[Paul Mohr]

Ya I am going in the opposite direction. I have to move out of a house and get an apartment. So headphone are probably going to become more useful to me. Hoping I will have enough room for a home theater and a dedicated two channel set up/headphone area. We will see. And I can probably kiss my subwoofers goodbye unless its the middle of the day and I dail them back a bit.

I really don't listen to music much outside of the house anymore. I rarely even turn the radio on the car anymore. Because of my nerve problems I don't like music on in the background if I am trying to focus on something. It just annoys me. If I want to listen to music I want to just sit and just listen to it. If its in the background its just noise to me. Didn't used to be that way. Downfalls of getting old and crazy I guess lol. If do listen outside the house though I really love my Bose QC35II NC headphones. Didn't think I would be a fan of NC but it certainly has its uses. I use them when I mow the lawn. I like to listen to my police scanner when I mow and the headphones cut out the mower really well. Problem is I got caught on a branch one day and it pulled my phones off which pulled my portable scanner off too and I almost ran them over with the mower!! That would have been a really expensive oopsie. That portable scanner cost more than the headphones did.

 

[bigshot]

When I was an apartment dweller, I lived in a cheap neighborhood. No one complains about noise unless you live in a fancy area full of karens!

 

[Paul Mohr]

Well since I am on SSI and will be getting an income based apartment its probably not going to be in a nice area lmao. Except they do have one in town that caters so disabled people and the elderly. Would by nice to get in there. Its a secure complex with staff. I will probably end up in a crack house though with my luck. Glad I didn't sell my AR-15 to get my headphones.

 

[bigshot]

You can turn up the volume as loud as you want next to a crack house. Not next to a granny.

 

[ADUHF]

Mr. G's take on soundstage and HPs.

 

[bigshot]

I answered your question. Did that give you the info you were looking for?

 

[ADUHF]

I answered your question. Did that give you the info you were looking for?

You did indeed! Thank you sincerely, sir. Your replies were very informative.

I'm still wondering how alot of this gets applied to HPs though. Mainly the passive ones.

 

[bigshot]

Good. Glad to help.

Some of it just doesn't apply to headphones at all. Speakers and headphones both produce sound, but we perceive it in different ways because of the physics involved. To discuss it, you have to understand both sides.

A lot of audiophiles who know either one side or the other but not both blend definitions until it's hard to even know what they're talking about. A lot of people on youtube pretend to be "experts", but their experience is actually limited, and a lot of their information comes from parroting other people on the internet who don't know what they're talking about. It's the job of the reader (or viewer) to parse who is a good source of information, and who isn't. I prefer to do that in writing, because I can scan a forum post or article and quickly see if it has useful info. But videos are time based. You have to sit down and commit ten or twenty minutes to it, and then you find out that the person is totally full of baloney and you've wasted your time. I don't click on videos unless I am sure they have something to offer. I'm a busy person and I have other things I can be doing with my time. If you provide a summary and outline the points being made, I might click. But just throwing it out on the table with a comment like "here's this." doesn't inspire me to commit my time to it. I'm here to have conversations with people. Not play other people's playlists. I'd rather talk with you than passively view an audiophool with an unjustified sense of self worth. Just letting you know where I'm coming from.

 

[ADUHF]

Mainly the passive ones.

I stole that term from Maya btw. (Thank you, Maya!) Seems like a pretty good term though for HPs with no built-in electronics.

 

[ADUHF]

Good. Glad to help.

Some of it just doesn't apply to headphones at all. Speakers and headphones both produce sound, but we perceive it in different ways because of the physics involved. To discuss it, you have to understand both sides.

A lot of audiophiles who know either one side or the other but not both blend definitions until it's hard to even know what they're talking about. A lot of people on youtube pretend to be "experts", but their experience is actually limited, and a lot of their information comes from parroting other people on the internet who don't know what they're talking about. It's the job of the reader (or viewer) to parse who is a good source of information, and who isn't. I prefer to do that in writing, because I can scan a forum post or article and quickly see if it has useful info. But videos are time based. You have to sit down and commit ten or twenty minutes to it, and then you find out that the person is totally full of baloney and you've wasted your time. I don't click on videos unless I am sure they have something to offer. I'm a busy person and I have other things I can be doing with my time. If you provide a summary and outline the points being made, I might click. But just throwing it out on the table with a comment like "here's this." doesn't inspire me to commit my time to it. I'm here to have conversations with people. Not play other people's playlists. I'd rather talk with you than passively view an audiophool with an unjustified sense of self worth. Just letting you know where I'm coming from.

I appreciate the clarification. Thank you.

I come from the TV generation, and am sort of a slow reader and typist. So I suppose that's why I enjoy watching and listening to videos.

