[Zdzichon]

Just like going to Mars. Theoretical yes.

Hello, mister, are you from the past?

 

[roines1987]

There is a possibility that someone will crack this egg in the end with lossless bt. And at the same time there is a possibility that no one will be able to create something as good as what a physical cable is able to deliver.

 

[hanumanbob]

There is a possibility that someone will crack this egg in the end with lossless bt. And at the same time there is a possibility that no one will be able to create something as good as what a physical cable is able to deliver.

My problem is not the capability of lossless bluetooth but a connection reliability. Do you know how many hours of my life have been wasted on unreliable BT connections ?

 

[mainguy]

Actually I think that what it takes is not that far outside the realm of the possible…. It should be possible to calculate or measure for the geometry of a headphone the responses of any wave generated by a transducer and the resulting reflections between a (model) head and the earpads, cups, etc., then to calculate what the corrections for those interactions need to be. Combine all the waves and required corrections and you can cancel out any unwanted interference. This is in theory not complicated at all, and could be done for every possible headphone, and applied as a standard correction for each headphone model. Theoretically you could even do this on a per headphone and user pair with built in microphones in the earcups, test sound waves, and sufficient computing. These corrections could be mixed with the actual sound to be played.

Theoretically doable, yes. Practical and affordable? No. Will it be the case one day? Who knows!

I mean idk if you have experience modelling waves in these kind of situations but it is very difficult from a physics perspective. Waves in cavities get crazy complex when you have a source with constantly varying outputs right next to the walls of the cavity.

For me the main issue is that the resonances and backwaves that arise are a function of the driver and song. It's not a case of just putting in some parameters for the cavity, but for every piece of music you play different things will arise in that cavity which disturb the driver in different ways. We're talking insane levels of complexity here with waves moving in 3d, interfering with one another, etc, etc and way beyond a DSP chip (I imagine). Whatsmore in the perfect case we're talking about the driver has to respond real time to whatever track is being played - a simple baked in EQ won't solve this issue as like I said, it's a function of the song and cavity, or rather sound at any given moment and the cavity. If you had the computing horsepower in the headphone you'd still need an insanely fast driver to respond accordingly. I just don't think it's possible.
DSP at the moment is just a vague correction and clearly doesn't magic away the closed back cavity, one is still very aware of the cavity and its characteristic. I can't see this changing in the foreseeable future.

 

[evhvis]

I have a Bathys on order. Does anyone know there's an OTG adapter to use with an iPhone lightning port to allow connection with a USB-C cable? I have cables like this, but they're very short and meant for use with an external DAC/amp, and obviously won't work to use with a Bathys' USB-C port unless I hold the phone 2" from the headphones. I have a USB-C 3.1 extension cable, but it's not as flexible as I'd like.

You could use an USB-C to USB-A adapter or use a USB-A to USB-C cable with and one of the official camera adapters. The USB 3 adapter seems to have less noise based on my experiences with portable DACs that are susceptible to noise, but the old one is smaller and more convenient.

 

[jsmiller58]

I mean idk if you have experience modelling waves in these kind of situations but it is very difficult from a physics perspective. Waves in cavities get crazy complex when you have a source with constantly varying outputs right next to the walls of the cavity.

For me the main issue is that the resonances and backwaves that arise are a function of the driver and song. It's not a case of just putting in some parameters for the cavity, but for every piece of music you play different things will arise in that cavity which disturb the driver in different ways. We're talking insane levels of complexity here with waves moving in 3d, interfering with one another, etc, etc and way beyond a DSP chip (I imagine). Whatsmore in the perfect case we're talking about the driver has to respond real time to whatever track is being played - a simple baked in EQ won't solve this issue as like I said, it's a function of the song and cavity, or rather sound at any given moment and the cavity. If you had the computing horsepower in the headphone you'd still need an insanely fast driver to respond accordingly. I just don't think it's possible.
DSP at the moment is just a vague correction and clearly doesn't magic away the closed back cavity, one is still very aware of the cavity and its characteristic. I can't see this changing in the foreseeable future.

I don’t have experience modeling waves, but I do have an engineering background. I don’t think the physics involved is all that complicated, as the physics of the interactions of waves are quite well understood. What is a challenge is the amount of computation that is required. But that is just today’s problem. Consider that today’s smartphones have far more computational power than the Apollo spacecraft, it is only a matter of time until smartphones have the capability of computing realtime the corrections necessary. Now, whether this will be a problem worth solving for is a different issue. But possible? In a matter of time, absolutely.

 

[mainguy]

I don’t have experience modeling waves, but I do have an engineering background. I don’t think the physics involved is all that complicated, as the physics of the interactions of waves are quite well understood. What is a challenge is the amount of computation that is required. But that is just today’s problem. Consider that today’s smartphones have far more computational power than the Apollo spacecraft, it is only a matter of time until smartphones have the capability of computing realtime the corrections necessary. Now, whether this will be a problem worth solving for is a different issue. But possible? In a matter of time, absolutely.

Oh trust me it's complicated. Modelling waves isn't straightforward they're tricky beasts in cavities.

Just because something is understood fundamentally doesn't mean it can just be applied with ease to complex systems. It's easy enough to write a few wave equations describing an electron orbiting a proton, but exrapolating from that equation and modelling the behaviour of billions of atoms is actually beyond what we can do with quantum mechanics at present. Waves are no different, very simple and easy in basic scenarios but insanely difficult in complex scenarios.

