Wow, I don't pay attention for a few days, and I miss a whole heated conversation on a topic that I very often rant on
Thanks guys for making sure I'm not the only one that is heavily miffed by the topic especially where it approaches HD650!
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Yes I find it quite annoying how people affix a bracket to headphones based on price... "low fi" "mid fi" "hi fi".... It is very silly tbh.... Come on clearly the HD650 are HIFI headphones.... 8 years ago people would be saying that they were "hi fi" now that they have decreased in price they are suddenly "mid fi" very silly imo.
If actual technology moved onward, new models replaced the old models, prices moved down, etc, I could see the whole "HD650 is mid-fi" thing. But that isn't what happened. HD650 is the same price it was 8 years ago. It still represents the same position in the market. I also find the notion that "newer better headphones (at 3x the price) exist now, so it's mid-fi" to be silly as well. "Newer better headphones" existed 8 years ago too. The Orpheus, Stax, and so forth. The
only difference between then and now is that the price range for exotics has tamed from the $5,000-10,000 down to the $1,000-10,000 range with some new models in that category. The notion that "tech has moved on" well outside the same price bracket is very sideways thinking indeed. That's like saying your brand new speedboat is obsolete because the U.S.S. Lincoln exists. Two different things at two very different price points.
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Isn't that more you projecting your conclusions? HD650's are mid-fi today because we have better phones around. It has nothing to do with price.
As above, we had better phones around back
then too. By your logic, when HD900 comes out at $2500 HD800 will be mid-fi. When HD950 comes out at $4000, HD900 will be mid-fi. The ever-ramping price for ever decreasing improvements is at its core for the "mid-fi" classification, otherwise we'd see new models moving down the price ladder. Maybe that will happen, but it has not happened yet. The old price points are holding steady. Otherwise we're locked in a debate where to be considered the owner of a piece of "hi-fi" equipment is an ever increasing ladder into elitism.
And then that puts headphones like HD700 and LCD-2 in a really weird light. Both have a superior model above them. Thus both are mid-fi? So there's a grand total of a dozen or so "hi-fi" headphones? Weirder: HD650 has the honor of former flagship. HD700 does not. Yet costs more.
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Ah right so the HD650 which was a flagship initially and many amps have been built around these headphones etc.... Are now suddenly "mid fi" because other more expensive headphones with different sound signatures have come out? I mean really the HD650 actual sound quality is still HIFI. It is not suddenly MIDFI because some other headphones with different sound signatures have come out. You could argue that the LCD3 is also MIDFI in that case because it has recessed treble. Under the same logic you could say the HD800 is also MIDFI because it is too bright and can sound harsh, same with the Beyerdynamic tesla. LOADS of people agree that the HD650 actual sound quality is still up there with more expensive headphones, just the more expensive headphones have different sound signatures.... Labelling them "mid fi" is silly IMO. They are clearly still upper tier headphones. I bet if the HD650 were priced at $800 people would not be spouting this sillyness about "mid fi". Also I bet if the LCD3 were $400 people would say they are "MIDFI" because they are lacking in the treble but have excellent bass etc.
Right, and there is they key. These new "superior" headphones have such different sound signatures, how could one compare HD650 to them? If we had a headphone with the same sound signature but improved in different areas; extension, detail, speed, that replaced the old price point. Ok, that would be progression of tech. But we don't have that . We have very different sounding headphones at radically higher price points. How could one even determine if they're "better" or more detailed since they're emphasizing different parts of the spectrum. Of course HD800 is more overtly detailed in presentation regardless of it's driver. Most argued that K701 and DT880 were more detailed back in the day too. They weren't, but they emphasized the treble to accentuate detail. We're still arguing the same argument with different phrases. Treble emphasis or no treble emphasis. +$1000. We never left the ancient "DT880 vs K701 vs HD650" debate. We're still arguing it and multiplied the price points
Note that I'm not trying to claim that some of these superior headphones aren't somewhat superior, my agrument is that they're not overwhelmingly superior, nor superior withing the same price range to actually be considered capable of supplanting HD650 as anything but "hi-fi." What we have is a group of headphones at radically different prices that offer some different advantages and tradeoffs, and are truly within the same general category. Some folks hate HD800 and like HD650. Some like what HD800 does better. Some like what LCD-2 does better. All balances of tradeoffs, not great leaps in superiority. If these were all $500 (and honestly most of them should be were they not trying to rig the market to a different sense of value) everyone would be debating the tradeoffs and technical merits of presentation, not openly declaring "x is superior."
