[wilzc]

Sometimes, its nice not to overthink things...
 
and let emotions run free...  like...
 
When I first listened to a great single driver like the HF5 or the ER4p. When you get the right seal...  dear lord...  the detail!! hearing every nuance. Its quite amazing....
 
 
 
However... when I first heard the Triple.Fi..  and again when I heard the Merlins.The emotion is different. Its almost as if I wasnt allowed the time or opportunity to grasp the details...   because the feeling is like when you're watching, for the first time, King Theoden give his battle speech, then led the Rohirrim charge into a sea of orcs...... 
 
 
A multi driver is capable of reaching into the heart. Whilst a sharply tuned single triggers the ears and brains...
 
 
So who cares about the technical differences... and abilities.
 
 
 
 

 

[Pianist]

Quote:

Sometimes, its nice not to overthink things...
 
and let emotions run free...  like...
 
When I first listened to a great single driver like the HF5 or the ER4p. When you get the right seal...  dear lord...  the detail!! hearing every nuance. Its quite amazing....
 
 
 
However... when I first heard the Triple.Fi..  and again when I heard the Merlins.The emotion is different. Its almost as if I wasnt allowed the time or opportunity to grasp the details...   because the feeling is like when you're watching, for the first time, King Theoden give his battle speech, then led the Rohirrim charge into a sea of orcs...... 
 
 
A multi driver is capable of reaching into the heart. Whilst a sharply tuned single triggers the ears and brains...
 
 
So who cares about the technical differences... and abilities.

 
Well, there is the subjective aspect to everything of course. But then there are also objective things such as the correct reproduction of real instruments through speakers/headphones. I understand that not everyone wants to hear musical instruments the way they sound in real life, but then that means not really listening to the same music anymore - not the music that the artist originally intended you to hear... And you also cannot say that music is interpreted differently by different people because in order to be able to say that, the music that we interpret needs to be reproduced accurately with the timbre of all instruments unaltered and all the details captured. This is required to give us a single point of reference.

 

[kiteki]

 
Pianist your reply had nothing to do with his post content at all, so why bother even quoting his post?
 
Seriously.
 
 
 

 

[kiteki]

 
@ Tronz - do you really need the turtle beach mario kart DAC/amp thing?
 
http://www.head-fi.org/t/447089/5-1-headphone-experience-foobar-configuration-for-all-stereo-music-files
 
 
 

 

[Pianist]

Quote:

Pianist your reply had nothing to do with his post content at all, so why bother even quoting his post?
 
Seriously.

 
My point was that there must be some kind of reference point for manufacturers to use as their objectively accurate sound ideal in order to be able to rationally justify the need to increase the number of drivers in their IEMs for example. And that reference should be the sound of real instruments and how accurately a headphone can reproduce the sound of real instruments. So when wilzc says "Who cares about technical differences..." the answer IMO is that manufacturers of the multi driver IEMs should care about the objective technical capability of their IEMs to reproduce the sound of real musical instruments. Otherwise, there would be no rational justification for the need to put more drivers into the IEMs. Imagine if manufacturers were to say "Who cares about technical differences?" and were to say instead "We decided to add two extra drivers to our X IEM in order to make your teeth rattle from all the huge bass output, because it feels good to feel bass like that!" Shouldn't the point of adding more drivers to BA IEMs be to increase their accuracy - to make them more hi-fi? Hi-fi means "high fidelity" remember? High fidelity to what? To an objective reference point in accurate sound of course, which IMO must be the sound of real musical instruments.

 

[kiteki]

 
wilzc made a valid point that lo-fi can be more acute and perceptive than hi-fi and he made an interesting analogy to single drivers versus multi-drivers that single drivers (like the Ety ER-4) are akin to more acute lower rez material and thus easier for our mind to percept the detail.
 
There have been studies somewhere or other that show that some people (I think it's the current youngsters gen-z or w/e) actually prefer mp3 over high-rez flac, as in they can tell the difference and prefer the mp3 sound, and then there's a lot of people that love 8-bit music and modern artists incorporating it into their music, or just loving the sound of basic computer chips, for instance crystal castles.
If you look at an oscilloscope of 8-bit music it's like you can see every detail that's being fed into your ears, whereas with high-rez multi-driver hi-fidelity classical music there's such a huge smooth sea of information that it's a different experience.
 
He wasn't talking about genres but I'm using that to extend his analogy, as far as drivers as concerned I'm not if I agree since I think more drivers should be able to offer more information but I can see where he's coming from.
 
