What headphones come close? (BD-Design)

by PeterSt. , Netherlands, Friday, January 25, 2008, 10:53 (5935 days ago) @ MikeH

Hi Mike, 2c here :

Although Bert perfectly informed you about it being rather "worthless" to judge a system as a whole by headphones, I think it may need some emhpasization in some areas;

Thinking of the influence of the room, you need to focus on what this actually does. And, this is not about the room influencing the sound, but merely that the room lets you judge the merits of the system. I hope I can make it clear by this :

One of the very first (and very) noticeable phenomena, is the standing waves in the room. Mind you, we usually accept this as "caused by the room" and nothing further to do about it but treat the room", but this is most certainly not true. Not since I defined that. :fishy:
It as been proven many times by now, that if one perceives the room as doing bad things, this is in 100% of cases caused by the source, the amps, the speakers.

Our project "in search for the best amp" has proven that the bad amp expresses standing waves, and if you take this as a measuring device, you're done with the judgement of the amp in seconds. I'm not making up anything here.
The standing waves are most common to us in the lower frequencies, but with some experience they audibly destroy the high frequencies just the same. The sound gets harsher, less refined and more that takes us away from realistic natural playback.

The point is, nothing of this emerges from headphones. There's just no opportunity to create the standing waves (maybe in the highest frequencies ?).

It may sound like voodoo, but it is not;
When a system (no matter what part does it) does something wrong ("wrong" remains undefined here), the waves supposed to be tight and defined by themselves become "wobbly". Imagine a tight thin line of 1 mm becoming a weak wobbly line of 5 cm. The effect ? 50 times more chance of that wave meeting another, mixing up with it because of that.
There's no scientific proof of this (say, because I'm not a scientist), but I'm sure it is allowed to imagine the things as how I just presented it.

Now try to use this as a tool;
Your first problem will be that you don't have the reference. So you must work relative. Now take a first "device" of which I can guarantee it does not contribute to the standing waves. This would be XXHighEnd, and it allows it without much mangling to the PC, although it needs Vista to do the things right. I can't tell whether you already use GC (sorry), but if not, there is no need to buy it in order to get you going with this.
Best would be if you do not use GC yet, so you can start to hear the first difference in the direction I mean. If you don't hear a difference, try to feel the difference. Put your hand on a table, and try to sense the vibes in there (the good thing) compared with that they're not there (the bed thing -> the individual waves are too messy to have the proper energy to move the surface of the table).

Assuming you get the hunch by this means, you can proceed with the other parts in the chain. You know the goal : not *any* disturbance of lower frequency waves no matter the SPL, and not any disturbance for harshness or the idea to better put the volume down.

As long as you are not experimenting with class-D amps, I'll kind of promise that each of your amps can sound much better than you knew. Similarly I can promise that the wobbly lows of a tube amp are not so wobbly at all. BUT :
Your greatest care must be in the area of anything that is related to impedance mismatches, and even the slightest earthing problems (this latter is opposite of what you think, it seems :blush. Also, rather start switching per-amps than main amps. They influence more.

For the speakers ? whatever it is you use, you will now their nature. That nature won't change, or not much at least. Try to put in your mind that speakers don't sound harsh. You only can make them sound hars by means of the other stuff (I'm not talking $100 speakers here of course).

I'd like to rephrase the implied "rather worthless" of using headphones into "completely worthless". For your purpose it is.

Hope this helps you Mike,
Peter

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