Same goes for HE-400. Is it inferior to HE-500? Probably. By the reports of most who have compared both, the difference is neglegable. Yet they get blased as "budget" "mid-fi" "entry" etc due to their low price that is entirely due to better production process.
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I tend to think of it this way... I would not call a high-definition tv a mid-definition tv just because 4k tv's are released. A high-definition tv would still be high-definition even though something with more resolution is released.
I think you're more spot on than you realize. The SOURCE resolution is what is key here. If 4k became a standard, then perhaps that would become high definition and the old would be dropped to a new mid-definition category. However the prices would also actualize and the 4k would fit the current price points of high-def and the old high-def would budget down. In headphones we're not seeing the progression of new tech; in with the new out with the old. We're seeing a new exotic price point added above the norm, and the knee-jerk reaction that suddenly
that is the new standard. If the 4k tvs were consistently sold for 2x, 3x, 4x the price of current high-def, it would remain nothing but an exotic plaything for people with money to spare, and the "old" high-def would continue to be the standard of high-def.
4k TVs are interesting because they function
only for up-scaled video. BD is still 1080 as a standard. Broadcast is still 1080 as a standard. And that is very unlikely to change soon given the immense budgets required for it. So all one can do with their shiny 4k TV is upconvert content that's really only 180 to begin with until some new video format standardizes.
Return to headphones. Red Book audio hasn't changed in 20 years. All this arguing about detail extraction seems a little shifty. Red Book has only so much detail. HD650 can
already surpass the resolution of Red Book audio and clearly resolve differences in higher resolution audio. And higher resolution audio is still relatively scarce. HD650 was designed and marketed to coincide wth SACD for good reason: It can outresolve Red Book. So while everyone is ranting about the "better detail resolution" of headphone B, while throwing the same Red Book recording at it, what is ignored is that much of that "resolution" is simply "more accentuated presentation of detail."
Specifically speaking of HD800, sure it has clear advantages. Greater extension in both directions with reduced distortion in the bass side. That can clearly be measured. Better soundstaging due to driver position and size. Sure. Faster in the transients? People underestimate HD650, but sure I can believe a new magnet setup could accomplish that. But, then, my planars have faster transients....HD650 still feels more detailed and refined. That can be considered an improvement, but it isn't something to make or break hi-fi status. We're talking about important and obvious advantages when comaring evolutionary steps, but it's not the sort of radical shfits that people claim it to be. Not until the RECORDING takes a serious change in direction. Beyond those things, any improvement is highly subjective since the sound signature will create a bunch of differences.
I'm convinced the people who will argue greater detail
retrieval than HD650/K701/DT880 (again, barring bass which
has been improved upon since then) on a Red Book CD would also easily argue that their 4k TV shows so much more detail from their 1080p Blu-Ray discs. Emphasis, sure. Retrieval, no.
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It's all relative. We generally don't assess phones by tonal balance, but by driver speed and sensitivity. In other words, resolution is usually what dictates better can, worse can--at least in this community. So since 8 years ago, we have HD800s, Omega 2's, LCD-2s, the HE-series (some of which are really cheap), T1's, and so on.
Pretty much all of them are faster transducers than the HD650. So the scale went up and hi-fi became $1K cans. Cans with less resolution naturally fell to mid-fi, and the worst are lo-fi. It just makes things easier to talk about. It's nothing personal--though I'm not sure why anyone would include a can in their self-identity anyway.
