[Plumbus the Wise]

you mean the yokes? i have the latest revision that use metal yokes

Do you know which version exactly or how to tell when purchasing? I think I'm gonna get a pair of it's no longer plastic.

 

[cel4145]

The original post is an impossible question for me to answer. It's a bit like trying to answer do I like sugar or specific dairy (milk, cream, custard style) more in ice cream? Both are important to the flavor.

 

[bigshot]

It's a lot easier to achieve a balanced response. An equalizer will fix that right up. But soundstage is more difficult. To do that right you need good speakers and a room with a good acoustic. Not everyone has that.

 

[71 dB]

When I use headphones, the spatiality is very important for me, because I find bad spatiality with headphones extremely annoying. I am allergic to excessive spatiality such as lower frequencies panned hard left or right. When I listen to speakers, the room takes care of the excessive spatiality problem and spatiality of the recording becomes less important. So:

Headphones ---> Spatiality is much more important
Speakers ---> Spatiality and frequency response are equally important.

 

[71 dB]

Headphones have a tendency to suck up bass. When I was a sound editor, I would use headphones to avoid annoying people around me with repeating sections around edits over and over. I would do a rough level and EQ pass as I edited. I discovered that I could EQ the low end and it would sound fine on headphones, but when I played it back on the big monitors, the bass would explode all over the room, threatening to tear up the woofers. I once bough a hip hop CD that was mixed like that. I suspect it was mixed using headphones by someone without much experience.

Yes, this is what happens, because a typical room has longer reverberation time (room modes) at low frequencies and that has emphasis on bass with speakers compared to headphones. The problem is short high level bursts at low frequencies. Headphones keep those bursts short in time and we perceive loudness lower, but in the room those bursts trigger massive room modes that die out slow and the perceived loudness is significantly higher. The solution for this problem is to avoid high level bursts at low frequencies if possible. Have the low frequencies be dynamically compressed so that they lack high level bursts and also tail off slowly. That way the bass can be mixed to sound "full" also on heaphones and things don't "explode" in a room with speakers. To have dynamic sound, burst energy can be concentrated on higher frequencies (say above 200-250 Hz) where the room modes aren't that severe anymore.

 

[FastAndClean]

Do you know which version exactly or how to tell when purchasing? I think I'm gonna get a pair of it's no longer plastic.

2020 version
the difference is very obvious, headband is different design
old


new 2020 version

 

[71 dB]

Yep...bass has a physicality to it that no headphones can reproduce.

Headphones reproduce the signal in a straightforward way. I try to give some physicality to the bass this way:

- Bass is mono or almost mono.
- Surface early reflection simulation

More than a few decibels of ILD at low frequencies makes the bass very non-physical and "fake" imho. There's a lot of octaves above bass to practice larger ILD.

The early reflection simulation causes comb filter colourization, but if the amplitude of the reflection is much lower than the "direct sound", the colorization is not massive and the fact is colorizations are part of physicality. Natural sounds are very rich, because the physical world around us enrich sounds before they reach our eardrums. Headphones provide a "shortcut" and a lot of this enrichment is bypassed in good and bad.

 

[bigshot]

The room in an INTENDED modification of the sound. It’s a benefit to the spatiality, not a detriment.

 

[71 dB]

The room is an INTENDED modification of the sound. It’s a benefit to the spatiality, not a detriment.

Rooms are not equal. Some rooms have good acoustic + good placement of speakers and listening point. Those rooms certainly can be called intended modification of the sound. Other rooms (vast majority of rooms in the World I'm afraid) with bad acoustics + bad placement of (bad) speakers and listening point can't be called intended modification of the sound.

 

[bigshot]

Good rooms improve the sound greatly, just as good speakers do. The fundamentals of creating a good listening room are pretty basic. Not hard at all. The only reason a lot of people have lousy rooms is because those people focus on buying expensive bling and ignore simple acoustic principles.

Rooms don’t have to be perfect, just complementary. That is very easy to achieve.