b) for the fashion part.

(And no, "everybody has one" doesn't diminish the fashion factor, except to fashion snubs people who you'd want to avoid anyway. Fashion works better when you conform -- to put it another away, nobody was seen in a bad light wearing Nike because "tons of other people have Nikes").

Oletros4• 11 years ago

So, it is better to recommend buying overpriced shit over cheaper good quality because you think they will serve better.

I wouldn't call friend someone that recommends me something like that

detaro• 11 years ago

The difference between different headphones is often easier to tell than the difference between different file formats/encodings.

Also, if you care about the social signals, don't buy Beats if you don't want to look like someone with more money than sense ;) (Mileage obviously may vary between environments, but it seems like the one things most people know about headphones is "Beats aren't good for the price", even if they never really looked at the topic in detail)

irremediable2• 11 years ago

How do Beats compare to e.g. the cheapest Sennheiser cans?

My go-to headphones are the HD201, which you can get for about $30. They're the best headphones/earphones I've ever used, but I'm no audiophile, as you can tell from that fact.

noir_lord• 11 years ago

Love the 201, so much in fact I bought 202's and 205's for different places and actually liked the 201's better, all sounded the same to me and the 201's are so comfy particularly compared to the 203's.

golergka8• 11 years ago

How do you compare?

Beats look a lot better, for once.

dharma13• 11 years ago

I struggle to hear a difference between 320 and wav, doubt I would get it right in a blindfold test. It's more of a psychological thing for me - prefer to listen to FLAC (or vinyl/cd) because I know it's "all there" :)

I have a pretty good monitoring environment and headphones. What cues do you listen to to differentiate 320?

golergka8• 11 years ago

Sharp 20 kHz LPF that is present in almost all lossy codecs. The 20+ kHz gives you the certain feeling of "air", but doesn't actually affect the music quality in the meaningful way.

mkj2• 11 years ago

At least if you're sitting at a computer it seems worth getting a better DAC before crazy-pricey headphones. I was quite surprised how much for example http://hifimediy.com/sabre-dac-uae23 improved sound over Intel/Dell motherboard output.

4ad3• 11 years ago

Unfortunately many PC motherboards ship with really poor DACs. If you use an iPhone, or an iMac, don't bother though. Their DAC are truly excellent. The only reason to upgrade would be if you have high-impedance headphones, or low-sensitivity headphones that require a more drive than these DACs can produce. Note though that the iMac DAC has higher output that most cheap external DACs, so chose accordingly.

This is the only reason to get a different DAC. These DACs have lower output impedance than most DACs under $500.

Edit: http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/iphone-5/audio-quality.htm

voltagex_3• 11 years ago

I can't justify that kind of outlay. I've managed to strike a decent balance between price and quality - Sennheiser PX 100 [1] for foldable headphones (not suitable for office use as they leak a lot of sound) or Audiotechnica ANC33is [2] for noise-cancelling & office use

1: http://en-au.sennheiser.com/stereo-headphones-travel-lightwe...

2: http://eu.audio-technica.com/en/products/product.asp?catID=5...

golergka8• 11 years ago

How do you define "quality"? Do you automatically assume that sound quality is the most important component of headphone quality, for everyone? Why?

4ad3• 11 years ago

This advice makes no sense. Beats headphones are poor headphones at their price range. You can get cheaper headphones which are far better, in fact you can get really, really cheap headphones which are better.

So why buy beats? The appearance argument is ridiculous, you can get cheaper, better headphones, that look (and are built) better. Beats don't excel at anything, they just make you look like a fool. I guess that's a feature!

golergka8• 11 years ago

How do you define "better"?

For a lot of people, how headphones look is far more important that difference in sound quality they won't be able to perceive.

eertami• 11 years ago

and are going to listen to Spotify stream anyway

But... Spotify streams at 320kbps (Vorbis), which is WAY more than enough until you start spending $500+ on your setup.

Why is that even relevant?

usrusr• 11 years ago

I tend to disagree: the occlusion predictions of the encoder should usually be more accurate when the decided signal it's played through a high quality output chain than when played through a chain that does all kinds of intentional and unintentional signal mangling post-codec.

