Are headphones fatally flawed by their basic design?

Well the only way to get a convincing stereo image from a headphone is to use artificial crossfeeding from a foobar plugin/headphone amp with crossfeed OR listen to a binaural recordings which are pretty rare. 

Ehh.. I havent really auditioned any hardware based crossfeeding, only software based ones like on Rockbox and foobar. But from the reviews they seem to be pretty decent. Crossfeed is just leaking a bit of the left channel into the right and vice versa so it may not sound like a huge difference unless you get really aggressive crossfeeds so binaural is still the best spatial representation i think. The whole headphone/IEM vs speaker argument is really just unjustifiable. Both of them will exist for different reasons.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by astroid 

Never really thought about a plugin, i do use a laptop and DAC combo so that would be interesting to test.

 

I know some amps/dacs have crossfeed as an option, are they any good?

Recabling your phones for a Balanced input will also eliminate crosstalk. 

I have a standalone crossfeed box built on the Corda Cross-1 schematics. It's positioned between the DAC and the amp in the signal chain. Meier Audio has a good explanation of the advantages of crossfeed, and Headroom does too. Both make well-regarded amps with crossfeed circuits built in.

After a lot of fiddling with settings and listening to music with and without the crossfeed, I leave the crossfeed on almost all the time. The better a given pair of heaphones are at space and instrument position, the better they sound with the crossfeed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by astroid 

When i listen to music on my speakers at home my left and right ears hear music from both speakers , on my headphones there is little to no crosstalk.

 

If i listen to my speakers and then my headphones, closed SRH840 for instance the presentation is different, obviously the headphone brings its own flavour to the sound just as speakers do but above that the presentation using headphones is different.

 

I prefer my speakers 100% of the time and only use headphones if i have too , someone sleeping , late at night or on the move.

 

Can headphones ever present sound in the same way as speakers?

I just want to say that you look like Super Mario.

HeadPlug MkII for Winamp is good - it allows you to adjust the delay between the signals as well as the relative volume.

It's not as good as actual speakers, of course.  But it's an improvement much of the time - for some music, like '60s rock that is hard-panned from one side to the other (Cream, for example), it's a huge improvement.

For some more modern mixes with less of that hard panning, I leave it off.  It's hard to tell with the other differences, but I think at least some of the dynamics are toned down with the crossfeed.  I'm not sure if that's the plugin itself or just the effect of the crossfeed.  For hard bass hits that are in one channel - like drums in Cream recordings, like I mentioned - without crossfeed you may feel the vibration in your ear more than with it on.  I believe this is because you're distributing the pressure to both ears, reducing the pressure on the ear that received all of it before.

There are actually different methods of recording for headphones (binaural) than for speakers (stereo). This is because your head and patena act as a baffle for sound. Sound recorded for headphones includes that baffle. Sound recorded for speakers does not (different mic setup). 

Quote:

Originally Posted by astroid 

When i listen to music on my speakers at home my left and right ears hear music from both speakers , on my headphones there is little to no crosstalk.

 

If i listen to my speakers and then my headphones, closed SRH840 for instance the presentation is different, obviously the headphone brings its own flavour to the sound just as speakers do but above that the presentation using headphones is different.

 

I prefer my speakers 100% of the time and only use headphones if i have too , someone sleeping , late at night or on the move.

 

Can headphones ever present sound in the same way as speakers?

I have never tried a Headroom or Meier headphone amplifier with a hardware-based crossfeed circuit, but I don't think they are as ambitious enough in their implementation as to try to actually try to make the headphone listening experience approximate listening to speakers, which would necessarily factor in the acoustical properties of the hypothetical room in which the speakers are placed, their distance to the listener, the reverberence of the room, etc. I have been very pleased with this VST signal processor plugin:

http://www.toneboosters.com/tb-isone/

It is a pro sound product designed for audio mixing and mastering engineers who are using headphones by necessity (rather than studio monitors), but need to hear how music would sound in an actual listening room.

Here is the (well, one) Head-Fi thread about it:  http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/473885/isone-pro-the-best-thing-you-could-ever-get-for-your-headphones-on-your-computer

If you use it with Foobar2K, I can recommend this VST plug-in wrapper as working with the latest Foobar version 1.1.2:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=84947

You can try the demo for free, but the purchase price works out to about $27 USD, and I have become so used to it that I find listening to headphones without it (as I am now on a Linux computer that does not accommodate VST plugins easily) to sound "unnatural."  But it takes some getting used to and tweaking the controls; use the minimal settings the program's author recommended to me at the end of the above-mentioned Head-Fi thread until the manual for the program (an update of an earlier version) comes out. 

Difference != Flaw. No, headphones cannot sound like speakers, but some get kinda close. Well, that's a lie, you can actually get a very speaker-like presentation with binaural recordings.

search for SVS Realizer - personal hrtf calibration in a real room with real multichannel loudspeakers let you hear very nearly the same "sound" as the loudspeaker system through your headphones including stable "external" imaging to the degree that the recording and loudspeakers can present it 

http://www.smyth-research.com/technology.html

in a short demo I found it as big an improvement as stereo is over mono - way bigger than any generic crossfeed or Dolby Headphone processing

Isone Pro is also pretty good, but it can colour your signal

personalization, headphone calibration, head angle tracking put the SVS system way beyond any generic plugin that doesn't incorporate all of these steps - albeit at a "small" $2-3K price

Wow. I was trying to find a price for it but I did not see 2k coming. I envious that you even got to demo it.