The more I get into the headphone hobby, the more nuances I’m finding. One of the most challenging is that evaluating headphones is not so straightforward. The same headphone can sound great on one playback system, and sound meh on another. The fact that one playback chain costs more than another one doesn’t necessarily translate into better results.
Maybe that’s why hobbyists have more than one DAC, or more than one headphone amp. Over time, I’ve noticed that each headphone I own sounds better with a specific playback chain setup, which are not the same for each individual headphone.
Sounds like you’ve discovered synergy. I think some reviewers will try their headphones on different gear though.
Imo, the more transparent the gear is, the better. But that is just one person’s opinion. And transparency for one set of headphones may not look exactly the same as transparency for another.
Not all headphones are equal in terms of their impedance, sensitivity, efficiency, distortion (and modal stability). And that can affect how they play with different gear in terms of loudness, noise, frequency response, dynamic range, and overall distortion characteristics.
Yep! The recording really does make or break it for me. No matter the “audio chain” or transducer, if the recording is bad then my enjoyment will be lower.
Absolutely. The recording does indeed make a HUGE difference. A fair amount of the music I listen to is older/legacy recordings from the 40’s to the 60’s. I have found that PGGB can help those recordings somewhat. The recordings made during the loudness wars era all sound poor, PGGB can’t help those.
Synergy is a important and under appreciated aspect of this crazy hobby. I’ve been moving gear in and out for the past couple of years, searching for synergy with the playback chain. I now understand why headphone users swap out gear so often.
Along the way, you come across you really like that supports one’s preferences. I found a DAC/Headphone amp that I really like a lot, especially with standard CD playback. It’s a Canever ZeroUno DAC/HPA. The sound from standard CD playback is the best I’ve come across, and by a fair margin. The unit is seriously over engineered, with all high end components. The built in headphone amp sounds better (to me) than the majority of stand alone headphone amps. Found this for sale at a very reasonable price, and it’s worth every cent. The dealer told me that most people don’t know about the unit, so he was having trouble selling it. It also sounds good with all my headphones, which was not the case with a lot of the other gear I’ve had.
Discovered the PGGB software a few months back. It is amazing software, easily the best sounding upscaling option available. Currently using the RT version, which upscales PCM files on the fly. Whilst the the Canever sounds great with the PGGB via USB at 352/384 KHz, with some recordings, using a Topping DX9 as a DAC at 705/768 KHz connected to a Bryston BHA-1 sounds amazing, even more so. There is more variation in sound with headphones than with the Canever.
I am not that familiar with PGGB. However, I tend to side with the audio debunkers on tools like this. That doesn’t mean that it might not be a useful tool in some setups and circumstances. I just don’t know enough about it. And this might be the sort of thing that @GoldenSound could shed more light on.
There was some discussion and testing on it by someone on ASR a couple years ago, fwiw. If you think you can hear a difference though, who am I to say otherwise.
I think the science of synergy (which to me is largely about proper gain-staging and impedance bridging) may be somewhat underappreciated and possibly also misunderstood by a good percentage of the audio consuming public. The subject of what amp will sound good with what headphone is a much discussed topic though on the forums. Maybe not this one as much. But certainly on other headphone forums.
It is also true that there are alot of enthusiasts who enjoy “chasing the dragon” (or unicorns, depending on your POV), and listening to and trying out alot of different gear. I’m not sure that most headphone users would fit that description though. I don’t have any real stats on this, but I suspect that enthusiasts still make up a comparatively small corner of audio consumers.
While I’m interested in discussions (and measurements!) of new products, I usually only listen to and try new hardware when my old gear needs to be replaced, or it can use a much needed upgrade (which is sort of where I’m at now). So I don’t really fall into the enthusiast camp… in that way.
You are describing a pretty common trajectory in the hobby. People often come in thinking they want a starter system, or a “giant killer” value system, or a top-of-the-line system, and then they’ll be done. This sometimes works, but in reality there’s a weak correlation between price and performance, and your taste will vary from others.
