[istfleur]

I often read transparency, detailled, reference, neutral. But my question is about naturalness. Are these sound natural, life-like, accuracy in timbre and note. Would they make instruments sound as i would hear it if i was in the same room as the musician.

What about imaging, separation and lot of details from a headphone. Would we hear or perceived all these in a open air performance. I hear some headphones are details monster, but, is this lifelike, would we hear all these details in a live performance.

 

[watchnerd]

I often read transparency, detailled, reference, neutral. But my question is about naturalness. Are these sound natural, life-like, accuracy in timbre and note. Would they make instruments sound as i would hear it if i was in the same room as the musician.

What about imaging, separation and lot of details from a headphone. Would we hear or perceived all these in a open air performance. I hear some headphones are details monster, but, is this lifelike, would we hear all these details in a live performance.

 
Maybe I'm just not getting it, but what's the question, again?
 
Are you asking if highly detailed headphones are similar to what one hears in a live performance?  
 
In my experience, no -- live music is not as hyper-detailed as some recordings and headphones/speakers.  
 
But...live performance is usually not the right reference.  
 
A better reference is, "Are these headphones more detailed than what the recording engineer heard in the mixing / mastering studio?"

 

[castleofargh]

+1 but OP's question is how real it will feel, which is something that sadly can't be answered by anybody but himself.
 
@OP
fidelity and flowery subjective terms aside, in your daily experience of sound, the sound will hit the walls and some frequencies will come back quieter than others, your body will also reflect the sounds, your head, your ears will alter the signal in a way that is pretty much your very unique audio print. when you put the headphone on your head, you bypass that alteration of sound by your body and your head and the place where you're standing, so no it won't sound "natural" to you. for that to happen, you'll need to have a headphone that happens to have the frequency response close to what would result from the same sound hitting your body and reaching your ears. and you're the one alone to be able to say if that works for you or not.
headphones will lack other things, like any sound in real life will reach both left and right, you'll never get only sound in one ear unless you're blocking it physically. some albums on headphones will have sounds only in one ear. but in some domains headphones can be better than speakers(lower distortions for example), no room getting in the way.
 
IMO you need to first accept that you're not getting the "sound like the artist played it", so that you can move on to "the sound that I enjoy". it's a much better quest and then maybe you'll be able to appreciate headphones.

 

[istfleur]

"A better reference is, "Are these headphones more detailed than what the recording engineer heard in the mixing / mastering studio?"
The problem is I don't know what the recording engineer heard so I could compare to what i hear in the headphones.
I'm asking those questions cause in many reviews they state how detailed, transparent are an iem or a headphone, but not many on the accuracy of the timbre and how far or near the headphone is from the way one would hear the music if we were next to the musicians( naturalness)
For example, etymotic, I often read how neutral and accurate they are, but there's always a complaint" lack of bass" how could something be accurate but lack or can't play some frequencies well(bass for example)

PS: not a native english speaker.

 

[PETEBULL]

Wow! This is what I've been thinking about:
 
1) At a concert listeners sit somewhere distant from instruments about 10-20 meters away
2) As we know, treble tends to decay more rapidly over distance
3) Recording microphones are much closer to instruments than listeners are
 
Thus a recording sounds BETTER and more transparent than live performance and if a good recording sounds in headphones exactly as live performance that means headphones introduce timbre distortions and are actually BAD.

 

[gregorio]

  1) At a concert listeners sit somewhere distant from instruments about 10-20 meters away
2) As we know, treble tends to decay more rapidly over distance
3) Recording microphones are much closer to instruments than listeners are
 
[A] Thus a recording sounds BETTER and more transparent than live performance and if a good recording sounds in headphones exactly as live performance that means headphones introduce timbre distortions and are actually BAD.

 
A. BETTER and more transparent than what? More transparent compared to what an instrument/s is actually producing or more transparent to what an instrument/s is supposed to sound like? Do you think composers compose music according to what the instruments actually produce or according to how they think the audience will hear those instruments? Do you think musicians play their instruments according to exactly what they produce or according to what they think the instrument will sound like to the audience?
 
B. Unless of course the recording itself has been manipulated to make it sound more like a live performance on headphones!
 
G

 

[PETEBULL]

More transparent compared to what an instrument/s is actually producing or more transparent to what an instrument/s is supposed to sound like?

More transparent than a listener hears at live performance being more distant from them than a recording microphone is.

Do you think composers compose music according to what the instruments actually produce or according to how they think the audience will hear those instruments?

Why do you say "composers" while you ought to say "sound directors". Instruments have fixed non-linear properties. You can't just make them sound the way you want at live performance unless you use speakers for amplification but in this case authentic live performance is out of question.
In my opinion sound directors have no reason to worsen detail for the sake of "feeling live".
I've heard live music and consider it flawed.
 

Unless of course the recording itself has been manipulated to make it sound more like a live performance on headphones!

I'm afraid some equipment may be manipulated to reproduce perfect recordings more "livelike".

 

[gregorio]

  [1] More transparent than a listener hears at live performance being more distant from them than a recording microphone is.
[2] Why do you say "composers" while you ought to say "sound directors".
[3] Instruments have fixed non-linear properties. [3a] You can't just make them sound the way you want at live performance unless you use speakers for amplification but in this case authentic live performance is out of question.
[4] In my opinion sound directors have no reason to worsen detail for the sake of "feeling live".
[5] I've heard live music and consider it flawed.

