[Hifiearspeakers]

Even the housings of the headphones as well, they are very important to headphones as a design and it related performances. In fact, many headphones are advertising and marketing it specific voice coils or diaphragm, but in reality, it is the housing, the pads that effects the sound performances. For example, the Sennheiser HD800S and 820. The very same drivers, in different design, resulting in very different headphones

Absolutely.

 

[71 dB]

I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. You can't record hall resonance in stereo and have it create a dimensional sound field. The room is just as important as the speakers in creating the image of the soundstage. With a real room, you have the primary depth cues that tell you that the source of the soundstage is a distance in front of you, because the speakers are ten feet in front of you physically. And you have enveloping reflective sound all around you creating a feeling of space because the sound is bouncing off the walls on either side and behind you. That is a three dimensional sound field. Headphones can't do that, even with recorded hall ambiences.

How does your eyes know an object is 100 feet away from you and not 10 feet? Using optical cues. Similarly spatial hearing uses spatial cues. If those spatial cues are fabricated well enough in headphone listening, spatial hearing can be fooled just like our depth vision can be fooled using stereophonic 3D-images. Headphone spatiality is difficult and challenging, but not impossible. Even stereo speakers fabricate spatial information. We hear monophonic signal coming from between the speakers when there are no sound sources there to begin with! And sounds can be mixed anywhere in between the speaker and even "outside" the line of speakers. That is fooling spatial hearing and that's why stereo sound is pretty useful.

I am pretty sure you force yourself to believe headphone spatiality is very limited and flat and that makes you hear it that way, even when the spatial cues can do better. Believe in headphone spatiality. Close your eyes and forget you are listening to headphones. What do you hear? Where is the sound? Suddenly the miniature soundstage appears.

 

[bigshot]

Lantian, How do you have your speakers set up relative to your listening position? I might be able to make some suggestions for how to improve imaging with your speakers.

How does your eyes know an object is 100 feet away from you and not 10 feet?

And there are lots of kinds of spatial cues. You can turn your head to locate sounds in space like a deer does. Sounds reflect off the walls of the room and that gives you indications of where the source is placed. I think it's pretty much self evident that headphones with sound in a straight line through the center of your head doesn't sound like a speaker system in a listening room, even with your eyes closed. I think some people are just arguing for argument's sake.

In my listening room, I have a front soundstage that is about 14 feet in front of me. It's about 18 feet wide. Behind me is another sound stage in the rear. The two mesh and sound objects can appear in the middle of the room. If I had Atmos speakers, I could have a sound plane above adding more precision to the field. You can do all this with headphones, but it requires RT signal processing, head tracking, and a calibration to your personal HRTF. Castle is the only one I know who has this.

Binaural recording has similar problems. If your head doesn't match the dummy head, it falls flat. Binaural requires personal calibration to really work well. That is why it is a novelty effect rather than a widely used technique for recording music.

By the way. Headphones don't sound flat to me. They just sound like a straight line "inside my head", not projected out in front of me in a room. That can sound OK, they just don't have dimensionality. I listen to music on the go that way all the time. But it isn't the same as listening to music on my 5.1 system. Multichannel with good speakers in a sympathetic room is clearly better sounding than even the best headphones. I suspect a lot of people just haven't had the opportunity to hear a really good speaker system, so they don't know what they're missing. They might be judging by a couple of small bookshelf speakers randomly placed in a less than optimal room.

 

[71 dB]

And there are lots of kinds of spatial cues. You can turn your head to locate sounds in space like a deer does. Sounds reflect off the walls of the room and that gives you indications of where the source is placed. I think it's pretty much self evident that headphones with sound in a straight line through the center of your head doesn't sound like a speaker system in a listening room, even with your eyes closed. I think some people are just arguing for argument's sake.

I agree, headphones don't sound like speakers in the room. In the beginning I said something like that when I joined this forum about crossfeed, but I put my words poorly. They sound different, of course, but that doesn't mean headphones can't have miniature soundstage that is NOT just a straight line through the center of our heads. Headphone sound is almost never like that to me. Stereophonic recordings contain all kind of spatial cues and regardless of how much they make sense, my spatial hearing tries to make sense of them and that results a sound that doesn't live ONLY on a straight line through the center of my head, but is spread elsewhere, even outside my head. Without crossfeed the sounds are concentrated at my ears, because those spatial cues are REAL, that happens in physical world, put overall all sounds appear VERY near my head or inside my head, because the excessive ILD of typical stereo recordings without crossfeed is an indicator for the sounds being very near my ears. With crossfeed the "near ears" indication is milder or nonexistent and the miniature soundstage not only becomes larger (but still much smaller than speaker soundstage), but also organised, non-fractured. In that way it is more similar to the sound given by speakers in a room, but the result is still quite different from speakers and this is what I didn't make clear when I started on this forum, because I was too enthusiastic to write about crossfeed. Anyway:

1) I find properly crossfed headphone spatiality quite enjoyable, even intimate/cosy/personal.
2) Speaker sound is not without its problems. Headphones remove the problems of room acoustics.
3) I can (almost) always listen to speakers if I want the big real soundstage.

