Skeptico Saloon: An Objectivist Joint

[miceblue]

  There's a difference between speed and speed.
High speed of the driver means great transient response so it can reproduce high frequencies better. If you see an early roll-off the driver is "slower".
 
Perceived speed is a more complex matter. For example, boosted sub bass may give the impression of "slow" and "lagging behind" bass.

 

  Or if a headphone reproduces the faster decaying overtones of an instrument louder, for example because of a treble boost, it's probably gonna be perceived as "faster".
The speed and timing relationship didn't really change though.
 
I could also think of high amounts of distortion mudding up the whole spectrum which could cause the decay of distinct tones to be perceived as faster (they would disappear earlier in all the added distortion products).

I think that's why I think headphones sound "fast" or "slow." :/
i.e. LCD-2 sounds "slow" to me because its bass is really prominent; the STAX SRS-2170 sounds "fast" to me since its treble seems to be reproduced without any obstruction of other sounds.
ヽ（´ー｀）┌

 

[Cat Face]

don't all frequency response changes affect phase response? Could that explain any perceived "speed" of transients? There's an awful lot of discussion about group delay and transform phase differences between different subwoofer constructions and their audibility, but at such low frequencies and high wavelengths it pretty much doesn't really matter by any logic. How's the less tactile, more audible range then?

 

[bigshot]

 

  The decay on a snare drum is several orders of magnitude slower than any headphone. Speed is mostly placebo.

Yeah, I was focusing more on the attack than the decay I guess since miceblue mentioned impulse response. Driver design and diaphragm materials can have an effect on this.

 
No, the attack is still several orders of magnitude slower. We're talking about slivers of time that might shift enough to mess up a waveform if a frequency lines up wrong, but it isn't going to be anywhere near the transients you find in recorded music.

 

[xnor]

Well subs are often vented which causes quite a bit of group delay, or even passive radiator boxes which produce the highest group delay. We're talking about tens of milliseconds here but at very low frequencies where a single cycle can take 50 ms (= 1/20Hz).
 
Headphones with really erratic frequency response may have some peaks of higher group delay, but they would have to be like very narrow +/- 10 dB peaks in the treble range to even approach a quarter of a millisecond.
With some ANC headphones that have really steep bass roll-off you may approach a few milliseconds.
 
 
No big deal if you ask me even in those worst cases.

 

[xnor]

  I think that's why I think headphones sound "fast" or "slow." :/
i.e. LCD-2 sounds "slow" to me because its bass is really prominent; the STAX SRS-2170 sounds "fast" to me since its treble seems to be reproduced without any obstruction of other sounds.
ヽ（´ー｀）┌

 
I don't see a problem unless.. you really want that "fast" sound but cannot stand boosted treble or lean bass response.

 
Tradeoffs everywhere..

 

[uchihaitachi]

Quick question,
 
How would I go about recording music coming out from an aux out onto a mac?

 

[miceblue]

Wow, this is from 2009. That is so cool!

[VIDEO]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi74rYk2ebQ[/VIDEO]

 

[xnor]

Take a look at iZotope RX.

 

[miceblue]

Take a look at iZotope RX.

Huh, that looks like a pretty useful tool for audio manipulation. I cringed at its price tag though. XD

[rule]
How are a headphone's soundstage and imaging properties produced? All headphones have a diaphragm of some sort and they all move air; and yet, different headphones seem to create soundstages of varying sizes, and a sense of imaging different from others.

I'm listening to a piano-based music piece and I hear a very stereo-like sound, with sounds spread across the left and right channels. With a different headphone, I recall hearing the same piano piece, but the image was very centered and it sounded weird to me since I wasn't used to hearing the piano towards the center of my head, if that makes any sense at all.

 

[xnor]

Huh, that looks like a pretty useful tool for audio manipulation. I cringed at its price tag though. XD

Yeah, just wanted to mention it because there are some videos showing impressive stuff done with it.
 

How are a headphone's soundstage and imaging properties produced? All headphones have a diaphragm of some sort and they all move air; and yet, different headphones seem to create soundstages of varying sizes, and a sense of imaging different from others. I'm listening to a piano-based music piece and I hear a very stereo-like sound, with sounds spread across the left and right channels. With a different headphone, I recall hearing the same piano piece, but the image was very centered and it sounded weird to me since I wasn't used to hearing the piano towards the center of my head, if that makes any sense at all.

Not a one-sentence topic.
 
Stuff will be located in the center by the brain if the frequency response and time delay is the same for both channels.
 
Some ideas:
No two drivers are perfectly matched. The left driver could be a bit louder at X Hz but softer at Y Hz so depending on the piano note played the sound could be located more to the left/right. Since one note contains many overtones this will result in a diffuse center.
Our ears are not perfectly symmetrical. Different headphones (angled drivers, ear cup volume, in- vs over-ear etc.) interact differently with your ears, resulting in again frequency-dependent differences between the channels.

 

[Copperears]

Re: xnor's post above: I would suspect that's why Sennheiser has moved to designing their latest headphones with their "curved sonic wavefront" tech (makes me think of the Beach Boys.... "surf's up!"). In the HD800, HD700, HD598 and perhaps the Momentum around-ear. The goal seems to be precisely to increase the soundstaging.

Re; transients and headphones: taking a cue from using synths for years, and playing with transient curves to create sounds: anything shorter than about an 8ms attack transient for a sound tends to show up as a click, not an actually effective sonic event in the musical generation of sound. The "warm analogue" synthesizers that were pre-digital, and their excellent software equivalents now, tend to have transient attack phases of about 12ms. I suspect most "natural" musical instruments are 12ms and above, and this is for the initial attack (of course if the curve of the attack is logarithmic, linear or exponential this is going to have an effect on the nature of the transient as well).

But the main point is, it's all well past any kind of concern with the "slowness" of any kind of headphone on the attack; all of them are well within that spec, otherwise you'd be hearing horrible, distinctive noise instead of snares, hi-hats, triangles, etc.

 

[bigshot]

The term soundstage is the most misused word around here. Soundstage is a function of recording and playback on speakers, not headphones. Headphones don't have soundstage.

 

[miceblue]

I've been going by this definition:

soundstaging, soundstage presentation The accuracy with which a reproducing system conveys audible information about the size, shape, and acoustical characteristics of the original recording space and the placement of the performers within it.

http://www.stereophile.com/reference/50/index.html

ヽ（´ー｀）┌

 

[xnor]

Re: xnor's post above: I would suspect that's why Sennheiser has moved to designing their latest headphones with their "curved sonic wavefront" tech (makes me think of the Beach Boys.... "surf's up!"). In the HD800, HD700, HD598 and perhaps the Momentum around-ear. The goal seems to be precisely to increase the soundstaging.

Wait what. The orthodynamic headphone manufacturers advertise with a planar wavefront and Sennheiser advertises with a curved wavefront? And dome drivers already produce a curved wavefront... Crazy world.

 
I also don't see how any of those headphones other than the HD800 would produce an HD800-like wavefront, because afaik that's the only one with a ring driver and the others don't seem to have some sort of special waveguide either. Not more special than the "paper" with the hole in the middle as found in the HD515 and up anyway.

 

[bigshot]

I've been going by this definition:
http://www.stereophile.com/reference/50/index.html

 
That's correct. When you set up speakers, you try to create the image of the performing space in front of you. Unless the band is playing in the space between your ears, that can be tough with headphones!