How to make a speaker system sound as good as a headphone system?

[mulveling]

To me, a top notch speaker setup will amaze you as much with metal as it will on jazz, perhaps even more so. If it doesn't handle metal well, then I'm not interested

Metal is difficult because the speakers need:
* To be very coherent in phase and timing from top to bottom
* Very fast
* Very well balanced/integrated in the frequency spectrum from top to bottom - too much to one side or the other and the resultant muddiness, shrillness, or scooped-mids become VERY apparent
* Excellent dynamics, to avoid sucking life out and sounding sterile or analytical

That's a hard combo to optimize for. Add in the difficulty of finding an appropriate amplifier for when your speakers are of lower efficiency and/or have a weird impedance curve!

It's also very difficult on the room acoustics - the barrage of noise is too much for many rooms that would do perfectly fine with simpler music. A good room is a true luxury these days.

Once these factors are soundly addressed, you'll hear that the typical hard rock and metal recordings aren't as nearly bad as they say - in fact many are quite excellent (at least on vinyl)! The problem is, it's very difficult and often expensive to address the above issues in a speaker setup, when it can be accomplished (sans the wonderful attributes of staging and visceral presence that good speakers bring to the table) in a headphone setup at a much lower price - full range from a single crossover-less driver for perfect coherence, and freedom from room effects!

I've lucked out in the last year and found/obtained my "dream" room and speakers, but it wasn't easy nor cheap. I went through some very nice speaker gear the past few years, and still listened to mostly headphones until I just recently got the right speaker ingredients together. Only now, do I realize I can finally live without the high-end headphone gear - it's finally lost its magic in the face of my treasured speaker setup.

Still - man, I was a difficult convert over to the speaker-side

 

[earwicker7]

With bad recordings, the Bose (not my choice, it came with the car) setup in my 370Z sounds far better than my fairly high-end headphone setup. Listening to a Metallica or Primus CD on my headphone setup is painful, as they sound like they were created by putting a recording engineer badge on a homeless crackhead. The Bose system, with its undefeatable (why, oh why?) "loudness" boost, cranks up the bass and treble so much that it hides a lot of the errors by drowning them out.

I don't think it's possible to get speaker setups to sound exactly like headphones. I think that a good set of headphones will always have more clarity than the best speakers because of the fact that room interactions are unavoidable. On the other hand, headphones will never have the bass response of speakers. So it's a subjective toss-up as to which sounds better.

 

[jvlgato]

I agree that room acoustics play a very large role. Headphones completely control the acoustic environment, sit right next to your ear and have cups surrounding or on top of your ear. Speakers are at a distance, and interact with walls, furniture, carpeting, etc... Frequency response varies greatly at the listening chair based on all these factors. This is already mentioned earlier, so I won't go more into it.

But there is also the problem of scale. Our ears are logarithmic listening devices. Doubling the power output does not double the loudness that we hear. Rather, I think that a doubling of amplifer power output increases sound by only 3 decibels, which is noticeable, but it is not nearly twice as loud sounding. I think (but could be wrong) that 10 db sounds twice as loud. So even if we are not listening at head banging levels, it is not easy at all to get realistic, life-like dynamics out of a speaker being played at a distance. Not too many amplifiers/speaker combo's are up to the task, and it costs much, much more to do it at a high quality level. On the other hand, scaling down to the near field listening of a headphone, plus the lower power levels needed of the amp to drive them, it is much easier and cheaper to get the loudness and dynamics at a very high quality level.

I love both heaphone listening and speaker listening, but for different reasons. Phones for the nth degree of detail and portability; speakers for realistic imaging/dimensionality, and feeling like the artist is actually in the room with me. Each has its benefits, and it's fun to listen to the same music on different systems. It's like looking at a sculpture from different angles. However, if I had to choose only one, I'd personally spend my time with a great speaker set up over a great headphone set up. I'm very glad I do not have to choose only one!

 

[Skylab]

Excellent post - I couldn't agree more.

 

[Donald North]

From my experience and in my opinion, to get the same micro detail of headphones through loudspeakers, you need to use controlled-directivity loudspeakers which reduce room reflections, thereby allowing you to hear more clearly the direct sound.