Are headphones fatally flawed by their basic design? - Page 2

I prefer the sound of headphones, because sounds naturally occur around us, not in front of us.

 

When listening to live music, unless you're very far away, it's not coming from the front, it's almost omnidirectional.

 

At the same time, stereo speakers fail to convey any audio coming from the rear, unlike headphones.

 

I believe the future of realistic sound lies in headphones, not 9.1 surround sound setups.

 

Binaural recordings and holophonic sounds convinced me of this.

 

You haven't heard good enough speakers if you haven't heard sound coming from all around you.  I mean localizable sound coming from the rear and sides - yes, it can happen with stereo.

 

I once tricked a friend into thinking I was running a 5.1 SACD setup with just stereo running off of a CD to two speakers - in fact, I had to correct him several times after I had already told him the truth!  He had a hard time believing what he was hearing was even possible.

This is why crossfeed was invented. I use it 100% of the time to solve this very problem and I really like it.
 

I've heard sound around me, but not directly behind me, or in my head - with stereo speakers. Something that headphones could accomplish.

 

If referring to strictly music, then speakers generally do recreate a more realistic sound stage, but in any type of gaming, I'd always prefer good headphones to stereo speakers

The only headphones that may be fatally flawed are skullcandies which kids think can substitute for bicycle helmets. I read a news article about a kid getting beat up for his ES9W, so that could be considered potentially fatal.

 

I don't consider the lack of crossfeed something that makes headphones fatally flawed, it's just an unnatural way of listening, requiring some mental adaptation to the presentation, but a good percentage of people believe headphone presentation does have some benefits over speaker presentation. Doesn't necessarily mean it is worse or better than a more normal way of listening.

In the average domestic setting speakers present sound in a very strange way.

 

The acoustic of the room they are in is superimposed on the acoustic in the music signal.

 

The imposition of the room acoustic is a massive impediment to good sound quality with speakers and as I have said in other discussions for listening to music with speakers the only way to achieve good fidelity is to listen in a room which has been intelligently treated for sound.

 

In most cases a basic decent quality hi fi system in a well treated room will easily outperform a so-called hi-end system in an untreated room.

 

That people spend vast fortunes on hi fi and then put it in untreated rooms is imho the biggest nonsense in hi fi.

 

So the sound you get in an untreated room is hardly one to aspire to :)

 

There is a basic point however which is that a pair of stereo speakers provide information for the listener to accurately recreate a stereo image where-as with headphones this is not available.

 

I have been using the crossfeed feature in my Meier Audio StageDAC and I think this is truly superb. It does not recreate a "living room experience" which I'm rather glad about, however it does mean that a very good stereo image is created.

 

I've written about the Meier Audio crossfeed here in this posting if anyone is interested:

 

Meier Audio StageDAC crossfeed

 

Back to the separate issue of room acoustics. There are several reasons why headphones are capable of astounding levels of transparency. One of them is that there is not an awful room acoustic wiping out great quantities of the information in the signal.

Headphones cannot produce natural and desired crosstalk for one to truly spatially image the sound. But, DSP algorithms make it possible for headphones to produce this. Headphones have an advantage of cost as well as space. As Patrick said, a good speaker system with an undamped room is basically crap, not the case with headphones.

 

But there is one problem DSP often makes changes to the signal which makes it slightly different form the original one.

 

Rohan

The reason I use the Toneboosters Isone Pro VST plug-in all the time is because almost all recording engineers mix down a musical performance for people to listen to on speakers, not headphones. The exception of course being binaural recordings. I knew a guy who had a very expensive pair of Sennheiser binaural microphones and the dummy head whose "ears" they plugged into who would sneak it into rock concerts in the 1970s with a battery-operated Nakamichi 550 portable cassette tape recorder hidden under his coat, and produce some incredible recordings that sounded like you were actually there if - and only if - you listened to them on headphones.

But if you think of musical reproduction as "beginning at the point of conception" (I sound like the Pope suddenly) it is in the recording and mix-down that you have to begin assembling whatever your playback component chain is to try to recreate that "being there" experience. Since they mix for speaker playback because it has a far larger market share than headphones, I use Toneboosters Isone Pro carefully adjusted with some very minimal settings, but would love to have that $2,000 gizmo on the first page of this thread. Isone Pro costs $27 and has a free demo.