Quote:
Originally Posted by
Crazy*Carl 
You often hear around here so many headphones are dull or boring without expensive 500 dollar amps, but there is never any blind testing to prove it. I am willing to bet that most people could not tell a difference with an hd800 out of an ipod and an expensive amp. Yet people rave on about equipment when they first hear it. Placebo affect. Where are the blind tests?
What's the point in a blind test when there are people who try that at home just for kicks, only to see the iPod maxed out, and in the case of the HD600s not all percussions are audible, the ones that are sound hollow and nothing like what I hear when I'm standing near our drummer, cymabls sound like a 'ziiiiiiiiiiiiiing' instead of it vibrating up and downuntil it loses energy...when the power's out I admit the nice thing about the HD580/600/650 is that they're acceptable without a good amp, but once the power's back on I find myself going, "oh yeah, that's why I have this." An extreme example would be to say a good, 0.001% THD@75watts Class A/B won't do any better on Dynaudio Contour S3.4's than the 2-watt Class B amp inside my computer speakers.
And lest you think I'm fanatical about using amps, I sold my Little Dot MkII because I preferred the headphone jack out of my Marantz CDPlayer; I use my SR225 straight out of an S9, and preferred the Edition 8 without an amp; and I'm one of those who wouldn't strap several things on to each other just to listen to an inefficient IEM whose main selling point should have been isolation. The CD60-HD600 set-up was great until the transport stopped reading my CD-R's, so I got an iPod 5g, only to realize that the Wolfson 8994 isn't as good as the dedicated Philips chip in the Marantz (which is the same as in the E9 I think.) Oh, and there are people who aren't susceptible to price-placebo here - if the Meier Cantate was more widely available, I wouldn't be surprised if there would be a lot of people who'd immediately say they prefer the E9+E7 over it. The debate then is what constitutes "high fidelity" or "faithfulness to the recording," but at the very least there are people who will let their idea of what sounds good - regardless of the length of the debate you get out of that - come first before letting price determine that for them. In any case, I do agree that there's a certain dynamic here, but all that proves is the tendency to either 'bandwagon' or equate price to performance, if not both, not specifically that all amplifiers do nothing beyond psychological.
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Also, I've seen many of my musician friends who didn't care about Hi-Fi (why spend that much on listening gear when you're spending it on gear that MAKES themusic?) going wide-eyed when they put my HD600 on, then ask what the heck is wrong because it didn't sound the same when they hooked it up to their Blackberry, so I'm confident I'm not hearing things. They didn't even know there were such things as headphone amps, let alone portables, and since Social Science methods have already concluded that saying "this is a test" already clouds the subjects' minds (the observer makes what is observed, as we say in sociology), that unintended test was as good as a "proper" (that is, staged and belief-charged) blind test. And while we're on research methods and betting, I won't be surprised if someone does a blind test and when the results are contrary to your belief, your conclusion is it was absolute "B.S." far beyond a healthy level of methodical skepticism stemming from your strong theoretical skepticism.
Edited by ProtegeManiac - 1/26/12 at 7:15am