In my listening room, I have a front soundstage that is about 14 feet in front of me. It's about 18 feet wide. Behind me is another sound stage in the rear. The two mesh and sound objects can appear in the middle of the room. If I had Atmos speakers, I could have a sound plane above adding more precision to the field. You can do all this with headphones, but it requires RT signal processing, head tracking, and a calibration to your personal HRTF. Castle is the only one I know who has this.

I am not rich and in Finland apartments are typically small, because keeping large apartments warm during the cold winters is costly, and in Finland apartments are warm! We are not like Brits who wear warm clothes inside and still shiver of cold. My listening room is about 16 feet long and 11 feet wide. The distance of speakers from the listening point is 7 feet to all 5 speakers. My speaker soundstage is much smaller than your speaker soundstage and because I let my spatial hearing to do its "magic" with properly crossfed headphone sound, to me the difference of speaker soundstage and miniature headphone soundstage is much smaller than it is for you. With some recordings (typically well-recorded church music with massive reverberation), the miniature soundstage given by my headphones is just 3 times smaller than the speaker soundstage, but for most recordings it is not that good and typically the miniature headphone soundstage is about 10 % the size of the speaker soundstage, but even that means the miniature soundstage extents outside my head several inches.

Binaural recording has similar problems. If your head doesn't match the dummy head, it falls flat. Binaural requires personal calibration to really work well. That is why it is a novelty effect rather than a widely used technique for recording music.

Poor match of dummy head just means the result is worse and I believe "blurring dummy head spatiality" is one solution to mitigate the problems. In a way, crossfeed is just extremely "blurred" dummy head spatiality. So, if you blur out the most individualistic featured of the dummy head HRTF, the result for listeners with different kind of HRTF will be less contradictory. One thing I learned quickly when I started crossfeeding was that spatial hearing needs adaptation time. The soundstage may sound bad at first, but after 1-2 minutes spatial hearing has adjusted to it having learned its main characteristics and the soundstage gets better. It is kind of similar to eyes adjusting to dark.

By the way. Headphones don't sound flat to me. They just sound like a straight line "inside my head", not projected out in front of me in a room. That can sound OK, they just don't have dimensionality. I listen to music on the go that way all the time. But it isn't the same as listening to music on my 5.1 system. Multichannel with good speakers in a sympathetic room is clearly better sounding than even the best headphones. I suspect a lot of people just haven't had the opportunity to hear a really good speaker system, so they don't know what they're missing. They might be judging by a couple of small bookshelf speakers randomly placed in a less than optimal room.

A straight line inside your head sounds VERY flat to me. Only totally dry test tones or synthetic sounds avoid of any spatial cues sound like the for me. If I just add some reverberation to those dry sounds the miniature soundstage becomes something bigger, at least filling my head more.

I have had the opportunity to hear top notch speaker systems. I know what they sound like. My own 5-channel speaker system performs really well for its price, but the reality is most people just aren't as well off as you are. Your standard of living surpasses at least 95 % of all people in the World. That's why you can't be surprised about why ALL people don't do what you do. The fact that a great sounding speaker system requires expensive speakers carefully placed in a room with good acoustic treatment is a financial and practical burden, a problem. You are not willing to admit that while you whine about all the problems of headphone spatiality. That is not intellectually honest. Most people are not kings who can have everything they want. Normal people need to make compromises in life. I suppose you are not rich enough to go to space, are you? So maybe you compromise by visiting Paris instead? What if William Shatner told people how they judge space exploration by having seen Kubrick's 2001 in a crappy movie theatre instead of having gone 70 miles high or so for 10 minutes... ...yeah the latter asks for a BIGGER wallet.

 

[gregorio]

[1] Recorded music, especially orchestra, are all performed in the halls, everything related to the performances are captured. [2] So, without the additional reverbs and echos, time delays and so on, that is the original performances. [3] Sadly, speakers just can’t do that without being complex by itself, using multiple drivers, crossover, cabinets, dampening and room treatments.

1. No, the vast majority of recorded music is recorded in recording studios. Even the majority of orchestra recordings are recorded in recording studios. Didn't you know this?

