Quote:
Originally Posted by CDBacklash /img/forum/go_quote.gif
O Contrare, headphones are sending you a more accurate representation of what has actually been recorded than the speakers which give you a more realistic interpretation.
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We will have to agree to disagree. They aren't for several reasons. One is that our hearing reference in terms of "realism" is free field - it's not from transducers placed millimetres from our eardrums, or at the most a few centimetres from the ear drum. The recorded sound is a stereophonic, free field representation of the real event. Try and play that same recording through headphones and it will be hopelessly out of whack - not only because the spatial clues and phase information is totally screwed up - but also because of the frequency imbalances mentioned by the original poster.
Headphones only work properly in a way acceptable to our brains when used with binaural recordings. It is impossible to make them work properly with a stereo recording because of the way our human hearing mechanism is designed to function. With purpose made binarual recordings, things are better, but the frequency imbalances still remain.
Why are there frequency problems? It's because it is almost impossible to put the theories into practice. Many people seem to totally ignore the huge difference between the way our ears perceive a free field sound versus sound force-fed directly into the ear canal, effectively bypassing the hugely significant effects of the pinna and the associated amplification effects of the ear canal when sound waves hit the pinna from a free field source.
There are easy tests you can even do at home to see how huge these differences can be. Take a a pair of IEMs for example. Then play tones through them at 2 Khz, 4 Khz, 6 Khz and 8 Khz at the same volume setting(these are standard audiology frequencies). See how relatively loud they are to each other. Then stick the IEM in your ear (turning the volume control down to a safe level of course). You will hear a significantly different relative of loudness of those frequencies when the IEM is stuck in your ear canal versus what you heard when you had them out on the table. If you don't, then you are just incredibly lucky.
Or here is another test you can try. Play some white noise through a pair of high quality speakers, then manipulate your pinna - push the pinna so it is flat to your skull, then pull the pinna away as far as you comfortably can. Listen to the drastic effects that has on the balance of the white noise. You will hear it become much more dull when the pinna is against the skull and much brighter when it is as far out from the skull as you can go.
It's all very well showing how a headphone response curve is similar to the inverse of a Fletcher-Munson curve, but again that is theory. If you actually examine the response curve in more detail - with much more accurate plotting of the frequencies and relative output levels - you will find it isn't neccessarily anywhere near as accurate as it is when it is just shown as a generic curve with a similar shape. When you get down to the precise details - the exact position and amplitudes of those peaks and troughs - you can be "out" by a huge amount.
And even if it did achieve "accuracy", it would only work properly if one assumes that an HTRF reading of your own actually matches off against the HRTF estimations made by the company who made the headphone. The chances of that happening are extremely slim indeed. The only way you could get a headphone that really worked correctly is to have one custom made - you would have to have your free field thresholds measured at a huge number of plot points in an anechoic chamber and then you would have to have a headphone made that produced those same thresholds.
This is where EQing can help to some extent, but as the OP correctly points out, the EQing required would be so incredibly sophisticated that it just would not be worth the trouble. You can certainly take a good EQ program and produce something which subjectively might make a pair of headphones sound tolerable and even subjectively good, but it is a thousand times easier just to buy a half decent pair of speakers if you want to approximate more closely what the original performance sounded like had you been in the audience.
We all hear differently, but at least with a pair of speakers, if you can achieve a reasonably flat measured response then you are most of the way there. Even if you have hearing loss or hypersensitivity, with a reasonably flat speaker it's not getting much in the way of the original recording. And with your own hearing (as good or bad as it may be), a flat pair of speakers are going to get you closer to what you would hear at the original performances, since you are using exactly the same pair of ears in both instances and you are using them in exactly the same way.
But as the OP points out -and as I have found in my own experiments over the last two years - headphones are just all over the shop. To get one that is accurate would be nothing more than an incredible fluke and worthy of you purchasing a lottery ticket to go along with it.
Using headphones is brain-bending stuff. It's why so many people keep upgrading them and complaining about sibilance, dullness, brightness, fatigue etc, whereas with a good pair of speakers, people can hold onto them for many years with contentment.
