Jump to content
IGNORED

Headphones v. Speakers


Recommended Posts

So for those who can measure and correct, what dip are you using from LF to HF? The B&K curve looks to be about 6 dB, my setup is a little over 5 dB so I guess I'm similar. What have others found best? How low is your LF and how much area (piston area) are your woofers pushing (I was told that less extreme LF push would require more dip from LF to HF)?

Analog: Koetsu Rosewood > VPI Aries 3 w/SDS > EAR 834P > EAR 834L: Audiodesk cleaner

Digital Fun: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (JRMC) SOtM USB > Lynx Hilo > EAR 834L

Digital Serious: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (HQPlayer) Ethernet > SMS-100 NAA > Lampi DSD L4 G5 > EAR 834L

Digital Disc: Oppo BDP 95 > EAR 834L

Output: EAR 834L > Xilica XP4080 DSP > Odessey Stratos Mono Extreme > Legacy Aeris

Phones: EAR 834L > Little Dot Mk ii > Senheiser HD 800

Link to comment
Studies were done a long time ago showing that 89 percent of what you hear with speakers has been reflected one or more times in the room, smearing the sound that's preserved in the recording. Most headphones will get you a lot closer to the recording, and most IEMs will get you closer yet. Speakers are nice for several reasons - no attachment to the head, more freedom to move around, a more diffuse and comfy sound, and physical drama.

Not to argue but ciems are not as good as speakers or good headphones period. Even though ciems and headphones are much cheaper than good speakers and Amps.

I have all three being discussed here.

Its speakers , headphones , ciems

that's my two cents anyway

Al

Link to comment

I agree, speakers first by far, then headphones, and finally IEMs.

Analog: Koetsu Rosewood > VPI Aries 3 w/SDS > EAR 834P > EAR 834L: Audiodesk cleaner

Digital Fun: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (JRMC) SOtM USB > Lynx Hilo > EAR 834L

Digital Serious: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (HQPlayer) Ethernet > SMS-100 NAA > Lampi DSD L4 G5 > EAR 834L

Digital Disc: Oppo BDP 95 > EAR 834L

Output: EAR 834L > Xilica XP4080 DSP > Odessey Stratos Mono Extreme > Legacy Aeris

Phones: EAR 834L > Little Dot Mk ii > Senheiser HD 800

Link to comment
So for those who can measure and correct, what dip are you using from LF to HF? The B&K curve looks to be about 6 dB, my setup is a little over 5 dB so I guess I'm similar. What have others found best? How low is your LF and how much area (piston area) are your woofers pushing (I was told that less extreme LF push would require more dip from LF to HF)?

 

The curve I am using has a couple of slight bulges just to suit my taste. In general trend it is maybe 7-8 db overall. I don't have much slope between 20 hz and 300 hz. Not quite flat, but less slope. I have panels so the woofer is 1350 square inches. As is the tweeter. I get good response to around 40 hz. I could get a bit lower with speakers in a different part of the room, but the lower 300 hz is much less even if I do. The great bulk of recordings have little below 50 hz anyway.

And always keep in mind: Cognitive biases, like seeing optical illusions are a sign of a normally functioning brain. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but it is something that affects our objective evaluation of reality. 

Link to comment

1350 square inches - holy crap! I've got four 15" subwoofers that push a total of 796 square inches and I thought THAT was a lot (I'm not counting the two 15" passive radiators that fire downwards). However they go down to 15 Hz at -3 dB and 20 Hz is solid at -1 dB. So your slightly higher dip makes sense.

 

I'm still getting over the 1350 in^2, you could look like the dude in the Maxell commercial when the canons fire on the 1812 Overture. Or your toupe could go airborne :)

Analog: Koetsu Rosewood > VPI Aries 3 w/SDS > EAR 834P > EAR 834L: Audiodesk cleaner

Digital Fun: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (JRMC) SOtM USB > Lynx Hilo > EAR 834L

Digital Serious: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (HQPlayer) Ethernet > SMS-100 NAA > Lampi DSD L4 G5 > EAR 834L

Digital Disc: Oppo BDP 95 > EAR 834L

Output: EAR 834L > Xilica XP4080 DSP > Odessey Stratos Mono Extreme > Legacy Aeris

Phones: EAR 834L > Little Dot Mk ii > Senheiser HD 800

Link to comment
I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Speakers are meant to be used in rooms and the performance depends on the sonic atributes of the room as well as the positioning of both speakers and listener (hi-fi stereo is a solo experience).

