Yes. And it will probably come as no shock to folks here that I don’t generally concur with this idea.
Some of it is undoubtedly FR-related. But I think some of it is probably also related to other things, like distortion, noise, symmetry, openness and isolation, dynamic range, pinna interaction, and maybe also acoustic impedance, among other things.
Audiophiles will also talk about things like imaging, soundstage, detail or micro-details, speed and transient response, slam or punch, timbral fidelity, and so forth. And I think a good bit of that can be distilled from measurable effects. (See my discussion of “speed” with Resolve in the Driver Story topic as one example.)
The size, stroke, distance, and angle of the driver to the ear might also matter.
The input impedance of a headphone is also an interesting idea to consider. And I think there are some audiophiles (including generic) who might associate a higher input impedance with better technical performance. And there might be some very good reasons to think that.
I don’t disagree with any of that, but it wasn’t what I was asking. I do have an old pair of massive transmission line speakers in one room, KEF LS50s in my home office, and a pair of Sonos ERA100’s where I do headphone listening, and the constraint there is very much size, due to the room shape/design.
Headphones are for a different purpose. Due to underlying health problems, I might end up with regular hospital visits for hours at a time, and/or protracted stays in a hospice. So headphones (and a portable DAC/amp, Chord Mojo II in my case) might end up being my only viable option as I can’t see me lugging speakers around. Certainly not the transmission line ones.
It’s not that I dismiss speakers as beneficial, and in the right circumstances, I often prefer them, not least because I don’t then have an extra mass, heating up my ears. It’s just not part of why I was asking about different ‘bestness’ at different price points.
What I as trying, poorly I suspect, to get at is while it’s clear just about any tech (and many non-tech) products suffer from diminishing marginal returns, how large do people consider the extent to which the marginal benefit has decreased to be, at each price band. I was trying to avoid involving people’s personal circumstances, not least because phrasing the question that way is rude, but because it’s not what I was asking, which is why I suggested a situation where we’d each be given whatever “best” headphone, for that person, at each price band. What brand, driver technology, blend of comfort, build quality, stylish presentation and sound quality that person chooses to apply at each price point, is up to each person.
In other words, independent of the individual personal circumstances, and of whether a given person ever would spend $X or $Y on headphones, because that is very much dependent on their circumstances … how much “better”, on whatever metric or blend of metrics that person chooses, would $Y be over $X, given that Y is a significant increase over X?
It might be that someone thinks their choice of a $3000 headphone doesn’t SOUND significantly better than a $1000 pair (or whatever price point they want) but they’d buy them, if the price delta wasn’t a major factor to them, because of comfort, or because of build quality, or even because, say, they prefer the look, and consider them works of art.
Some people might buy $3000 headphones over $1000 headphones because they look great, but an awful lot of people probably can’t justify $3000 on headphones, period, or considers it a ludicrous sum, which it pretty much is, but if that person were suddenly to inherent $10m from a deceased uncle, I’d bet my left gonad most people in this hobby would rethink their position on spending whatever it took to get whatever headphones they want, pretty much regardless of price. There are very expensive headphones I wouldn’t buy even if I inherited $10m, but between say, $300 and $1000, or between $1000 and $5000, the cost would not be a factor I’d consider at all. I would just get the ones I decided I wanted, for whatever combination of factors floated my boat, whether they would be $300 or $35,000. The monetary difference, at that point, is immaterial, but the difference in what I get, in comfort, build quality, style, materials used and, yeah, sound quality, could be very different.
For example, at $300, there are materials that, due to cost, manufacturers realistically can’t use but at $1000, or $300, or whatever, they can. At $30,000, they can use pretty much whatever they want, except maybe solid gold (too heavy anyway) or encrusting them in diamonds (too showhy for me but if it floats someone’s boat, that’s their choice).
Putting it yet another way, regardless of what people index for in those factors, and ignoring brands and/or models, how much better do they think the optimum pair (for that person) of more expensive (by price band) should be, than the optimum pair at the lower price band, and completely ignoring the value for money? I’m trying to find how much difference people would expect, in their experience, independently of whether they think it’s value for money or not?
