Single Driver vs Multiple Drivers... My thoughts on the trend.

[dookiex]

It is fine tacitapproval, you are entitled to your comment as I am to mines

 

[p0wderh0und23]

Is it safe to come out yet?

 

[dookiex]

Of course! When are those UM3s coming out? I enjoyed the UM2s when I had them

 

[ak40ozKevin]

For some reason I just read through this argument and though both sides are too proud to admit it, they both made some good points. From then it just got ugly and somewhat embarrassing. I hope the best for both parties involved and that they can each find their ideal forms of sound reproduction.

 

[xnothingpoetic]

"Do you need a dual driver IEM, or did some marketing genius convince you that two drivers are better than one?

The argument for multiple drivers holds water when there are physical limitations to filling a large room with sound, and not a 1.4cc volume in your ear canal.
" -Don Wilson,Etymotic Research

 

[shigzeo]

i think i am one of those who prefer dynammic to armatures but i won't say they are better. for me, they are. however, i loved the sound of the ety but it was far from what i have ever heard in my life.

no phone, speaker or crossover should introduce 'what was intended by the artist' into music by its own accord. it cannot. if it does, it is misusing something as you cannot take a produced album and turn it to anything else. if you are, you are fighting against the sound, not cooperating.

no matter how much i loved the speed of the ety or perhaps just perceived speed, i could not fall in love. it was not till several phones later (the lovely um2 and e500) and the atrio that i finally found a sound that i felt comfortable saying of as, 'natural'. it was the atrio m5.

that said, dynammics don't on a whole seem to impart speed or detail as well as armatures as far as i can tell. however, they are less fatiguing to me, have great bass impact. it is important for bass to actually impact as it does in fact make impact. if all i hear is a sound and not feel the boom, then it taked 50% of the enjoyment away.

if bass from speakers had no tangible impact, i think we would have some trouble relating to music.

as for multiple drivers versus single: apple are releasing an affordable unit at 79$ usd for 2 drivers, crossover and a mic. the multiple driver market has i feel been fueled by 'keeping up with the jonses' too much and not enough about making the best for the money.

i would love to try sa6 as im sure the studied the likes of ety and came up with something better but a fact is that my ears don't respond as well do armatures versus dynammics so my preferences lie with not only one driver, but one driver in a dynammic shell.

problems with dynammics? size. they sound best in large enclosures like atrio m5. denon c700, victor fx500 etc are all excellent but where they are strongest: bass is also where they have the biggest limitation: their size allows bass to punch out but not vibrate as much as they are small: so resolution is sacrificed.

it is a hard pill to swallow anyway but i think that we may see that the argument for multiple drivers will go the way of the dodo as prices come down as companies like apple make affordable solutions. rather than money dictating what sounds good, it will be actual mass ratings from consumers who do not have to sell their lovers to buy quality sound.

 

[dookiex]

Sony really did a nice job on semi-solving the big driver issue by have the driver positioned the way they are on the EX700s. I definitely want to try out the Atrio m5s again, I recollect them to have very very nice rich bass which gave the sound body yet still maintain a nice amount of detail. I would give it to armatures that they are usually superb at details but they lack a richness in the body of the sound as a whole.

I think that multiple drivers would eventually go the way of the dodo and depending on market trend, drivers may shift back to dynamic-centric on the high end audio department. With the exception of Shure e530s, I don't feel that companies who have produced multiple armature driver phones have found that perfect sweet spot for leveraging the multiple drivers so time can only tell as they develop more on multiple BA drivers equipped phones.

 

[WindowsX]

All right guys, imagine you're IEM wannabe customer. What would you choose to buy between "Single driver IEM ABC that sounds fxxking great and natural because blablabla." and "X drivers IEM XYZ that reveals completed frequency range because multiple driver running different frequencies".

This is market where all companies stand to fight against not purist nirvana lab where everyone wants the same conclusion for "Best sounding IEM".

Choose what you believe.

 

[dookiex]

But they did do a great job with the SE530s from Shure

 

[younglee200]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xnothingpoetic /img/forum/go_quote.gif "Do you need a dual driver IEM, or did some marketing genius convince you that two drivers are better than one? The argument for multiple drivers holds water when there are physical limitations to filling a large room with sound, and not a 1.4cc volume in your ear canal. " -Don Wilson,Etymotic Research

John Diles of Livewires said something like this to me when I told him I preferred the Triple Fis over the Livewires when I returned the product.