Around 10 years ago, the measurements crowd (e.g., NwAVGuy, ASR, Drop when known as Massdrop) grabbed the mindshare of many new headphone users. They sent a lot of people down a…marginally relevant…tech-driven pathway.
There is NO substitute for listening with your own ears. While measurements play a weak-to-moderate role, personal taste, personal hearing, psychological perception, and build quality/appearance strongly affect many people. This is a hobby, so I try not to judge unless they try to bully others/dictate their opinions without real-world testing. While it would be possible to disentangle the factors with complex blind research designs, it’s simply not cost effective (nor worth the effort) with a hobby.
In my experience there is a correlation between price and quality up to certain point, if only because high quality transformers and capacitors are not cheap and are produced in low numbers. After a certain point, product price is mostly about marketing and who buys a given brand. It’ll be very different if sold to working studio engineers than Wall St. guys looking for gear for their second home.
Synergy is very real with some products (e.g., Sennheiser 600 and 800 series), but not with others (e.g., anything Bluetooth; most stuff at Best Buy). In my experience and beyond a certain price level (e.g., $500 to $3,000), tube amps have almost no relationship to performance, quality, or preferences. Some sound nearly like a solid-state amp while others are distinct or sound awful to me (with a very high price tag).
I’ve noticed that. I struggle to find value without direct experience. A lot of stuff collapses into “samey same” sound despite different numbers, while other stuff that seems good by the numbers proves to the awful. Often, the marketing guys push irrelevant measurements or dubious tech (e.g., Bose; MQA).
Funny you should say that. Here’s what Golden Sound has to say about PGGB:
"PGGB is great.
PGGB (the full version, the RT version is a bit slimmed down) is from a technical standpoint the most accurate Nyquist reconstruction tool available.
The Nyquist reconstruction filter itself uses the maximum number of pure sinc coefficients possible given the number of samples in the file, ie: it’s taking Nyquist theorem to the maximum possible extreme within the constraints of the fact that we don’t have infinitely long audio streams.
And then the noise shaper it has allows you to get higher dynamic range in a 24 bit file than would be possible even in a 64 bit file with standard dithering or without any noise shaping.
Basically, PGGB is as accurate as it gets. It gives you the most accurate possible reconstruction of the audio contained within the file you feed it.
BUT the main argument as to why PGGB wouldn’t just plain and simple be ‘the best’ is that recordings/production aren’t done perfectly and some of the stuff close to the Nyquist frequency you may not actually want to reconstruct. ADCs and digital resampling tools in DAWs don’t have perfect filters and so by perfectly reconstructing the audio in the file right up to the nyquist frequency, you also are now inadvertently reconstructing some of the aliased/incorrect content that was “baked in” to the file due to the imperfect recording/production methods.
For this reason sometimes an apodizing filter like HQPlayer’s Sinc-M or some of the gaussian filters can help by slightly limiting the bandwidth and filtering out some of the ringing/aliased content that you don’t really want to reconstruct.
But it’s just a question of ‘accuracy’ vs a potentially more practically ideal result.
Personally, given as nowadays DAWs even just by default usually have very high performance resampling/filters, and ADCs are getting better, I prefer to go for the most accurate possible option. I find that PGGB sounds better than HQPlayer most of the time to me, and I don’t really want to limit the accuracy of the reconstruction to potentially avoid including minor issues in some tracks. Frankly if they’re there that’s a mastering/production issue anyway."
PGGB can make a HUGE difference, providing the DAC can support the higher clock rate. For example, the Jazz Messengers CD “Like Someone In Love” sounds a lot better when PGGB is used. Both my DAC/Amp combinations sound MUCH better using PGGB-RT. What I really like about the RT version is that it upscales the original file size, as opposed to having to store a HUGE file. You just need a recent vintage computer to run it effectively.