Personally, and it’s very much circumstance-dependent, I want headphones for several different purposes, and I pretty much already have picked those that suit my preferences at sub-$1000. I buy in £, not $, which is different but doesn’t chance the basic point. I have one pair at about £300, another at about £500, and another at about £700. What I am struggling to convince myself is that, say, Empyrean II (about £2800 here), or LCD-5 (about £4000 here) or new Stax Electrostatics (depends on model of phone and power unit) will give me enough of a difference to be worth the cost because, sadly, I haven’t inherited in silly amount of money, so while I could buy any of those, it’d put a large dent in my “fun fund” and I still have, for instance, my eye on a gaming PC, and a decent 3D printer (capable of most materials, so not an entry-level machine). The “cost” to me of Empyrean II or LCD-5 or Stax is not the difference in price, but that it will constrain me from doing other things i.e. the opportunity cost. It might come down to … more expensive headphones or 3D printer of choice, but not both. The critical thing for me is how much better my choice of expensive unit might be than the good, but much less expensive pairs I already have, because the cost of them will be a large compromise in 3D printer. I’m erring towards 3D printer, but trying to get a feel of community view on betterness per price band, before making an irreversible choice towards, well, non-headphone stuff be it printer or not.
In my experience, the headphone market was dominated by function and pro-audio (studio) users through the release of the Sennheiser HD 800 (or 800 S). One could get Stax and esoteric niche products back in the day, but the focus was on mainline Koss, Beyerdynamic, AKG, Sennheiser, Grado, Sony (closed DJ stuff), and Bose (air travel). The mainstream quality of the HD 600 of 1997 and HD 800 of 2009 made people take headphones more seriously. Then came the $2K LCD-3 (2011) and $4K Focal Utopia (2016), and a luxury market akin to Swiss wristwatches came to the fore. This includes all later top-end models from Hifiman, ZMF, Audeze, Abyss, etc.
Sennheiser was and is focused on function and basic performance, per their plastic chassis and tough studio-friendly builds. Fragile Audeze rings and artsy wooden ZMFs…not so much…
Any flagship can be crippled by a mismatched or weak upstream chain, and some middle-tier headphones compete well with flagships on a well chosen chain. To my ears, a central consideration at the top end of the market is whether the DAC and amp veer toward smoothing gentleness (cliched audiophile demos of female vocalists over piano or strings), or whether the setup preserves the bite and edges of other sources. Audio is not a very complex data source.
I concluded that anything above the HD 800 S isn’t necessary given the mixed quality of my music sources, and anything below the HD 600 is too much of a sacrifice. I don’t own Audeze and ZMF because my headphones are exposed to wear-and-tear and sweat in normal use. I don’t abuse them, it’s just the nature of having something on your head for hours and hours.
I’ve made a ton of things on my basic Ender 3 S1 Pro 3D printer, and would personally upgrade it before buying more headphones.
I remember coming out of a Black Sabbath concert at the Hammersmith Odeon (in London) in the early '80s and nearly ending my audio enjoying days that night. Because it was loud? Yup, but not necessarily because that permanenty damaged my ears (though it may well have).
Oh no. It was because my ears were ringing, I was talking to a couple of friends , and nearly got flattened by a bloody great, bright red double decker London bus that I simply didn’t hear!
Can overly loud concerts cause problems? Very, VERY nearly, that night.
Whether it actually caused damage, I don’t know but have always wondered. And suspected it did. I didn’t go to concerts a huge amount, and that was significantly the loudest, but it was a one-off for me.
And yeah, if anyone cares, it was the concert where the ‘Live at the Hammersmith Odeon’ album was recorded, though I’m not sure which night they recorded.
Yeah. I picked up a pair of Stax SR5 and SRD-6 (I think they’re the right numbers. can cheek tomorrow) in about 1977, I think. Not sure of the priice, but something like £100-£150, at the time. It wasn’t like they tend to be (at least for the round ones) these days, but it was a very carefully considered purchase back then. I didn’t much change my headphone setup for years after that, beyond a fairly cheap pair of Sony on-ear things to accompany a (tape) Walkman, then a CD version, then (for my sins, a portable Minidisc recorder).
On the more general parts of the post, thanks. That’s broadly the kind of perspective i was after.
A bit earlier than that. Normally, my sense of what happened quite when isn’t that precise unless there’s some anchoring event I can nail it to. In this case there is, because I bought them, I think, the summer before going to uni, because taking much in the way of speakers wasn’t viable. By which I mean, in those days, speakers small enough to take would either be pretty expensive, or crap. Or sometimes, both. And I’d be very limited in running speakers in a hall of residence, unless I wanted to be very unpopular. I’ve always been a nightbird. I can (and usually did) work very efficiently in the evening, right through to dawn if need be, but a morning person I am not. As I started uni in late '77, it would have been a little before that that I got them.
They certainly weren’t exactly bass cannons, but quite a few friends asked what they sounded like, so I just put something interesting on and handed them over.