If the speaker has flat on-axis free-field frequency response, balanced off-axis response and care was taken to minimize or eliminate floor-bounce then it's performance with be less room-dependent.

 

Assume you are listening to a music instrument in a room and what you hear is the sound of the instrument itself and what the room acoustics do to that sound. No one modifies a instrument to fit a specific room. A loudspeaker is supposed to reproduce that sound. One could argue that one does not want to hear the room one is sitting in but only the room where the recording was originally made. So there are 2 rooms the one of the recording and the one of the reproduction. The later one can not be eliminated while using loudspeakers only modified. Using headphones that room becomes irrelevant but than one experiences the interaction between head and phones.

If the recording has a lot of room acoustics the 2 room conundrum is more obvious than in close miced recordings. Good loudspeakers, good room acoustics including good placement of speakers and listeners can minimize the influence of your listening room but is never disappears sonically. For me a larger problem is how music is recorded (mixed -hopefully not so much) and mastered in regards to room acoustics.

Link to comment

That part I understand and agree with, although I don't like close-mic'ed recordings (not only they eliminate the acoustic cues of the place where the performance took place but they also "alter" timbres because no one listen's to instruments or vocals that close except the musicians).

 

What I didn't understand was this:

 

I agree that the B&K curve is a good approximation but it is a composite of speaker and room and therefore room position dependent. What is the relevant free-field response is depending on measurement(and eventually listening) position - one reason I never like speakers with multiple drivers and crossovers above a few hundred Hz.

 

In what measure do multiple drivers and crossover points above 300Hz affect polar response?

This 4-way JBL has a very nicelly-balanced lateral response despite the 5 drivers and crossover points at 700Hz, 5kHz and 20kHz.

 

906JBLfig5.jpg

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

Link to comment
1350 square inches - holy crap! I've got four 15" subwoofers that push a total of 796 square inches and I thought THAT was a lot (I'm not counting the two 15" passive radiators that fire downwards). However they go down to 15 Hz at -3 dB and 20 Hz is solid at -1 dB. So your slightly higher dip makes sense.

 

I'm still getting over the 1350 in^2, you could look like the dude in the Maxell commercial when the canons fire on the 1812 Overture. Or your toupe could go airborne :)

 

Don't forget I am talking about panel speakers. Open backed dipoles. So at lower frequencies the sound from the rear begins to partly cancel out the sound from the front. That fact also helps with reducing room interaction in the lower frequencies.

And always keep in mind: Cognitive biases, like seeing optical illusions are a sign of a normally functioning brain. We all have them, it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but it is something that affects our objective evaluation of reality. 

Link to comment
Don't forget I am talking about panel speakers. Open backed dipoles. So at lower frequencies the sound from the rear begins to partly cancel out the sound from the front. That fact also helps with reducing room interaction in the lower frequencies.

 

Lows are not like mids and highs. Lows simply disappear in impact below the lowest resonant frequency of the room. Furthermore, the impact essentially disappears when there are large openings to the room, or weak thin walls.

Link to comment
Lows are not like mids and highs. Lows simply disappear in impact below the lowest resonant frequency of the room. Furthermore, the impact essentially disappears when there are large openings to the room, or weak thin walls.

 

I understood it differently. I thought the lows bounced around a bit and in some places they summed up (creating nodes) and in other places they cancelled. When Legacy set up my speakers they moved the mic around the room and measured the effect, it was quite pronounced (you could actually walk around the room and hear the nodes come and go, all they did was measure a full sweep at those spots). It was pretty cool, certainly was a hands on display of room modes and corrections.

Analog: Koetsu Rosewood > VPI Aries 3 w/SDS > EAR 834P > EAR 834L: Audiodesk cleaner

Digital Fun: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (JRMC) SOtM USB > Lynx Hilo > EAR 834L

Digital Serious: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (HQPlayer) Ethernet > SMS-100 NAA > Lampi DSD L4 G5 > EAR 834L

Digital Disc: Oppo BDP 95 > EAR 834L

Output: EAR 834L > Xilica XP4080 DSP > Odessey Stratos Mono Extreme > Legacy Aeris

Phones: EAR 834L > Little Dot Mk ii > Senheiser HD 800

Link to comment
I understood it differently. I thought the lows bounced around a bit and in some places they summed up (creating nodes) and in other places they cancelled. When Legacy set up my speakers they moved the mic around the room and measured the effect, it was quite pronounced (you could actually walk around the room and hear the nodes come and go, all they did was measure a full sweep at those spots). It was pretty cool, certainly was a hands on display of room modes and corrections.

