floppy-ear ted
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2004
- Posts
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I'm looking for a pair of headphones that will sound pleasant and non-fatiguing, especially in the midrange frequencies. I've DIYed a couple of loudspeakers, so I'm looking for info from a slightly different technical perspective. For me some of the most useful information that speaker manufacturers have often provided were waterfall plots, aka: cumulative spectral decay plots. When I first saw such graphs I wasn't sure how to interpret them, but it's quite easy: basically they show a combination of time and frequency response, so you can pick out any frequency bands that are resonant and take a long time to decay. Although these plots are always unique for each speaker, there are 2 common groups:
1)Smooth and fast decaying up to a certain frequency, with a big slow-decaying ridge at say: 5kHz, and at higher frequencies it goes completely out of control. This characterizes a speaker with a very stiff cone that moves like a piston and sounds great, as long as the unwanted stuff is filtered out.
2)Reasonably smooth decay across a wide range of frequencies, but has lots of smaller resonances that are unavoidable. This indicates that the cone/dome is soft and flexible. The movement is not supposed to be pistonic except at low frequencies, and instead the coil provides mechanical energy that is absorbed by internal damping and the surrounding air. Just about everyone will be familiar with this sound if they've ever heard paper-coned woofers and fabric-domed tweeters.
I haven't been able to find any waterfall plots for headphones, and the closest I've seen was at Headroom when they still had those square-wave response measurements up. Those provided similar information, but it was hard to interpret (hence waterfall plots were invented). I'm not too worried if the frequency response isn't outstandingly flat, as long as it's smooooth, and the small, sharp seismic ripples (tell-tale sign of resonances) only start at a high frequency. I know that some resonances are unavoidable because of the air cavity between the ear and headphone speaker, but it would be useful to know how the different brands and models compare in that regard too.
I'm mostly unfamiliar with high quality headphones, and I don't really want to start playing around with lengthy auditioning and repeated buying and selling. Here in New Zealand almost any headphone costing above appox. US$80 is only available from snobbish hifi shops who give themselves a 100% profit margin. Therefore, it's far cheaper for me buy directly from the US or Germany or elsewhere, even though I have to pay extra for transport and tax. This means that I have to do some research before purchasing.
I once listened to the Sennheiser HD-580 "Jubilee" with the intention of buying them (heard through a cd player with a built-in valve headphone amp). They were made with carbon-fibre, and were apparently identical to the up-and-coming HD-600 and made for "hyping up" purposes. I was not impressed with the sound. I didn't like the loud "warm and intimate" mid-bass, with a slight drop-off at very low frequencies. The treble was droopy, giving me a disconcerting feeling of having cotton in my ears. That could have all been fixed with a bit of EQ, but the midrange is what killed them for me. I hated them right from the word go, and I couldn't put my finger on the reason. At first I suspected that the valve amp was producing noticeable harmonic distortion, but it didn't sound that way, and the bass was quite clean.
Perhaps I was expecting too much improvement over my cheap closed-back Sony MDR-CD170, but (regardless of how morally corrupt this may sound) I felt that the Sonys did some things better than the Sennheisers. I read about the large flexible "Duofol" diaphragm design that Sennheiser uses, and it all fell into place. The old 100Hz square-wave measurements at Headroom showed that although the HD-600 headphones had the nicest frequency response, they had a lot of delayed energy, and there were small ripples that kept on ringing for a long time after the initial "step".
I realised that this all reminded me of paper-coned woofers, and was exactly the kind of sound I was trying to avoid. On the plus side, because the diaphragm is flexible, measurements show that Sennheiser does an outstanding job of absorbing resonances formed in the headphone cavity. Nevertheless, I haven't found those "cavity" resonances to be obtrusive on other headphones, and I'm still yearning for the type of clean sound that I can get from loudspeakers with hard (metal/composite/ceramic) cones. I've set my sights on the Beyerdynamic DT 880, but would like to know what other people would recommend for me, and are there waterfall / step-response plots around that could help me make an informed decision?
FET
1)Smooth and fast decaying up to a certain frequency, with a big slow-decaying ridge at say: 5kHz, and at higher frequencies it goes completely out of control. This characterizes a speaker with a very stiff cone that moves like a piston and sounds great, as long as the unwanted stuff is filtered out.
2)Reasonably smooth decay across a wide range of frequencies, but has lots of smaller resonances that are unavoidable. This indicates that the cone/dome is soft and flexible. The movement is not supposed to be pistonic except at low frequencies, and instead the coil provides mechanical energy that is absorbed by internal damping and the surrounding air. Just about everyone will be familiar with this sound if they've ever heard paper-coned woofers and fabric-domed tweeters.
I haven't been able to find any waterfall plots for headphones, and the closest I've seen was at Headroom when they still had those square-wave response measurements up. Those provided similar information, but it was hard to interpret (hence waterfall plots were invented). I'm not too worried if the frequency response isn't outstandingly flat, as long as it's smooooth, and the small, sharp seismic ripples (tell-tale sign of resonances) only start at a high frequency. I know that some resonances are unavoidable because of the air cavity between the ear and headphone speaker, but it would be useful to know how the different brands and models compare in that regard too.
I'm mostly unfamiliar with high quality headphones, and I don't really want to start playing around with lengthy auditioning and repeated buying and selling. Here in New Zealand almost any headphone costing above appox. US$80 is only available from snobbish hifi shops who give themselves a 100% profit margin. Therefore, it's far cheaper for me buy directly from the US or Germany or elsewhere, even though I have to pay extra for transport and tax. This means that I have to do some research before purchasing.
I once listened to the Sennheiser HD-580 "Jubilee" with the intention of buying them (heard through a cd player with a built-in valve headphone amp). They were made with carbon-fibre, and were apparently identical to the up-and-coming HD-600 and made for "hyping up" purposes. I was not impressed with the sound. I didn't like the loud "warm and intimate" mid-bass, with a slight drop-off at very low frequencies. The treble was droopy, giving me a disconcerting feeling of having cotton in my ears. That could have all been fixed with a bit of EQ, but the midrange is what killed them for me. I hated them right from the word go, and I couldn't put my finger on the reason. At first I suspected that the valve amp was producing noticeable harmonic distortion, but it didn't sound that way, and the bass was quite clean.
Perhaps I was expecting too much improvement over my cheap closed-back Sony MDR-CD170, but (regardless of how morally corrupt this may sound) I felt that the Sonys did some things better than the Sennheisers. I read about the large flexible "Duofol" diaphragm design that Sennheiser uses, and it all fell into place. The old 100Hz square-wave measurements at Headroom showed that although the HD-600 headphones had the nicest frequency response, they had a lot of delayed energy, and there were small ripples that kept on ringing for a long time after the initial "step".
I realised that this all reminded me of paper-coned woofers, and was exactly the kind of sound I was trying to avoid. On the plus side, because the diaphragm is flexible, measurements show that Sennheiser does an outstanding job of absorbing resonances formed in the headphone cavity. Nevertheless, I haven't found those "cavity" resonances to be obtrusive on other headphones, and I'm still yearning for the type of clean sound that I can get from loudspeakers with hard (metal/composite/ceramic) cones. I've set my sights on the Beyerdynamic DT 880, but would like to know what other people would recommend for me, and are there waterfall / step-response plots around that could help me make an informed decision?
FET