So a tonally imbalanced headphone with fast transients is hi-fi, but a well balanced headphone with moderately fast transients is mid-fi? That explains a lot about HD700
Again, though, I ask, considering detail
emphasis versus resolution as a factor. Given the Red Book audio standard, which HD650 has already been outresolving for quite a while, even if the higher end headphones are physically capable of outresolving HD650, what good is the capability of outresolving a headphone that already outresolves the source? It's like upgrading your 20" picture frame with a 30" picture frame to frame a 4x6 photo. HD650 was already blasted as complete overkill at an insane price tag when it was released. Now we're overkilling the overkill and patting ourselves on the back for our achievement.
Certainly there are applications for such headphones, and if one prefers the sound signature of them, they're ideal. But to agrue that HD650 is so outmoded by them as to be considred a lesser level of fidelity is pushing it. And faster transducer or not, I do not consider my "really cheap" HE series to be superior to HD650. I love both of them, and I have different desires for the different sound signatures of both. I consider them at worst equals and at best, HD650 still has the edge. The idea that a faster transducer automatically is sufficiently better to mark it as being in a different class is, IMO inaccurate.
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You're mixing up definitions. HD in video is very specific--1280x720 pixels or upwards is usually called HD. We have no such threshold defined in audio. In audio it's just the most detail you can extract from the recording, the better.
Sure we do. 16/44.1 as the standard, and the beginning of the next resolution is 24/88. Can HD650 resolve all detail from 16/44.1? Can it resolve past it and resolve additional detail from 24/88? Yes. As it was designed to do. Can HD800 resolve even greater detail from 24/88 and into 24/96? I don't know. I can say that my if my plenty fast planars can do so, I can not detect such difference.
There's so much talk about "extracting as much detail as you can extract" as though Red Book were some vaguely defined format. Like video there's a very specific amount of resolution on the disc. The headphone/amp/dac can either play all of it without slurring anything or losing minute peaks between impulses or it can't. Beyond that all you can do is accentuate the edges of the waveform and bump the specific frequencies where most detail is contained to draw greater attention to their edges. Detail perception, not retrieval.
I'd gleefully grant that the higher end headphones almost certainly have more ability to do so with the very high resolution recordings. The trouble is I doubt even the most serious of audiophiles has a majority of their music in such high res formats since so few albums are even released in those formats. And that ignores whether the human ear can parse it at all. And completely ignores that for all but the very best DACs 127 may actually be WORSE. But for Red Book we're very, very far beyond that hump. We were beyond it when HD650 was released. Thus why it was blasted as overkill and defended on the merits of SACD which was, at the time, a rising star.
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They are, but again, they're all just names. Calling the $1K cans hi-fi just makes it easier to talk about. Back in the day no one called R10's or Qualias Hi-fi and HD650's Mid-fi. The word hi-fi here seems to take into account some sense of affordability/accessibility and resolution. Does that make perfect sense? No. But It's language. It's always going to be subject to consensus rather than logic.
If the categorization of audio performance is subject only to consensus instead of logic, then you'd better get your battery-ended cables ready before heading to the cables forum
You're right, it's langauge and since this is a forum to discuss audio the langague used is very important, and the "mid-fi/hi-fi" monikers are thrown around entirely falsely, often on lines of elitism and emotionalism, not genuine debates about actual comparitve performance on a given source material. Consnensus about outright false categorezation does little but hurt the general state of the hobby. We depend on "new blood" streaming through all the time, and wrongly declaring headphones like HD650 as "mid fi" because it's convenient to "consensus" as though they're somehow not giving you the full resolution and that you need to get into the $1000+ range to get into actual "hi-fi" is only harmful. Those are semi-exotic playthings, not the standard of hi-fi.
Disclaimer: While it's an important and serious discussion relating to all of hifidom and especialy HD650, I intended none of my commentary to be accusational or attacking anyone, especially you sphinxvc, since a lot of comments were responses to yours, don't feel like I was blasting you! Your statements were very well stated and pleasant, and reasoned, unlike some who comment on such things at times. We may or may not ever agree on the matter, but it's a debate with informed ideas on both sides. It's always nice when it's a civil debate and not flaming arguments