 

[MayaTlab]

Since we're in a thread that uses the word "science", then I think that we can start by agreeing that we need to discuss about phenomena that we can test, and if we want to "test" whatever the hell "soundstage" is, since it refers to our capacity to localise sounds in space, we need to actually know where the sounds in question are meant to be placed, to actually test whether or not the playback system accurately reproduces their location. With the usual stereo recordings we have zero reference to that effect. We simply have no knowledge of the intent of the recording / mixing / mastering engineers. When you combine this with a playback device (HPs) that by design, without binauralisation techniques, can only produce only one aspect of how humans localise sounds in space (FR only, no ITD, etc.), this makes "soundstage" or "imaging" simply untestable.

So I think that we need to start by a space (whether real or virtual) where we can physically locate sounds on three axis. A typical example of that would be a video game, particularly modern ones using object-based formats and state of the art binauralisation techniques (Returnal on PS5 for example).

A fairly typical test you'll see on many AES articles dealing with testing HRTFs or binauralisation techniques puts subjects in a virtual environment and ask them to point, "shoot", or move towards the sound source, and rate their results (accuracy, speed, etc.). These tests can be, quite literally, "blind" in the sense that they're asked to do so without visual stimuli. But in other tests both visual and audio cues are fed to the subjects. In the following for example, the visual stimuli was used to train subjects to adapt to generic HRTF profiles over a few weeks : https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/conventions/?ID=949

This article calls this the "gamification" of auditory localisation .

What all these tests have in common however, is that we know where the sound sources are meant to be placed.

 

[bigshot]

It isn't correct to say that you have zero reference with a stereo recording played through speakers. The standard triangular speaker setup is remarkably consistent for creating sound stage, and the distance between the listener and transducer is physical, so it is going to sound totally natural. As long as the proportions of the triangle are correct, the sound stage will be accurate and repeatable. The only thing that changes is the scale, meaning the difference between the three points of the triangle, and the effects of the room, depending on the quality of its acoustics. I imagine different speakers might have different dispersion patterns, but that is something you account for when you are designing your system.

Sound recording studios have standards that mixing stages adhere to. Playing back a mix in one studio isn't different than opening it up in another. Consistency is required. The sound stage of the recording is designed and created in the mix, so a home playback system that comes as close to matching the arrangement of a recording studio is optimal. The same is true of 5.1 and Atmos. The balances and placement of speakers is more critical the more speakers you add to a system, because a simple soundstage plane in the front of the room is easier to achieve than a coherent sound field that immerses the entire room in sound.

I wouldn't want to adapt to a standard HRTF. I would want the HRTF to adapt to me. That way sound in real life is the same as the sound of the playback.

 

[ADUHF]

It isn't correct to say that you have zero reference with a stereo recording played through speakers. The standard triangular speaker setup is remarkably consistent for creating sound stage, and the distance between the listener and transducer is physical, so it is going to sound totally natural. As long as the proportions of the triangle are correct, the sound stage will be accurate and repeatable. The only thing that changes is the scale, meaning the difference between the three points of the triangle, and the effects of the room, depending on the quality of its acoustics. I imagine different speakers might have different dispersion patterns, but that is something you account for when you are designing your system.

This was sort of my thinking as well.

If you can reproduce some of the (fairly predictable) characteristics of stereo speakers in a room within a pair of headphones, using FR and other techniques, then maybe you can get a little bit of the soundstage from that room in the headphones as well? Not sure though.

 

[bigshot]

Distance cues are a LOT more than just frequency response. It involves time and reflections, head tracking and HRTF. To pull all of that off, you need a computer like the Smyth Realiser. And that technology is still new. I'm sure it will be better in the future.

Apple's spatial audio has rudimentary head tracking, response and timing, but no HRTF. And I think HRTF is the big deal breaker. That is why binaural recordings have never taken off commercially.

 

[71 dB]

Yep. Headstage=Headphones / Soundstage=Speakers.

There is a progression of sophistication of sound... mono - stereo - multichannel, which create a sound source (mono) - headstage (stereo headphones) - soundstage (stereo speakers) - sound field (multichannel speakers)

I don't like the term headstage, because it implies (severed?) heads on a stage. Maybe when you are listening to Talking Heads? I use the terms miniature soundstage and headphone soundstage.

The amount of audio channels and sound sources radiating sound is a technical thing. The way our spatial hearing interprets what we hear is a subjective impression. It is wise to keep these concepts apart and try to understand how they are related. From the perspectice of our spatial hearing, it is all about spatial cues. Multichannel speaker system has greater degree of freedom to generate good spatial cues compared to stereo speakers, but that doesn't mean any multichannel speaker system will produce better spatial cues.