2. Exactly, that is the original performanceS, the raw recordings. Of course though, no one wants that, no one wants 40 or so original performances, what they want is a single performance, IE. Those 40 (or more) "performances" edited, mixed and mastered into a single performance.

3. Neither can headphones and why is it "Sadly", the public don't have access to the raw recordings anyway?

[1] Remember, the original recordings is meant to be heard without additional effects

[2] It doesn’t matter how the engineers are mixing it.

1. This is completely false, in fact it's pretty much the exact opposite of the truth! The original/raw recordings are definitely NOT meant to be heard by anyone other than the engineers and musicians. In fact commercial studios have significant security to make sure that no one else ever hears the original recordings!

2. Of course it matters how the engineers are mixing it. Several takes of say 40 unmixed/unbalanced channels of raw recordings just sounds like a complete mess!

[1] Unless you are saying that they mixed it in the A room, and in order for you to listen to what they listened while mixing, then you should also set up the very same A room, otherwise, your performances from the speakers are not the original as intended by either the artists nor the engineers

[2] Therefore, headphones, without anything reflected and reverberated artificially to color up the result, is the real way to listen to music.

1. No, again that is false, don't you know what mastering is or why it's been standard practice for about 70 years?

2. Again, NO! In the vast majority of cases the "real way" to listen to music is on speakers with room reflections to colour the result, AS THE ENGINEERS AND MUSICIANS INTENDED.

I have speakers too, and no, I never get the imaginings the engaging presentations as the headphones.

That says more about your personal perception/preferences than it does about accurate reproduction.

Agreed, with my headphones imaging is far beyond my speakers, not even close. ... I Use headphones all the time for their superior sound quality and only go to speakers if I have company.

That's a contradiction! IF headphone imaging were beyond speaker imaging then the sound quality would be inferior because the speaker imaging is what was intended by the artists/engineers. Secondly, headphone imaging is not far beyond speaker imaging anyway! Sure, it's a lot wider but it also has a lot less depth, plus there can often be unpredictable imaging inaccuracies, such as sounds appearing to be on top of your head for example.

I am pretty sure you force yourself to believe headphone spatiality is very limited and flat and that makes you hear it that way, even when the spatial cues can do better.

And what are you basing that "pretty sure" on? Numerous studies have demonstrated that the vast majority of people perceive the headphone spatiality as largely wide and flat. Although, there are a number of people who perceive something else, more depth and or height, etc.

Believe in headphone spatiality. Close your eyes and forget you are listening to headphones. What do you hear? Where is the sound? Suddenly the miniature soundstage appears.

And if you believe in homeopathy, that can work too. Are you really still trying to convince others to believe in a placebo effect?

G

 

[71 dB]

1) And what are you basing that "pretty sure" on? Numerous studies have demonstrated that the vast majority of people perceive the headphone spatiality as largely wide and flat. Although, there are a number of people who perceive something else, more depth and or height, etc.

2) And if you believe in homeopathy, that can work too. Are you really still trying to convince others to believe in a placebo effect?

G

1) I base it on my knowledge and understanding of human spatial hearing and headphone spatiality. Just 10 years ago I was very ignorant about headphone spatiality. I took it for granted without thinking about it, until one day I suddenly realised, that headphone spatiality is not just headphone spatiality. It is not just "different." In most cases is it completely wrong! With speakers we have the room acoustics to mitigate and smooth out problems of spatially bad recordings, but with headphones we don't have that luxury. As Bigshot often says, headphones shoot the sound directly into your ear, so if your spatial information is all wrong, the result is bad. That's how I became a crossfeeder and it revolutionised my headphone listening. When I say I am "pretty sure", it mean I am pretty sure. I doesn't mean I am right. I can be wrong, be my mind says I am pretty sure. That is how I feel. It is for Bigshot to verify my claims (or ignore them) and that's what I encourage him to do. I am not asking him to spend thousands of dollars on expensive gear. I am asking him to think differently about headphone spatiality, give 1-2 minutes time for his spatial hearing to adjust. That is not a lot to ask, is it?

2) Come on. How we experience spatiality of sound is not the same as the health of our bodies. My point was Bigshot is the one experiencing the placebo effect (of hearing headphone spatiality flatter than it is) and I am trying to help him to let go of it. He believes headphone sound is almost always a straight line "inside head", when that is not the case and it doesn't take "perfect match on binaural spatiality with your HRTF" to make it different. As I said, for me that is a special case caused by a serious lack of spatial cues in the sound. The nature of our senses is to interpret the cues and make sense of them, create the narrative if you will and the idea of fooling our spatial hearing is an inherit feature of stereophonic sound. That's why we can place sounds in between the speakers using amplitude panoration and that's why we can create miniature soundstage with headphones by making sure the spatial cues aren't completely nonsensical.