______________
 
In  your above post (which isn't relevant to what wilzc was saying) I'm confused why you're saying manufacturers need objective data on the timbre and fidelity of instruments in order to justify putting more drivers into an IEM, why do they need to prove themselves, to you? Just because you think ALL multi driver setups are flawed, and the people buying them and raving about them are just marketing suckers, or can't hear crossover deviation and incoherency as well as you can?
 
 
 

 

[kiteki]

 
For defenders of the $999 3-driver UERM, there is also the Starkey SA-43 btw... ($1050?) which is IMHO superior to all universal and custom IEM's in at least one way, it has ON/OFF switches on the drivers.
 
Now, if only starkey could make an 8-driver IEM with ON/OFF switches on each pair of drivers and then we'd be able to clearly hear what the individual drivers are doing.
 
Then people would be able to experience 2, 4, 6 and 8 drivers without even needing to take anything out of their ears.
 
But what's the point in creating such a thing, other than experimentation and novelty? the manufacturers don't need to prove to themselves which number of drivers sound better, they just figure it out via their expertise on crossovers and the properties of different drivers, materials and filters, tube distances and placement, in-ear simulators, and of course by listening to the IEM's themselves, and then the consumers listen to it and like it?  Just like ljokerl has the UM Miracle on the top of his list now in sq.....
 
 
BTW there's a 6 driver custom IEM in Korea with 5 crossovers.
 
 

 

[Pianist]

Quote:

In  your above post (which isn't relevant to what wilzc was saying) I'm confused why you're saying manufacturers need objective data on the timbre and fidelity of instruments in order to justify putting more drivers into an IEM, why do they need to prove themselves, to you? Just because you think ALL multi driver setups are flawed, and the people buying them and raving about them are just marketing suckers, or can't hear crossover deviation and incoherency as well as you can?

 
Why not?
 
No, I just want to know what is the manufacturers' justifications for putting more drivers into their IEMs than say 2-3, which I believe should be sufficient to cover the full spectrum adequately. They sure can't say that the extra drivers make the sound more fun or something like that because that's purely subjective. They need to have an objective reference point and the only one I can think of right now is the sound of real musical instruments.
 
Where did I say that all multi driver setups are flawed? I don't remember ever saying that. It's just that from my experience most sounded strange to me and not natural, and had an odd sound that single drivers, even really crap ones don't have like odd, extreme variations in the frequency response, odd differences between the character of the lows and the rest of the spectrum, strange muddiness present in an otherwise a very detailed and fast sound, etc. But not all multi drivers had such obvious issues to my ears. Some just sounded a tad off sometimes, but were just fine and enjoyable otherwise. I think multi drivers can sound just fine (read: acceptable) if done right, but I don't understand the driver wars.

 

[Sylafari]

To me, I think the situation of multiple balanced armatures are like computer processors. As computer processors reached about 3.4GHz, it became incredibly hard for researchers to innovate the single cored CPU so that it could run faster. Thus they sort of took the easy way out which was to create Dual-core processors and eventually quad-core processors and octa-core etc. Once the industry went this route, the solution to increasing CPU speed was mainly to just add more cores while the speed of a single core increased much slower if not much at all (Quad cores these days on average are still at 2.8 GHz a core). Also by manufacturing multiple cores you could charge more for more cores. The saddest part? Single cored CPUs are basically extinct , though I did head AMD just recently create a single cored CPU that reaches 8 GHz :-O.
 
Balanced armatures sort of resemble CPUs as tuning a single armature is very difficult so some manufacturers decided to add another balanced armature and creating dual armature, triples, quads, sixes, octa, etc. Naturally this means less focus on optimizing one or two balanced armatures and focusing more on optimizing multiple armatures as it is much simpler than to optimize a single one. Also manufacturers can charge more money for more armatures and thus we are in the age of the # of driver wars (More is better right!?). Now single balanced armature IEMs are just seen by most people as weak and incompetant compared to their multiple armature siblings. Though companies like Sleek Audio have a flagship dual BA IEM where their marketing campaign is along the lines of we do with 2 speakers what our competition does with 8. 
 