I'm not saying you can't model it, but to do so real time, and have a signal processor send constant, consistently precise updates to the driver, without any meaningful delay which must then respond...Yeah no. Absolutely nobody is going to bother doing that for the money involved in selling these things.

 

[AcademicBarzo]

This is an interesting discussion but Focal know the they are doing in producing BT headphones. They are not, clearly, intended to be a replacement or direct competitor to their wired models but to give a strong flavour of those with the convenience and use case of portable BT and ANC headphones. It is a job they do well, and the wired DAC mode is a worthwhile addition to wring extra performance out of the design. They do not, nor are they meant to, directly compete with Focal's wired, close backed designs, never mind their open back models.

What they have produced is an excellent ANC, BT headphone. Nothing more and nothing less.

 

[jsmiller58]

Oh trust me it's complicated. Modelling waves isn't straightforward they're tricky beasts in cavities.

Just because something is understood fundamentally doesn't mean it can just be applied with ease to complex systems. It's easy enough to write a few wave equations describing an electron orbiting a proton, but exrapolating from that equation and modelling the behaviour of billions of atoms is actually beyond what we can do with quantum mechanics at present. Waves are no different, very simple and easy in basic scenarios but insanely difficult in complex scenarios.

I'm not saying you can't model it, but to do so real time, and have a signal processor send constant, consistently precise updates to the driver, without any meaningful delay which must then respond...Yeah no. Absolutely nobody is going to bother doing that for the money involved in selling these things.

I won’t challenge your assertion that it is hard! But there is hard, and there is impossible. If we can model to some level the Big Bang, formation of galaxies, stars, and planets, I think we can model how waves will behave in a complex cavity…. I admit I might be wrong, but I don’t think I am

BTW, you don’t need to model the interactions in realtime. You need to model all possible interactions in advance (or at least a sufficiently compressive subset to approximate enough to make it indistinguishable from all), and then calculate realtime the corrections required based on all of the waves (or a sufficiently large subset to do an acceptable job) that result from playing a particular piece of music. Hard and computationally expensive. Maybe not worth the effort. But not impossible. I doubt I will be alive long enough to see it through, one way or the other!

P.S. I don’t think that modeling sound waves approaches the complexity of modeling electron waves, thank goodness!

 

[hanumanbob]

This is an interesting discussion but Focal know the they are doing in producing BT headphones. They are not, clearly, intended to be a replacement or direct competitor to their wired models but to give a strong flavour of those with the convenience and use case of portable BT and ANC headphones. It is a job they do well, and the wired DAC mode is a worthwhile addition to wring extra performance out of the design. They do not, nor are they meant to, directly compete with Focal's wired, close backed designs, never mind their open back models.

What they have produced is an excellent ANC, BT headphone. Nothing more and nothing less.

Unless this is your only set of headphones which is entirely fine, why on earth would you consider using these wired? I fail to see the use case. Because they are closed back perhaps?

 

[Zdzichon]

Because wire is science

 

[botmann]

... Bathys ... are now my daily driver. It's just that good and the added convenience of wireless cannot be overstated. ...

Like you, I use the Bathys significantly more than my other headphones because of the convenience.

 

[BrainIsMind]

Anyone getting an annoying 'knock knock' tone when on calls? it's so annoying an I cannot find any reference to it at all. Happens every minute or so.

Yes, and I think I’ve figured out the source of the sound. It’s from another connected device sending out alerts. I’m listening to an online meeting on my iPad with my Bathys phones, and I hear the frequent “knock knock”. I noticed a correlation with alerts popping up on my iPhone screen. I disabled Bluetooth on the iPhone, and the knocks stopped.

 

[NightBuho]

Like you, I use the Bathys significantly more than my other headphones because of the convenience.

This creates real struggle in my life. I have a bunch of great wired headphones that I love to listen to but a lot of the time I want/need freeom of movement. That leads me to use the Bathys more than their wireless sound quality nature justifies but when push comes to shove convenience rules. Don't get me wrong the Bathys is a quaility piece of equipment, it's just not possible in our current day and age for a wireless unit to truely compete with a wired unit due to the quantiy of power and the lossless signal quality of wired.

 

[AcademicBarzo]

This creates real struggle in my life. I have a bunch of great wired headphones that I love to listen to but a lot of the time I want/need freeom of movement. That leads me to use the Bathys more than their wireless sound quality nature justifies but when push comes to shove convenience rules. Don't get me wrong the Bathys is a quaility piece of equipment, it's just not possible in our current day and age for a wireless unit to truely compete with a wired unit due to the quantiy of power and the lossless signal quality of wired.

Agreed. I use my Bowers & Wilkins PX8 when out and about, as I find them a better solution, particularly when walking with them on, than the Bathys (more comfortable, better ANC). However, when seated, so particularly when working or listening at home I find myself reaching for the Bathys more often than many of my wired headphones, even though I know many of my wired headphones sound better. Indeed, I'm experimenting with using true wireless buds when walking and the Bathys for my commute by train.

There's a lot to be said for convenience and, in isolation, the Bathys are a good sounding headphone, certainly good enough most times that I don't feel I'm missing too much listening to them. However, if I go wired (say with the Elegia, or the Senn HD650) there is an appreciable difference in quality.