"A hoax, just a damn hoax. They're just nothing but a lie to overprice those earphones when what they're doing is distorting the music. Do you know how much those drivers cost? 10 dollars. And they're charging you over 100 dollars for that."

I have yet to try myself the x10s or the SA6s to be able to compare them to the multi-driver IEM I own.

 

[accurate_dB]

Haven't hind sight already given us enough clues that
technology is ever evolving machine?
Soon enough, we will all know which prevails.

Its funny that we, the online community, have been through
this types of debates before:
solid state vs. tubes;
BJT vs. MOSFETs;
regulated power supply vs. unregulated power supply; etc...

Who knows, something completely different (tech wise) will change the way we perceive hearing. And most will be eager to use their buying power to get the experience asap.
Regards.

 

[jinx20001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by elnero /img/forum/go_quote.gif dookiex, I've been involved in music most of my life and audio for close to 25 years. I've worked at high end audio shops and for a speaker manufacturer as well as going to school for audio engineering and I've been involved with high-end headphones now for over 6 years so I have a bit of experience. In my opinion if anyone needs to get off their high horse it's you. You do realize that the average range of hearing is 20hz to 20khz don't you? And that's more of an ideal than a reality, the reality is as we age and are exposed to loud sounds we suffer an amount of damage that diminishes the range which we can hear. Bass below that range we can feel but it requires some serious air movement for that. Regardless of that, there are very, very few instruments that actually reach down even to 20hz. So with these things in mind you're argument about armatures not reaching down below 20hz is really rather pointless. Speakers are not what music is supposed to sound like, live music is what music is supposed to sound like. Speakers are the standard which we got stuck with and unfortunately it is far from ideal, in fact the closest to an ideal for reproducing music I can think of would be an IEM playing back a binaural recording. As ClieOS stated though, all recoding and reproduction equipment is going to color the sound to one degree or another so the ideal really comes down to personal experience and personal preference. If you think armatures can't sound as good as dynamics that's you're prerogative but that's not the case for everyone and apparently not even for yourself as you seem to exclude the Shure E530's from you're argument. There are plenty of Head-Fiers who have some serious equipment, both headphone and speaker related, that have UE-10 or 11 pros that believe they are right up there with some of the best sound they've heard. I've personally heard quite a few of the higher end universal armatures and some I quite like and some I'm only lukewarm on. I'm not big fan of the Ety's but I do love the Image X10's, SA6's, E530's and I quite like the Triple.fi's as well. In fact I'd take most of those over almost any other headphone I've heard.

i agree with this, frequency response is a small guide and means squat, if a set of phones were claiming they could only go as low as 40hz i would never claim they could not possibly be better than some that could go as low as 15hz or similar because that 10-100hz range is all about feeling anyway, actually hearing sounds below say 30hz is almost not possible.

onto single vs multi drivers, i believe both harness plus and minuses, but i also believe its all about how loud you listen. now single drivers from the likes of ety and klipsch do sound very good but if you crank it up they will not perform as multi drivers will, bass will destroy music at high levels, hence ety's lacking a whole lot of bass presence, they do this on purpose because they know exactly what a single driver can handle.

multi drivers have thier own single job to do, hence bass will be cleaner and clearer (and louder), mids can come across smooth and unaffected by the congestion of sounds, and highs certainly are better with thier own driver because highs require a driver that can move fast and respond quickly, this is another reason ety decided to hold back on the bass, bass requires a much slower and bigger movement, imagine what a single driver has to do all at once, it has to move fast for highs and slow for lows, all this at the same time and that driver goes into distortion meltdown. so high volumes would really not sound half as good a multi driver set ups.

so yes, its safe to say i like a multi driver setup a little more than single driver phones. multi driver phones have downsides, phasing coherence as well as more things but its down to manufacturers to do the tuning, set up the housing so it works, adjust and manufacture the crossovers so they work how intended and so on, but manufacturers such as ultimate ears,shure and westone have all the experience needed and will only get better, and single driver believers such as etymotic will soon follow suit you mark my words. because they are such a distance behind they need to get working.

as others have said, i have certainly never put a set of etymotics in my lug holes and thought yessss wow this sounds just how it did down at the live performance, no, so much is missing that multi driver phones manage to fill in. sorry to say it but its true, ety's are brill but realistic, not really.