I don’t remember ever getting a response that was less than utter shock at thte ‘clean’ and ‘detailed’ characteristics, compared ro the junk my friends were using. Their interest waned a bit when they found out what they cost, though, compared to their “junk”.
And yes, they certainly were “niche”. But so were the Mitchell Engineering Reference turntable - very like the one in Clockwork Orange with the solid aluminium platter and the gold-plated brass weights, except that was the hydraulic reference and mine was/is the electronic version (i.e. speed control was electronic rather than a type of vane dipped in an oil bath). Oh, and a Lecson Pre/Power amp combo. I still have the Mitchell, but not the Lecsons. They were all pretty niche.
I graduated in November of 75, and soon was working several states away. Married in 76, and moved back to PA in 78, and picked up my set probably the following year. There weren’t many bass cannons out there, so lack of extended bass wasn’t much of an issue. Yes, people trying them were almost aways amazed. I still really like them for acoustic jazz and stuff that doesn’t require a lot of bass. Now I power them on a STAX SRM T1S hybrid amp, and they sound better than they ever did on the energizer. The amp was bought used from moljnir-audio in Iceland, modified by Birgir (AKA Spritzer of the STAX Mafia).
While in college I’d gotten interested in hi-fi, and my turntable was the AR-1a with a Shure V15 type III improved cart. I had friends with Rec-o-Cut tables, Garrard, and I’ve seen and heard the Mitchell. My speakers, which I still have are Rectilinear III highboys, modified by a friend who owned them. The friend was a grad student in engineering acoustics, sang barbershop, had worked a few years in engineering at Dynaco, and played his own home brew keyboard – mostly theater organ, but part sampling synth. He sold me the Rec IIIs so that he could build his 8 cubic foot BMF-1 speaker for the organ and “synthesize 64 foot pipes”.
When I was in the residence hall at Penn State, big speakers MADE you popular, not the other way around.
Yeah, I get that. I nearly said that speakers would make me unpopular except when everyone wanted music, if we were staying in on a Friday or Saturday night. They wouldn’t have made me quite so popular at 2am, when I was working and almost everyone else was sleeeping … or trying to, at least.
The walls in that hall were, to say the least, thin. An example … one of my flatmates regularly had his girlfriend visit and she could be, ummm, loud, in the early hours. It had been quietly menttioned to him a couple of times but nothing changed. Until one of my other flatmates recorded the … erm … audio effects of ther ‘activities’, and played it back to the young lady in question over breakfast the next morning. Needless to say, the noises stopped, dead. For all I know, the ‘activities’ did, too. I wouldn’t know … I had good headphones.
You’re right, there weren’t many (if any) bass cannons then. I was being a bit whimsical about it, but if I had a criticism of the SR5’s, it was that bass was … gentle. What there was was quite crisp, in that I could head the snap of a small drum, etc, but they were, even compared to ‘normal’ headphones, crtainly not bass heavy. They certainly weren’t boomy, which was one reason why I bought them. I do like deep base, when it should be deep, like a low note from a church organ, but I never like it boomy. Even if the SR5 were a tad light on bass, it was a worthwhile comprmise for the rest of the sound (IMHO).
I came from the speaker world - 1966-2016. I’ve bought 17 different headphones from '16-'22, but only kept 3. Senn HD-600 new $285; HFM HE-500 used $350; HFM HE-6 SE $599. I modded and PEQ’d all 3.
I’ve also auditioned probably 1/2 the headphones from $750-$9k on some stellar equipment like the Aegis, Stellaris DNA,
The current headphones that I have considered buying the past year: HEK SE, Caldera Open (used). My favs are the Ralls Immanis and DCA Corina.
But I have a huge speed bump now: a pair of speakers that cost $2k that I would rather listen too than any headphone (BMR Philharmonic Monitor) which I have had for almost 6 months, and have not touched my headphones since.
Given the price of the headphones I like and the fact that I won’t use them much/at all means no more headphones because the prices of my favs is more or a very large portion of my speakers.
The Philharmonic that crossover designer Dennis Murphy owns and runs? I know Dennis - he’s one of the nicest guys in the industry and truly cares about the customer experience. I heard his first ever Philharmonic floorstanding speaker that he designed in the early 2010’s and am glad he’s still designing. I mained a pair of Salk Sound speakers with Dennis’ crossover at the heart for many years; selling them is one of my biggest regrets. Tell him I said hello if you talk to him (Nuance from AVS Forum).
I too think speakers are better than headphones, but the latter have their strengths and purposes and I’m happy to pick either to listen with depending on the situation.
