Crossfeed Circuitry

Well I find Headroom's reference crossfeed module a "necessary"
evil and always use it, since without it headphones have almost no 3D perspective compared to good stereo. Even with the best crossfeed still does not compare to the 3D offered by good stereo, which is why most of my time/money is spent on main stereo.

If you find crossfeed useless you can always switch it off, the choice is yours.

I find the crossfeed on my Max is absolutely wonderful with some material. With some material, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference, and with yet other material, it sounds better left off.

So it all depends upon how your brain is wired and how the sound was recorded.

Happy listening!!

It's the recordings that are inconsistent and that is to be expected.

CRESCENDOPOWER,

how long have you been using the crossfeed circuit? at first, i thought it was no big deal. now, five months later, i'll never not listen to crossfeed.

i never turn it off. even on mono recordings. of course, i love the tone of the crossfeed (crossfeed on, treble boost off).

the soundstage is smaller, but deeper.

it's easy to become addicted to crossfeed over time . . .

tonal changes or not, i love my crossfeed. the worst sin any of my speaker / headphone systems has ever committed was to be fatiguing and distracting from the music. crossfeed lets me enjoy music in a relaxed, stress/fatigue-free manner.

I too love crossfeed. I use it all the time, and built it into my cmoy amp. I have a perspective switch installed, so I can make it more crossfeed, or less crossfeed, or bypass crossfeed. The idea of trying to keep the music as clean and unproccessed as possible is a valiant one, and one I agree with for the most part, but headphones are limited by the fact that while engineering a mix, the recording engineer is listening to two nearfield monitors in a stereo configuration. He/she is mixing all the channels on the board, AND they are 'mixing' the natural crossfeed 'pseudo' channels. They are expecting you to hear those pseudo channels of acoustic crossfeed. When you listen to headphones, its like you have just removed two channels from the original engineer's recording. You are hearing the WRONG mix! Now, this isn't necessarily a problem, the increased detail and precision of headphones makes them attractive for critical music listening, but it can be hard to do without those two channels. Crossfeed is a simplistic, but reasonably effective, way of preproducing those two channels that we lose by wearing our speakers on our heads, instead of putting them out in front of us.

If you are very used to listening to headphones without crossfeed, you may have 'adjusted' to the headphone sound, and won't like the crossfeed. Some headphones benefit more from crossfeed than others. Some ears just like it better than others.

I don't believe that it detracts from the sound or lowers the sound quality. I believe that it improves the quality of my headphone listening. I suggest that everyone give crossfeed an honest try, and see how they like it, then they can decide if they want to keep using it. Some people just won't like it, and they can stop using it, and go back to their unprocessed world. Some people will like it on everything! others, like me, will like it more on some things, and less on others, and adjust their settings as desired.

Peace,
phidauex

well, i agree with you there. detail freaks probably will not like the headroom crossfeed circuit -- all that bass gets in the way of the treble.

I find the crossfeed on my MOH to vary not only with recordings, but also headphones. Crossfeed seems to have more of an effect on my Sony 888s or Senn MX-500s than my Grado HP-1s. When I first used crossfeed, I didn't like it much. The ultimate detail is lost, and the bass is a bit less controlled. This makes each instrument sound less defined than if the crossfeed were off. But this is a tradeoff that results in a much better image of the entire sound field, a tradeoff I think is very worthwhile. Now I use the outputs on my MOH to record to my R900, always using crossfeed, rather than the digital output of my CDP. In a portable enviroment where the smallest details are hardly audible, I find the improved soundstaging to be wonderful, with few sonic consequences.

While I agree with kevin that some recordings don't sound right with crossfeed (although just a few, for me), I don't feel that crossfeed + filter make the treble sound artificial. I think that taken together they make most music sound more realistic and enjoyable. I have a hard time listening without crossfeed anymore -- THAT sounds artificial to me (the unnatural left/right isolation).

deaf in one ear and enjoy crossfeed

Arnett's comments about depth:
This rings true to me and it's sooooo coool that someone else mentioned it!!

But I am not the typical headphone geek in that I am totally deaf in my right ear, and bought an Airhead mostly to try out the crossfeed circuitry.

Previous to that I'd been playing with speaker placement and finally settled on mono, with two speakers, one top of the other but recessed four inches, and the balance favoring one of the speakers. I figured that if I only had one ear, at least I could project sound into my brain from two sources separated by four inches and maybe in some limited way the brain would be fooled into thinking I had two ears. I swear that it did something, and "depth" is a word that's occurred to me before. There's no sensation of left/right but all the voices and instruments are separate entities. Harmonies, for instance, sound great with each voice recognizable. In just plain mono, everything is jumbled together. Very fatiguing.

I suppose I'll get lots of replies saying "yeah, sure buddy, whatever" but believe me and Arnett: Depth is there!!

About the highs being less distinct, I agree with this, but still much prefer listening with the crossfeed filter.


I'd be very interested in hearing from others with any kind of hearing impairment that feel they benefit from crossfeed circuitry.....

Re: deaf in one ear and enjoy crossfeed

yeah, sure buddy, whatever.

just kidding Quincy. glad you agree.

welcome to head-fi. (and as the saying goes, 'sorry about your wallet.')


(. . . and now i'm REALLY ashamed that I was the one who penned that brutum fulmen pre-april fools joke about the sennheiser cochlear implants . . . )