 
1. So less transparent than it is supposed to sound then?
2. Because the intention of the composer is the aim in some genres of music, classical music for example.
3. What do you mean by "fixed non-linear properties"?
3a. Yes you can, at least to a degree! An orchestra performing in a cathedral for example, is likely to perform using more attack (more marcato) and less sustain (sostenuto), to somewhat compensate for the wet acoustics, to aid the clarity of what the audience will hear. Is it more transparent to try and record exactly what the orchestra is playing (which is effectively deliberately wrong, overly marcato/staccato) or more transparent to hear the intended results of the orchestra performing that way?
4. In my opinion, sound directors can have many perfectly valid reasons to "worsen detail" of what an instrument actually produces relative to how it is supposed to sound. Place a mic a few inches from a flute player for example and you'll record all sorts of mouth-piece noises (details) which an audience would never hear and are not intended to hear. Place a mic next to a french horn and you'll record or sorts of details which will make a french horn sound quite different (and more like a trumpet) than it should because an audience never hears the direct sound of a french horn, they only hear the indirect sound reflected off the back wall of the concert venue, giving the french horn it's typically warm timbre (than a trumpet). Is it more transparent to hear a french horn which actually sounds like a french horn or a french horn which sounds like a trumpet? The "detail" that pretty much all acoustic instruments produce is quite different from the actual expected sound (for which composers are composing and musicians are performing).
5. That all depends on the genre. For an acoustic genre, like most classical music, the baseline against which any recording is measured is live performance, as that is what the music was designed for. The music for most popular genres on the other hand is designed primarily for recording/studio production, which typically cannot be perfectly (or often, even well) recreated in a live performance and is therefore flawed.
 
G

 

[PETEBULL]

If we agree upon that live performance has its drawbacks it also has advantages. Physical vibrations and ability to swing head build up the effect of presence. Headphones cannot give you the same and they have to compensate for it with additional detail (those mouthpiece noises, string scratching). That's one more reason not to pursue "authentic live sound". Some headphones tend to sound veiled and have recessed treble and some people find them most "authentically reproducing". They just can't bring you there no way.

 

[gregorio]

  [1] Physical vibrations and ability to swing head build up the effect of presence. [2] Headphones cannot give you the same and they have to compensate for it with additional detail (those mouthpiece noises, string scratching). [3] That's one more reason not to pursue "authentic live sound".

 
1. Physical vibrations and swinging one's head does not build up the effect of "presence". However, other sensory information can, such as visual data.
 
2. No, headphones do not have to compensate for that perceptual "presence" with additional detail, if anything, quite the reverse! It's an unfortunate consequence of headphone presentation that they often reveal "details" which are not supposed to be audible and create a highly artificial "presence" because the vast majority of recordings are designed for speakers (with subsequent speaker environment acoustics and crosstalk). There are various common ways to achieve this perceptual "presence" typically already employed in the finished recording itself; Compression, EQ, simply changing the level balance or any combination of these which can be achieved with mic choice/placement, processors or again, some combination. What we would ideally want is a flat response headphone which isn't adding anything ("detail" and/or "presence" for example), to an already compensated recording and is effectively transparent. This is the reason why HRTFs exist, to reduce some of that additional presence/detail which is a consequence of headphone presentation.
 
3. In one sense, I agree with you. Our perception of a live gig is heavily influenced by visual data, our other senses and various other biases, none of which can be recorded (or reproduced) by any audio format/system. So in this sense, pursuing "authentic live sound" is futile because a totally "authentic" experience of the sound of a live gig can never be achieved. On the other hand, by definition certain genres of acoustic music absolutely require a high level of realism/authenticity in order to be perceived as acoustic music in the first place! In these circumstances and regardless of the fact we can never perfectly achieve an "authentic live sound" there's no sensible alternative but to try and get as close as we can. More "detail" (noises which wouldn't be heard by the audience) does not get us closer to the real/authentic sound, it takes us further away from it. This loss of realism caused by more "detail" might be a price worth paying if outweighed by some other gain in realism, say a higher level or as you put it, more "presence" but this is an artistic decision of those who created the recording (as there are other ways to achieve the same effect, as mentioned in #2). So, there certainly are situations where we want to achieve the best illusion of authentic live sound possible and in those situations we want as transparent/flat a headphone as we can find, to as accurately as possible reproduce the artistic decisions of those trying to create that illusion.
 
G

 

[PETEBULL]

But the flatter the response the better the detail and volume tolerance. On mobile phone external speaker (whose frequency range is desperately narrow and unbalanced) you need to crank up volume to merely be able to understand speech. And if headphones are very hi-res you will hear totally everything in the recording. So why wouldn't we use poorer quality headphones on those recordings intended for speakers to make them slightly more "real"?

 

[gregorio]

  [1] But the flatter the response the better the detail and volume tolerance.
[2] On mobile phone external speaker (whose frequency range is desperately narrow and unbalanced) you need to crank up volume to merely be able to understand speech. And if headphones are very hi-res you will hear totally everything in the recording.
[3] So why wouldn't we use poorer quality headphones on those recordings intended for speakers to make them slightly more "real"?

 
1. Not necessarily! Let's say we have a recording, say of someone speaking, and, almost imperceptibly in the distant background, we've got the sound of a bird tweeting, which is let's say centred around 4kHz. On a very resolving flat system we can just about make out that bird tweeting, on a less resolving system or at a lower level we won't hear the bird at all but on a system which is not flat and has say a significant boost at/around 4kHz, we're going to hear much more (detail) of that bird tweeting.
 
2. No, it doesn't matter how hi-res, you're never going to hear "totally everything" in a recording. There's always a fair or large amount of masking going on; overlapping frequency content at different levels which can't be heard or rather, which can be heard during mixing when we can play individual instruments/sounds in isolation but which is inaudible (or changes perceptually) when the rest of the mix is played.
 
3. You could! Providing of course those poor quality headphones sound the same or remarkably similar to good quality speakers in a good quality listening environment.
 
G