[YGingras]

Greetings Headfiers,

since I joined this forum, I went through several combinations of
audio source, amplifier, and headphones. It seems that most people in
here will test a pair of headphones by listening to music that they
like with them. That makes a lot of sense if you want to know if you
like the headphones for music listening but it makes it hard to build
a qualitative test suite that you can use to compare gears that you
can't get together for an A vs B comparison.

Do you guys have a set of benchmarks that you can rely on to
determine, for example, that one headphone is "faster" that some other
one, or that some DAC is definitely less noisy that the audio port of
a laptop, or that FLAC is definitely better than 320 bit MP3?

Are there reference tracks somewhere with well documented
characteristics? Are there programs that will stress test the response
curve of your audio gears in a reproducible manner? I'm especially
interested by test suites that can be used on GNU/Linux since most of
the music that is listen to comes from a computer.

Thanks for your help.

 

[ericj]

Testing the output of a source or amp is easy - most people use RightMark Audio Analyzer.

testing headphones directly is more subjective.

 

[SiriuslyCold]

the only tests you need are:

1. does it sound good to me?
if "yes" then
2. can I afford it?
if "no" then
3. how much am I willing to suffer to get it?

 

[YGingras]

How about codec artefacts? How can you tell if MP3 320 is good enough for your setup or if you need Flac? I've seen a few spectrum analisys but it was very low bitrate so not realy useful for real life scenarios

 

[sahwnfras]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SiriuslyCold /img/forum/go_quote.gif the only tests you need are: 1. does it sound good to me? if "yes" then 2. can I afford it? if "no" then 3. how much am I willing to suffer to get it?

Finally someone who enjoys the music not the equipment.

Don't worry about numbers and all that bs, all that matters is if you enjoy it.

 

[Tridacnid]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SiriuslyCold /img/forum/go_quote.gif the only tests you need are: 1. does it sound good to me? if "yes" then 2. can I afford it? if "no" then 3. how much am I willing to suffer to get it?

Precisely this.

 

[YGingras]

Don't get me wrong, the goal of a sound setup, unless you happen to be a sound engineer, is to enjoy music. However, numbers and specs are still useful if you want to understand what it is that you like in one particular setup and to be able to focus on that aspect when looking for an upgrade.

 

[SiriuslyCold]

AFAIK there are no tests to tell if FLACs sound better than 320KB MP3s - FWIW you (or anyone) may not even be able to tell the difference

However we all know that FLAC compression is lossless and MP3 throws away some data; therefore, be it significant or not I'd rather have lossless over lossy compression. So, don't need a test there.

Plus, you can always get a MP3 from FLAC, if you need it.