The New Even Over-Ear Headphones Will Blow Your Mind Without Blowing Your Ears

This blog entry is pretty much a straight-up sales pitch, but I find the concept described to be intriguing. I was wondering what an anal-retentive audiophile would think. For some reason, that led me here.

The New Even Over-Ear Headphones Will Blow Your Mind Without Blowing Your Ears

richard09 wrote:

what an anal-retentive audiophile would think

You rang?

Quote :

Why aren’t they more like prescription glasses, where each and every person gets her or his own custom sound-fit based on a hearing profile?

Because, um, nobody needs prescription glasses unless their eyesight is flawed?  The theoretical ideal in sound reproduction is flat response DC-to-light.  Sure, everybody's ears are slightly different -- but you're not CORRECTING for that, because then the headphones wouldn't sound like live music to the listener.

The basic underlying assumption is wrong.

NoCoPilot wrote:

The theoretical ideal in sound reproduction is flat response DC-to-light.

That's the ideal capability of the recording and reproduction hardware.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Sure, everybody's ears are slightly different

People's ears can be vastly different. I used to be bothered by the very high frequency noise of flyback transformers in televisions; no one else there could hear it. But now I can only hear a portion of the range of sounds I could fifty years ago (and I have tinnitus - thank you, Uncle Sam).

Those new headphones sound like a great idea. I wish I had something like that for my speakers.

_Howard wrote:

I wish I had something like that for my speakers.

They do -- it's called an equalizer and a frequency response analyzer.  

But you wouldn't like how "flat" sounds, I guarantee it.  I spent an awful lot of time with my Soundcraftsmen parametric EQ back in the seventies, and a flat FR curve sounded terrible.

And if you corrected the curve so that what you HEARD was flat?? The high frequencies alone would destroy what's left of your hearing in five minutes.

I think everyone is familiar with equalizers. And loudness, base, treble, and balance controls. What makes these headphones different is that they adjust for each ear. Not so with the typical amplifier's EQ.

No one was suggesting a flat response; don't know why you brought that up.

If not flat, what frequency response curve were you recommending? How will the listener adjust the curve? When will she know when it's "right"?

I wasn't recommending anything.
The listener will know it's "right" when it sound the best to the listener. That's pretty  obvious.

Have you ever spent any time with an equalizer?

Not in a biblical way.

Yes, I have experience with equalizers, and band pass filters, and crossover networks, and phase shifts, and time delays. All sorts of fancy big-city stuff. But only for about the past fifty years or so. Kind of a newby.

Well I have too, and in my experience (yours may differ) anything other than flat is fatigue-inducing.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

NoCoPilot wrote:

But you wouldn't like how "flat" sounds, I guarantee it.

And if you corrected the curve so that what you HEARD was flat?? The high frequencies alone would destroy what's left of your hearing in five minutes.

Okay, now we have a baseline.

Is that different from a "base line"?

Or a bassline?

I still don't understand what you are trying to say about "flat frequency response". That term only applies to the fidelity of a piece of equipment. What the hell does it have to do with hearing impairment and range boosts? And why do you say in one post that a flat response curve will destroy your ears and then say that anything else is fatigue-inducing?

Hmmm, let me type this VERY SLOWLY so you can follow.

"Flat response" is all frequencies 20-20,000Hz at the same level. Modern electronics do a pretty good job of approximating this, and decent speakers and headphones reproduce it within an order of magnitude.

However, our ears as we age no longer hear all frequencies equally. As you yourself pointed out, quite correctly, high frequencies above 14,000 cycles are pretty much lost on us at our age. Therefore (there's always a therefore) if we were to BOOST the high frequency content to the point that frequencies above 14k were HEARD at the same SPL as lower frequencies, by our aged ears, we would very quickly destroy what's left of our hearing.

Now before you say it I know this is not what the headphones promise to do.

As I understand the video accompanying that article, the headphones take six or eight of the ten theoretically-available octaves (discarding above 14k and below 145Hz), and provide broad-band (octave) equalization to level out the response. By level-matching to some central ideal (perhaps a 1000 cycle tone) the headphones adjust their output to the listener's ears, left and right separately. By cutting off the highs and lows the manufacturer eliminates two sticky areas: hearing loss, such as ours, in the upper range, and the difficulty of reproducing low frequencies in the ear buds this system was designed for, and in the cheap headphones this idea was adapted for.

Therefore we're left with midrange level matching, using probably sine wave tones as baselines. It's relatively easy these days to electronically filter an electronic signal through six broadband filters.

But -- and here is the point I was trying, unsuccessfully, to make at the outset -- adjusting the sound of a pair of headphones to the listener's ears is at the heart of it a flawed concept. Headphones, and stereo in general, aims to reproduce the sound the listener would hear at a live performance, or if the stereo were not there and she was listening to the music in real life. And of course, in real life the listener will hear through her ears' normal flawed hearing. In other words, what she hears "in real life" will be different from what she hears in the filtered headphones.

So the experience will NOT sound "accurate" to her or like a real music performance.

Naturally, the EQ adjustments will probably be minor and the listener will tweak the upper midrange for a little better "presence," the same as all the CD remasterings of the 1990s. There's nothing wrong with preferring a sound which is not flat. All of us do.

But the flim-flam explanation is just so much marketing hyperbole aimed at fleecing the rubes.

The new Samsung phone has this functionality built in.

Good for it.

I'll stick with my Stax SRX-IIIs.

"Stax - the headphone for smart asses the world over."

I just thought it was interesting that Samsung added that bit. I don't know if it works, because I don't use the phone for music. In fact, these ear phones and the ones for my old iPhone have never been removed from the box or unwrapped.

Smartphones work great for music if you use a decent set of headphones.

The newest Apple earbuds are a vast improvement over the original (and all other) earbuds but they're still shite.

_Howard wrote:

The new Samsung phone has this functionality built in.

The reason some small speaker systems sound better these days than older systems used to, is active electronics. They use equalizers (basically) to deliver a broader (and flatter) frequency response than is possible from small speakers without equalization.

Maybe the Samsung phone is doing this.

Smartphone speakers sound 10x better than they should, for their size -- but they're still shite.

I don't know how the phones sound on the Samsung. The last time I used ear buds was with my Sony DiscMan. That was a while back, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good they sounded.

This function to adjust for hearing loss is, I think, an outstanding idea. Everyone sooner or later loses hearing level in the higher ranges.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Smartphone speakers sound 10x better than they should, for their size -- but they're still shite.

Just for grins, I copied some music to the phone and gave the ear buds a try. Outstanding. I was very surprised how good it sounded to my old ears. I didn't play with any of the settings; equalizer, tube amp mode, etc., and it is probably as good as any head phones I used in the old days (except maybe the Sennheisers).

Interesting note: No special program required (I'm looking at you, iTunes). Just drag and drop the music folders into the phone's Music folder.

If that didn't start a big enough argument, here's another set.

OSSIC X: Immersive 3D Audio Headphones

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The OSSIC X instantly calibrates to your anatomy to provide a truly immersive 3D audio experience.

Clever idea for gaming. Not for music.