 

There's no magic about 'nodes' or whatever. Sound at sea level is around 1120 fps, and a 30 hz wave is approx. 37.3 ft long on its round trip, which according to the AES means you need a room dimension of at least half that (18.65 ft) to sustain that wave for proper reproduction and impact. When a wavelength corresponds more-or-less exactly to a room dimension (length, width, height), you get a resonance, i.e. reinforcement, or 'node' it might be called. Those resonances are very undesirable, but probably unavoidable, since to dampen them requires huge padding, in which case you're in an anechoic chamber.

 

Most users have never experienced truly deep bass impact in their listening rooms, unless what they felt (felt more than heard) was just a resonance. You can check the AES on this, as it's been well known for decades.

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

To me, headphones will give you an experience that speakers simply can't. But the problem is that you have something on your head that's "TYPICALLY" tethered by a cable to your equipment, so you have less freedom to move. Yes, there are wireless headphones but I prefer wired headphones instead, plus there are more choices of wired headphones.

 

The advantages of headphones is that you can get headphones that have a full frequency range beyond 20Hz to 20kHz that will be loud and if you want to get the best sound, it costs AROUND $3 to $5K for a pair of top end headphones, and a headphone amp/DAC and you just can't get that much sound out of speakers for that kind of money. But, you are restricted. So, it's much more affordable to get the highest quality headphone setup that would require hundreds of thousands of dollars if you were to buy a speaker setup that could compete. With headphones you don't have the room to deal with, only the ambient noise outside the headphones. But if you are listening to headphones in a quiet room, then you don't have that "outside" noises to deal with, but if you are in a noisy environment, then you are restricted by the isolation of the headphones and there are less headphones on the market that will block out those outside noises. Bose and others have the headphones with noise cancellation, but it comes at a price of less quality of sound.

 

If you really want to analyze the recording and hear every detail, headphones can be very good for this. The problem I have with headphone is the restrictiness of being tethered, the weight of the headphones, and that they are usually pretty loud and it's hard to gauge how loud they are from a dB standpoint. With speakers, I can pull out a trusty SPL meter and make sure I'm keeping the volume down to a certain level as to avoid hearing damage, with headphones we just don't know other than guessing. The thing that I have found is that it's hard to find headphones that I can "live with". I don't have the money to drop on the ultra high end pair right now and what I've heard so far I haven't been impressed with. I'm waiting for the MIT Vero cables/dongles to come out so I can try lower priced headphones with these dongles to see if I can spend less money on headphones and then just buy dongle to improve the sound. But they aren't shipping until Sept.

 

Bottom line, if you need or like headphones, then try a lot of them and at least try the top of the line models if you can just to see what they sound like, just in case that's the direction you want to go. With headphones, only one person can listen to the music, with speakers a room full of people can enjoy. That might be a deciding factor.

Link to comment
To me, headphones will give you an experience that speakers simply can't. But the problem is that you have something on your head that's "TYPICALLY" tethered by a cable to your equipment, so you have less freedom to move. Yes, there are wireless headphones but I prefer wired headphones instead, plus there are more choices of wired headphones.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0006DPNNK/ Now you're tethered to the room, instead of 6ft from your source.
Link to comment

I own the gamut of ciems to headphones to speakers . They are all different in presentation period.

I own two pairs of infinty speakers the RS1B and the IRS V

headphones , stax 009 , he6 seen ,s Botha woo Wes and a bhse , also hdvd800 worh hd800. And a woo wa5 with the he6.

They all have the pro and cons , but headphones can be world class at a fraction of what a speaker set up can be. I love all,of them.

Link to comment
Just curious whether people prefer listening with headphones to their speakers. Are headphones generally considered to offer better sound? Is is just personal preference?

For me it completely depends on the speakers and the headphones, and when I am to listen and to what. If I am listening to a podcast at lunch for example, I definitely prefer my Audio Technica ATH-M50x headphones (see ATH-M50x Professional Monitor Headphones || Audio-Technica US), it's just easier to hear what they are saying in comparison to even some of the best speakers. On the other hand, if I am to watch a movie or a series (can't wait to see the new game of thrones episode today!) on for example my outdoor projector "cinema", then of cause I will want some excellent outdoor speakers. I use the Definitive Technology AW 6500 for anyone who is interested, see 10 Best Outdoor Speakers 2015 | Consumer Top. My answer is therefore – I like both, but it depends on the situation.

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



×
×
  • Create New...