 

[bigshot]

You have absolutely no way of knowing that I “force myself” to hear headphones “flat”. You can be “pretty sure”, but I’m pretty sure you’re just being argumentative and you have nothing to back up your “pretty sureness”.

I have a theory…

The amount of info in posts is inversely proportional to the number of words used.

 

[sander99]

.

 

[sander99]

I have a theory…

The amount of info in posts is inversely proportional to the number of words used.

And, does my previous post support your theory?

 

[bigshot]

At least is isn’t wrong!

 

[bfreedma]

Lantian, How do you have your speakers set up relative to your listening position? I might be able to make some suggestions for how to improve imaging with your speakers.



And there are lots of kinds of spatial cues. You can turn your head to locate sounds in space like a deer does. Sounds reflect off the walls of the room and that gives you indications of where the source is placed. I think it's pretty much self evident that headphones with sound in a straight line through the center of your head doesn't sound like a speaker system in a listening room, even with your eyes closed. I think some people are just arguing for argument's sake.

In my listening room, I have a front soundstage that is about 14 feet in front of me. It's about 18 feet wide. Behind me is another sound stage in the rear. The two mesh and sound objects can appear in the middle of the room. If I had Atmos speakers, I could have a sound plane above adding more precision to the field. You can do all this with headphones, but it requires RT signal processing, head tracking, and a calibration to your personal HRTF. Castle is the only one I know who has this.

Binaural recording has similar problems. If your head doesn't match the dummy head, it falls flat. Binaural requires personal calibration to really work well. That is why it is a novelty effect rather than a widely used technique for recording music.

By the way. Headphones don't sound flat to me. They just sound like a straight line "inside my head", not projected out in front of me in a room. That can sound OK, they just don't have dimensionality. I listen to music on the go that way all the time. But it isn't the same as listening to music on my 5.1 system. Multichannel with good speakers in a sympathetic room is clearly better sounding than even the best headphones. I suspect a lot of people just haven't had the opportunity to hear a really good speaker system, so they don't know what they're missing. They might be judging by a couple of small bookshelf speakers randomly placed in a less than optimal room.

I have a theory…

The amount of info in posts is inversely proportional to the number of words used.

I guess the first post above is one of your low info musings...

Probably best for you to stop generalizing - not everything can be communicated effectively in 1-2 sentences.

 

[bigshot]

.

 

[bfreedma]

.

You've already posted your ABX controls. No need to repeat them...

 

[71 dB]

You have absolutely no way of knowing that I “force myself” to hear headphones “flat”. You can be “pretty sure”, but I’m pretty sure you’re just being argumentative and you have nothing to back up your “pretty sureness”.

I have a theory…

The amount of info in posts is inversely proportional to the number of words used.

I am not saying you are forcing yourself to hear anything. Placebo just happens and when you become aware of it you can stop it from happening.

My posts are "longish" because I have actually something to say and spatiality is a complex issue with lots of nuances. You are simplifying this issue a little bit with your "speaker spatiality rules and headphone spatiality sucks." narrative. It is not that simple. It is more nuanced. Many people just can't have great speakers in a great room meaning their speaker spatiality just isn't that great while headphone spatiality can be satisfactory if you have headphones with good spatial properties and the signal is processed so that the spatial cues make sense.

 

[gregorio]

It is not just "different." In most cases is it completely wrong! With speakers we have the room acoustics to mitigate and smooth out problems of spatially bad recordings, but with headphones we don't have that luxury.

No, it is just different. There aren't any/many "spatially bad recordings", the spatiality of recordings is good according to what that artificial spatiality was designed for, namely; reproduction on speakers with room acoustics. Without those speakers/room acoustics, eg. with headphones, we obviously have a difference.

My point was Bigshot is the one experiencing the placebo effect (of hearing headphone spatiality flatter than it is) and I am trying to help him to let go of it.

I know that was your point and that is why you are wrong! Bigshot experiences what the majority of others experience, which is hardly surprising because the intended room acoustics on the designed artificial spatiality is missing. Hence why cross-feed and more recently personalised HRTF + room acoustic simulation were invented in the first place. If you experience something different, headphone spatiality narrower and deeper than it is, then you're the one suffering placebo effect and you're effectively trying to "help him" to also suffer from placebo effect!

You've had this explained to you and been shown the evidence on numerous occasions but here you are just repeating the same falsehoods again.

G