jant71
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2005
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It is because they uses your ear parts and do stage and positional cues better and move air and have real impact. IEMS are chasing the sound of speakers and headphones for a real sound not the other way around. Everything colors. That headphones and speakers color the sound but IEMs don't thing....where does this kind of stuff come from. I want to hear the logic of how they are not in the same damn boat as the other forms. Also love the E5000 posting. No coloration there ha ha. WOW moment of the day.Full Size Headphones have worse sound quality than IEM, scientifically proven.
First of all, especially closed IEM, isolate. They lower you background noise by +30db which is essential for sound quality.
Than a lot of these are multi-way multi-driver BA IEM where every single driver is tuned to perfection and all they have to control is the air inside your ear canal with the only reflections coming from an ear canal.
An over ear Headphone have to do the same job with one single driver, that needs to be big at the same time, while controlling the reverb from your head, your ear, the earcups and so on.
It is physically impossible that an Headhpone can ever compete with an IEM and every measurement that was ever done is backing this up.
Even the best Planar Magnetic and/or EST fail to reproduce even an simple rectangular signal because they are not fast enough because one single driver needs to do the whole frequency spectrum while the sound is bouncing off everywhere and extern noise from your room is getting in your ear and just everything messes up.
Headphones are not even Close to IEM in terms of sonic performance and that is exactly the reason why more and more sound studios switch from speakers/headphones to Multi-BA IEM
This is an frequency response measurement of an 5-way 5-BA IEM
This is the measurement of an Planar Magnetic Headphone made for the same use case
And i am not talking about the tuning, i am talking about how even the measurement is. And you can hear that, instantly.
If you play a frequency response test file wiith the IER-M9, it sounds absolutely perfect, homogenic and flat. If you play an frequency repsonse test file with any over ear headphone, no matter what, you will hear a constant shaking and vibration in volume with dips and peaks that are even strong enough to make the sound disappear for a short moment.
And this is just a simple frequency response sinus wave. Try an rectangular wave or multitone or actual music and Headphones completely fall apart.
Take the 6000$ Hifiman Susvara
And compare it to this 300$ entry level IEM
or even this 250$ Single DD
Not even remotely close. Headphones are significantly inferior to IEM, especially when it comes to correct and accurate reproduction of the original sound.
And speaker systems are even worse. Even an 40'000$ Speaker system in an perfectly well tuned room are worlds beyond Headphones and Earphones.
That people prefer Speaker and Headphones to IEM is _because_ they colour the sound and change it and make everything sound bigger than real life and wow and whatnot. But in terms of Monitoring, in "Playing the original Sound File as perfectly as possible", they are worse in every single aspect.
Back to TWS please! Continue it in the sound science forum or whatever it is called now.