This surely does not rule out the possibility that certain classes of compression artifacts are lost only on low end headphones, but I really would not give compressed sources a free pass on wonky headphones. If you listen to compressed audio, you don't want post-codec inaccuracies.

rplst83• 11 years ago

The sad part about the headphone market - especially over the ear models - is that the sound they produce is so far from natural, that no one knows what thinks actually sound like anymore. Beats headphones are a perfect example and are probably the worst offender of them all. This ends up affecting everyone - even those of us who choose a pair of headphones that are "flat" or better at being acoustically transparent. Just as recording and mastering engineers learned to change the sound of their albums to sound better on small little "boom boxes" in the 80's and early 90's, today they alter the sound so they work on these grossly inaccurate headphones.

degenerate• 11 years ago

Earlier this year I was looking for the flattest (least "colored") pair of headphones I could get for under $100 and after lots of reading finally went with the ATH-M40x. You all might have seen this model headphone go on sale now and again with mic bundles on Amazon/B&H, and wondered if these headphones are any good. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udLoAV7YmjA&feature=youtu.be...] (linked to 83s) really puts into perspective how muddled - aka "colored" - the popular pairs of headphones can sound.

I was skeptical of how this works - how do you record what the headphones sound like? This must surely be fake. However here is the making-of video and it really put into perspective for me how detailed sound engineering can get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnK1Gq7txYA

falcolas5• 11 years ago

If looks don't bother you too much, you may wish to look into the Koss PortaPro headphones. Sub $50, they look terrible, but sound remarkably good.

coldtea4• 11 years ago

Beats headphones are a perfect example and are probably the worst offender of them all.

Still Beats are much better than 99% of the headphones people use there, especially cheapo in ear models, and most everything the mass market used with their "walkmans" in the 80s and 90s.

Nav_Panel2• 11 years ago

I dunno. I've always been a big headphone evangelist, have owned a few pairs of not-bad cans like the ATH-M50s and HD280Pros, but I've been using a $10 pair of IEMs lately (I think the first pair was Phillips and then I bought a Sony pair). To my ears (and I'm fairly sensitive to this) they sound about 80% as good as my ATH-M50s and they actually isolate a little better. I'd assumed most earbuds would be awful tinny pieces of plastic like the Apple earbuds but I was blown away. I suggest giving it a shot if you have $10 to experiment with potentially large convenience gains for only a mild loss in fidelity.

Demiurge• 11 years ago

Depends on whether you think better precision with worse accuracy due to highly exaggerated lows is better than worse precision but better accuracy.

rplst83• 11 years ago

I strongly disagree. Beats is to headphones as Monster Cables are to wires. Pure overpriced marketing B.S.

It's fine if you want to buy them for the looks, but know that you are not getting the best sound quality achievable for said money.

tP5n• 11 years ago

I agree, but I think you're forgetting something that gets lost in the age of digital music: for some 'what things actually sound like' isn't hard to describe.

If I want to know how a piano sounds, I'm going to listen to an actual piano. If my recorded and played backed piano sounds any different than that, it's not 'how a piano sounds like'.

Apart from that and having owned HD600s, ATH-M40x, E-10s and a pair of AKGs, I'm in agreement with the parent and most of the following posts. Don't buy beats, any of the mentioned headphones here will blow you away for a lot less money.

dharma13• 11 years ago

What I would like are in-ears that almost completely block outside noise. With some better foam to physically block out the noise, and better noise canceling algorithms, maybe with deep learning. Saw this for cars but nothing for headphones yet

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/huma...

rjsw• 11 years ago

I have a set of Etymotic Research earphones, they don't do noise cancelling, all the noise reduction is from the design of the plug.

[1] https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones.html

4ad3• 11 years ago

There are a ton of IEMs like that. Please see /r/headphones and the various wikis in the sidebar.

randlet• 11 years ago

I use etymotic in-ear headphones with the two-flange tips (I prefer the rubber flanges over foam) and they do a remarkable job at isolating from external noise, allowing me to listen to music at a quiet (read non hearing loss inducing) level.

falcolas5• 11 years ago

Shure and Westone both offer great IEMs (in-ear monitors) which have foam tips that block around 30db of external sound, and offer good-to-great representation of the source material.

http://www.headphone.com/collections/in-ear

bluedino• 11 years ago

A few years back I worked in an open office setting and I went a little headphone crazy. I bought 4 pairs of over the ear headphones, and 5 pairs of in-ear headphones. I read all the forums and reviews. I even bought two headphone amps!

I ended up with a pair for home, pair for travel, pair for work, and a pair that go in my laptop case. I gave the other pairs to friends and family.

Headphone preference is just as much a personal preference as it is picking the 'best' ones. Some just aren't comfortable on certain shape/size heads or ears. You might just not like how certain pairs sound.

tasdev• 11 years ago

I bought a pair of B&W P7s for $349 (AUD, RRP is $649). I was fortunate to get mates rates on a clearance item. Had been thinking about it for a while. The sound quality is incredible and you certainly can justify spending money here if you're at all passionate about audio. I listen to a lot of lossless with them and they sound superb.

Conversely, from listening to Beats I've found them to be overly cheap feeling and the sound quality isn't on par with their competition.

The rise and rise of headphones

Related Stories