71 dB
Headphoneus Supremus
Headphone soundstage with great recordings isn't as deep as with loudspeakers, but it in front of listener, outside head nevertheless. Depth is about 1-2 meters. My head is much smaller than that!
Headphone soundstage with great recordings isn't as deep as with loudspeakers, but it in front of listener, outside head nevertheless. Depth is about 1-2 meters. My head is much smaller than that!
Not impossible, but hard to get right. The accuracy of the cues is the problem and that's why the depth and realism is weaker than with loudspeakers which render in the room 100 % accurate real spatial cues.I think the point is that certain cues are impossible in 'pure' headphone listening, and thus we should avoid a speaker-derived term such as 'soundstage' when discussing headphones. I tend to fall into the 'words have meaning if people know what you mean' camp of linguistics, so I'm fine using the term soundstage on this site, but I can understand the objections.
Do you have a good speaker setup?
I'm curious, because I have good headphones and a good speaker system and they present the sound completely differently.
Are you just referring to secondary depth cues like sound bouncing off the walls in the recording venue? Because that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about having the sound physically in front of me ten or twelve feet away, not right up against my ears. The depth cues are in my room, not on the recording. Soundstage involves physical space. Angled drivers in headphones won't accomplish that.
Not impossible, but hard to get right. The accuracy of the cues is the problem and that's why the depth and realism is weaker than with loudspeakers which render in the room 100 % accurate real spatial cues.
I listen to my music cross-fed with headphones, because it's idiotic to suffer unnatural spatial distortion ruining the spatial cues there is. Cross-feed bends the sound more forward, so that helps a lot with having depth. In the end it's having good spatial cues for the ears.
Yes but the second you add crossfeed you have left the plane of 'pure' headphone listening,
which I would wager is the plane most people run around on on this site ("Let some two-buck DSP alter the sound of the beloved flagship headphone?! Unpossible!").
That means the term 'soundstage' on the site is referring to inter-headphone differences during 'pure' listening, which can't involve anything HRTFy except frequency response. I guess I just feel this is a definitional argument, not an argument about sound virtualization...
The way I look at it is that headphones are a straight line through your ears. Soundstage is a flat plane like the wall in front of you. A 5.1 sound field is a flat plane with you in the middle of it. And an Atmos sound field is a true three dimensional space. 3D is a pain in the butt to view on TV because you need to wear special glasses. But three dimensional sound doesn't require any special equipment to perceive it. You just have to be able to move your body and ears around relative to the sound sources.
almost all recordings contain spatial distortion.
Sort of wondering about Atmos through Stereo headphones. I downloaded the Atmos demo on Windows Store and through my AKG K551, the demos were boomier but didn't actually seem wider than what i was used to.
Also IIRC there are headphones with more than 2 drivers per ear. I dunno how Atmos would affect that but I never thought that having multiple drivers that close to your ear would be any different than typical stereo drivers.
...3D is a pain in the butt to view on TV because you need to wear special glasses. But three dimensional sound doesn't require any special equipment to perceive it...
I'm going to differ on definitions again... Music recordings don't have spacial distortion. They only have rudimentary spacial information- secondary depth cues like phase shift effects and reverb. Stereo recordings aren't supposed to have spacial information. They just have left to right information. The spacial info is supposed to be provided by the speaker placement within the room. There's a standard for speaker placement and almost all music is mixed to suit that standard. If you listen on headphones, you aren't getting that aspect, so you add crossfeed to synthesize the effect of the standard speaker placement in a room. It isn't spacial distortion when you listen on headphones, it's lack of the intended spacial placement for the sound. Music is mixed for speakers, not headphones.
no music that I know of, that have a mix available for the public to actually consume.