Maybe one day like headphones, we can just have one BA do everything and more :-D
 
Just my opinion

 

[kiteki]

 
Quote:

[...]
Where did I say that all multi driver setups are flawed? I don't remember ever saying that. It's just that from my experience most sounded strange to me and not natural, and had an odd sound that single drivers, even really crap ones don't have like odd, extreme variations in the frequency response, odd differences between the character of the lows and the rest of the spectrum, strange muddiness present in an otherwise a very detailed and fast sound, etc. But not all multi drivers had such obvious issues to my ears. Some just sounded a tad off sometimes, but were just fine and enjoyable otherwise. I think multi drivers can sound just fine (read: acceptable) if done right, but I don't understand the driver wars.

ok...
 
 

 

[kiteki]

 
Quote:

To me, I think the situation of multiple balanced armatures are like computer processors. As computer processors reached about 3.4GHz, it became incredibly hard for researchers to innovate the single cored CPU so that it could run faster. Thus they sort of took the easy way out which was to create Dual-core processors and eventually quad-core processors and octa-core etc. [...]

Exactly, it's pretty straight-forward.
 
 
 
Anyway the Sony EX1000 easily competes with the UM Aero and UM Merlin so I'm not saying more = better.

 

[Sylafari]

Quote:

 

Exactly, it's pretty straight-forward.
 
 
 
Anyway the Sony EX1000 easily competes with the UM Aero and UM Merlin so I'm not saying more = better.

But the Sony EX1000 are dynamic and I believe the limitation of dynamic drivers is you can't have more than one in one housing as that would cause interference as they both would create magnetic fields interfering with one another. So I guess if one were to make an analogy it be like the 8GHz Single Core processor (Dynamic Driver) vs a 2GHz Quad Core processor (Multiple Balanced Armature)! Yes.... I'm obsessed with computers... and hifi
 
 

 

[kiteki]

That's why the EX1000 is 16mm and has an angled magnesium housing and everything else, Sony are trying to push the limits of a single CPU, and succeeding.
 
 

 

[Pianist]

I don't think you can really compare PC processors with headphone drivers, because the goal of CPU manufacturers is to make them as fast as possible and there is no clear end goal that will be achieved in the end. The faster the better. With headphones however, there is a clear goal - to make the headphones reproduce the sound of real musical instruments as accurately as possible and we know what that accuracy would sound like because we know what the instruments sound like in real life. Now, with headphones there is no such thing as "0.5% better," while in PCs there is. With PCs you can potentially improve speed to infinity with measurable benefits, while with headphones our ears are the limitations and there is a point after which we simply cannot differentiate between the sound of the instrument through a headphone and the way it sounds in real life. And I don't see how we can measure a tiny difference between the way it sounds through headphone and in real life if we can't hear it. It might be possible, but I cannot conceive how it could be done. Maybe distortion charts or something like that. But in any case, we won't need such measurements if we can't hear the difference. With PCs, you may need every nanosecond shaved off to see certain benefits from the gained speed. For example. it could make a difference between hacking somebody's account and them hacking yours. lol Or something like that. Your PC is one nanosecond faster, your hacking procedure was calculated one nanosecond faster than the other person's and thus you hacked his account first. You know what I mean? Not sure how much sense this makes.

 

[Sylafari]

 
Quote:

I don't think you can really compare PC processors with headphone drivers, because the goal of CPU manufacturers is to make them as fast as possible and there is no clear end goal that will be achieved in the end. The faster the better. With headphones however, there is a clear goal - to make the headphones reproduce the sound of real musical instruments as accurately as possible and we know what that accuracy would sound like because we know what the instruments sound like in real life. With headphones there is no such thing as "0.5% better," while in PCs there is. With PCs you can potentially improve speed to infinity with measurable benefits, while with headphones our ears are the limitations and there is a point after which we simply cannot differentiate between the sound of the instrument through a headphone and the way it sounds in real life. And I don't see how we can measure a tiny difference between the way it sounds through headphone and in real life if we can't hear it. It might be possible, but I cannot conceive how it could be done. Maybe distortion charts or something like that. But in any case, we won't need such measurements if we can't hear the difference. With PCs, you may need every nanosecond shaved off to see certain benefits from the gained speed. For example. it could make a difference between hacking somebody's account and them hacking yours. lol Or something like that. Your PC is one nanosecond faster, your hacking procedure was calculated one nanosecond faster than the other person's and thus you hacked his account first. You know what I mean? Not sure how much sense this makes.

I see what you mean but I wasn't comparing increase in speed to increase in sound. I was comparing the solutions of manufacturers in that having multiple core CPUs was a simpler route and having multiple BAs might also have been a simpler route in creating something better.