 

[RedBull]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dookiex /img/forum/go_quote.gif Show me a armature driver that dips lower than 16hz. You won't find any. Dynamics can dip a bit lower than the 16hz armatures can go down to. Look at your charts, you have the frequency range starting from 20hz. Why don't you pull up some charts showing a phones full range? Your charts are obviously flawed as they do not show any of the frequencies that dynamics can dip down to and armatures can't.

According to this reference: Hearing range - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia human can only hear no lower than 64 Hz, only an animal call "Ferret" can hear as low as 16 Hz.

 

[RedBull]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shigzeo /img/forum/go_quote.gif that said, dynammics don't on a whole seem to impart speed or detail as well as armatures as far as i can tell. however, they are less fatiguing to me, have great bass impact. it is important for bass to actually impact as it does in fact make impact. if all i hear is a sound and not feel the boom, then it taked 50% of the enjoyment away.

Quote:

Originally Posted by shigzeo /img/forum/go_quote.gif problems with dynammics? size. they sound best in large enclosures like atrio m5. denon c700, victor fx500 etc are all excellent but where they are strongest: bass is also where they have the biggest limitation: their size allows bass to punch out but not vibrate as much as they are small: so resolution is sacrificed.

while i don't always agree with shigzeo (in other long winded thread

), but in the above 2 contex, i agree. i can write 100 pages testimony on how i love the sound coming out from my lovely SE530, when i present both my se530 and cx300 as a 'blind' test to my friend (without mentioning the price of both to avoid placebo), he could swear he love the sound from cx300. i brought him to a headphone shop, get him to try denon ck350, portapro, UM1, UM2, CrossRoad Mylar (something, i don't remember), Ety 6i, he insisted that CX300 is still the best, others just has not enough bass, he said ... what can i say?

my own experience, i heard a lot of good reviews about HD650, i know it has to be a good stuff, and i tried to love it as well, i kept trying whenever i had a chance, but i can't still convince myself that HD650 is better than SE530 (no offence to HD650 die hard fans). i will keep trying btw ...

in the case of shigzeo comment above, my preference is more into details, a little less bass is ok with me, i have audienced atrio m5, it's definitely the bass i've ever heard in my live so far, hard hitting, precise and low (good for shigzeo, he like trance, i like rock music), but again, it is not as much 'vibration' (good term! like what shigzeo said, thus a little less detail) as the se530 or even a lesser bass UM1 (armature). i think i'm leaning more towards armature 'color'. please don't scrutinized me with technical graphs, this is purely my preference

For rock, jazz vocal, i'll use either 530 or UM1, for dance, disco, i'll change my gear to CX300 or PortaPro, Gwen Stefani's "Wind It" really blasting your head ....

so, the moral of the story is, sound is very very subjective, we can share experience of course but no point cursing that other people's ear is 'wrong', that's quite childish, i think

i'm also into photograhy, i found comparing picture quality is much easier than telling people what-you-think-you-hear, God!, this is hard! -- "ok, you find you camera is good, ok, can you send your picture, let me see, ah .., i don't like that, i'll buy the other one, simple.

that's my one cent, save your precious energy, just enjoy music ..... peace

 

[dookiex]

Try a pair of the Sony EX700s Redbull

You'll be pleasantly surprised how good they sound AND they don't have the overwhelming bass.

While human hearing can't technically hear as low or as high as frequency specs will have for phones these outer limits of human hearing I do believe should have some effect on the overall sound of the phones. Also, remember that testing frequency doesn't mean that the sound is true, since we all know that, for example, Ety's will hit the claimed frequencies but they are far from having any body in their sound. In that case, it becomes a personal preference.

It's funny how a blind test yielded a win for the CX300. Though the CX300 are not the most detailed of phones, I feel that the "lab rat" (ha ha, joke joke) gave it the win not really due to bass as we understand bass, but more in terms of body and soundstage. For a total layperson, what counts more than detail is soundstage and body which is why I had originally felt that though armatures are good for their purpose, excellent dynamics still have the upper hand because of the type of sound they produce that armatures up to now have still not been able to truly capture.

I think manufacturers have wised up and realized that they needed to go back to basics, instead of trying to fight the "King of the Details Hill" war that Etymotic originally started, they are going back to put musicality back into the equation. This change of direction have yielded some phenomenal kit with the highlights being SE530s and Atrio m5s and hopefully, the Sennheiser IE series. This climb up the audio quality hill has also pushed the major consumer brands to innovate as well which has provided us with Sony's EX700s. So single driver, multiple driver, dynamics, armatures, at the end of the day, I think the trend with whatever drivers will be lead by the sound that a company is trying to achieve.