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Grado Fan Club!
May 23, 2019 at 2:19 PM Post #39,736 of 65,687
aravaioli said:
What you mention, I was told, applies to device that "produce" sound, like music instruments. Indeed changing wood type in a violin would likely affect the produced sound.

Not so much for device that "reproduce" sound, such as headphones...
Click to expand...

That's a bogus distinction. Obviously headphones produce sound, or they'd be silent.
 
May 23, 2019 at 2:30 PM Post #39,737 of 65,687
aravaioli said:
What you mention, I was told, applies to device that "produce" sound, like music instruments. Indeed changing wood type in a violin would likely affect the produced sound.

Not so much for device that "reproduce" sound, such as headphones, where the objective of the housing is to prevent unwanted sound in the journey between driver and your tympan. There the difference between wood types will be very minimal if any but marketing personnel will use it as a differentiator beyond the aesthetic aspects of it. So I was told by someone very competent in the audio recording industry.
Click to expand...
Not true. There's a reason that very expensive loudspeakers use sophisticated enclosures and/or damping techniques. You cannot completely eliminate resonances, only reduce and control them.
 
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May 23, 2019 at 2:35 PM Post #39,739 of 65,687
aravaioli said:
What you mention, I was told, applies to device that "produce" sound, like music instruments. Indeed changing wood type in a violin would likely affect the produced sound.

Not so much for device that "reproduce" sound, such as headphones, where the objective of the housing is to prevent unwanted sound in the journey between driver and your tympan. There the difference between wood types will be very minimal if any but marketing personnel will use it as a differentiator beyond the aesthetic aspects of it. So I was told by someone very competent in the audio recording industry.
Click to expand...


Read my over-long comment. With the quote from the Fender company website on this very issue. There are a lot of competent people....John Grado is one among many; the Fender people are as well; guitarists who know that a Les Paul SOUNDS different from a Strat regardless of the pickups, that the different woods of the fretboard and the bridge and the body affect both the sound of the instrument and what guides their fingers as they play - they are experts too.

Rudy Van Gelder, Brian Malouf, Jon-Erik Kongshaug, Brett Kull, are all very competent recording engineers, and they all chose particular dynamic environments, and use different headphones for their mixing and mastering, aiming FOR particular sound profiles, not based on elimination, but on capture of a musical event - not frequencies, any more than cooking is the manipulation of molecules. Music and food - not physics and chemistry. Not elimination of distortion, but capture of a human event.

Your point raises another common error: Applying the theoretical ideal of the positivist engineer that the speaker "should" simply pass on the signal unchanged. Given that there are no perfect transducers, that every audio device is different in either subtractive or additive ways, that every device is in an immutably DYNAMIC relation with its environment (the air, the walls, your skull, the guitarist's fingers, etc), that ideal and the mandate ("should") it communicates is divorced both from aesthetic and physical reality.

There is no "objective" to the housing besides what the designer intends and does with it; to suggest that, as a Fact, its definition is "a structure designed to eliminate unwanted sound..." is so flawed it is a non-starter. The presumption that there is an a priori nature to a headphone housing; that there is an a priori DESIRE ("want" - which actually means "lack", but the etymology isn't important here) - the desire for only some sounds (those in the original signal?), and to eliminate those not desired; the disregard of the nature of a journey (between driver and tympan - time and space and material are all variables in a journey, and their interaction is what we call a "dynamic"). The material of the instrument and environment (and they are ALL transducers) determines what vibrations reach the driver, which is itself not some hypothetical character-less entity. The putative "fact" that that the difference between wood types will be very minimal, in the example you give, is based not upon any verifiable, measured degree of influence by the wood, nor in the importance of that quantitatively small influence (in good equipment, and, as something that John Grado says), the influence of any ONE variable might not be great quantitatively, but the dynamic of all of them together is what defines the character of the product.

As someone who plays wooden and metal instruments, including drums, for which I prefer wood-tipped sticks to plastic - I can say, as can any musician, the difference between materials is small but highly important - small effect which makes a huge difference, which is a complexity-theory axiom so well established that it is now the basis of bad movies as well as cosmology and cooking.

Marketing is always a factor - but a high-end company that tries to sell you fancy s--t and convince you it makes all the difference is going to lose credibility very quickly. Reproduction vs production is a difference we can all recognize, but in the experience, the human/equipment and equipment/environment and human/equipment/music holism, the difference is besides the point. ALl headphone models and brands sound different, and all the hih-end ones we pay attention to are excellent but different, and all are based on more or less improvised applications of material, electronic, and acoustic physics, all with an aesthetic, human goal.

So, "objective", "want", "eliminate unwanted" and assumptions of what is minimal and what is essential, are philosophical presumptions masquerading as laws of nature, and ultimately have no place except as a few among many guides for the engineer who always wants accuracy as an important north star - and the north star is meant for navigation to a place on earth - but is not a destination. Cliché that works here is that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon
 
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May 24, 2019 at 1:58 AM Post #39,746 of 65,687
mortcola said:
I don't know much about them, but I know Grado designed a headphone FOR or WITH them, which looks kind of like an RS or a GH.....worth a look-up
Click to expand...
I have Alessandro MS1's and they seem to be pretty much the same as the two Grado SR80s I've owned.
 
May 24, 2019 at 7:26 AM Post #39,748 of 65,687
If one is truly interested how grado headphones really work, i suggest that you go thru couple of Grado Mods thread here in head-fi.
Lots of discussion about different drivertypes and versions and about materials used etc... Threads are huge and long, but worth of it.
 
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