Is THIS why headphones sound better than loudspeakers?

Audio Gear Talk Headphones
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@Snook you have a point when it comes to ambience, imaging and structure-borne vibrations in headphone reproduction. These aspects are suboptimal by the nature and you have to accept it if you want to listen to headphones.

I personally do not find it awful, and there are ways to adjust timbre, choosing the right headphones for your personal HRTF and alike.

Front imaging can actually be very good with loudspeakers properly set up in a listening room, and a plausible acoustic image of a symphony orchestra is possible. To get an idea how the room reverb sounds, two-channel stereo is not sufficient, but with surround or immersive formats it can get actually pretty plausible or ´realistic´.

Rock is a different thing as close-miking and mixing electronically is essential to the typical mix style of such music. It is not aimed at sounding ´natural´ or reproducing a soundfield which had once existed. And in most cases mixing engineers will do the final mix in the studio on loudspeakers, not headphones. This might be different with electronic music or anything that is originating typically from a semi-pro recording environment, like Techno, but I do not feel the differences between headphones and loudspeakers to be drastic with such styles.

Tbh I do not see this drastic range of recording quality many audiophiles are talking about. yes, there might be a vast range of styles, personal tastes when it comes to mixing different genres, and I do not have to like everything. But on a very good system which is linear and well-integrated in the room, the percentage of recordings really sounding awful is surprisingly low. Even music which was either subject to the overuse of electronic effects or recorded under suboptimal conditions or meant for clubs, not hi-fi.

People complaining about ´awful recordings´ or ´sonic garbage´ seemingly have very suboptimal listening conditions in many cases, so only a very limited number of ´audiophile´ recordings will not sound annoying. That is a pattern I have noticed over and over again.

Have recently to a hi-fi show with lots of ´non-audiophile´ people, and it made me grin every time I heard New Order, Madonna, AC/DC or Depeche Mode coming from a room. It sounded actually pretty fun, and brought me to the conclusion that there are more people out there who see hi-fi as a simple way to have fun with their own preferred music.

All that is true to loudspeakers and headphones alike.

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He’s a very honest fellow. He’s just making an ironic comment along the lines that room treatments are so difficult and involved that it’s no wonder people will spend their money on high-end headphones instead of going through the process.

24

I have to hard disagree here. Music is mastered on speakers for speakers. The imaging in headphones just sounds so “off”. Things get hard panned too often and sounds silly in the image. It’s not very good compared to a proper two channel listening setup. But like I said headphones are for convienience.if they were actually better then they would be a mastering standard but they are not, they just can’t convey the same thing.

26

The 2 means of listening are very different so almost impossible to compare.

I suspect many headphone users are moved that way by a variety of reasons. Not everyone can listen speakers at ‘realistic’ levels neighbors object, spouse objects.

If you have a house in a field then maybe

I listen on what i consider hi end (ish) headphones

Sennheiser HD800
Focal Clear mg
Hi Fi Man Arya

I enjoy the effect, maybe i’m not purist enough

Each to his own

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That is true to most of music produced, but not to everything. Electronic music in a semi-pro environment might be actually produced and mixed on headphones rather than loudspeakers. Aspects like imaging and localization focus are as a consequence not really important. Other aspects like deep bass, ´hard´ beats and dynamics are on the other hand easier to properly reproduce with headphones or earphones.

Crossfeed algorithm might reduce the ´hard-panned´ effect of phantom sources panned to the flanks on headphones, but to me and many others it does not contribute to an imaging anyhow resembling of a realistic staging like with loudspeakers. Particularly with voices around the center it can even sound worse. Same is true to virtual HRTF calculations or binaural recordings which many people are saying they find ´more realistic´ or ´closer to loudspeaker imaging´. With me, this is not the case.

It is not only about the sheer SPL. Having loudspeakers in a room delivering a tight, clear, deep and ´rhythmic´ bass requires significant investment and is not an easy thing to achieve (even if you do not have neighbors you might disturb). Most loudspeaker setups in living rooms are pretty flawed when it comes to bass quality, bass is rather boomy, imprecise, reaching not as low or whatever. Just how John was describing it in the video.

People being mainly into electronic music, hiphop or beat-laden pop/disco/rock might find inexpensive in-ear monitors for just over a 100 bucks to sound superior compared to any loudspeaker/room setup they can afford.

Different musical taste and genres play an important role here as well, so I would not say that one variant is necessarily superior.

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He gets paid on views, so the title has a very specific purpose, to draw in those views. “Click bait”. As I said, maybe it can be implied from the content but not once does he mention headphones.

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Yes, that’s absolutely correct. If you ever hear someone say, “My system is so good that it makes bad recordings sound even worse,” my advice is to run away fro it, don’t walk. That statement usually signals a fundamental flaw in the system. A well-balanced system should make all recordings enjoyable, even if some are less than perfect.

More often than not, the real issue lies in poor room acoustics, improper speaker-room integration, undersized bass drivers that lack real impact, overly bright highs, cone breakup, cabinet resonances, poor of-axis behaviour or other system deficiencies. When people start selecting only recordings that sound good on their setup and blaming the rest on “bad recordings,” it’s usually not the music that’s at fault—it’s the system.

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I have the KEF LS60s in a large listening environment (2nd floor of a townhouse). They are excellent for the money & look fantastic. I don’t run Roon through them as I use a Naim NDX2 network player fed from a Roon One as it clearly sounds a lot better than the onboard streamer in the LS60s.
I personally prefer listening to speakers & also don’t like wearing headphones that much, even tough I’m an ex club DJ. If you have friends over to entertain, well, you’re on your own with headphones. I’m a big fan of Darko, but don’t like the title of the video as you’re not comparing like for like, so ‘better’ is at best subjective, so ‘THIS’ in the title is also subjective.

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32

It’s not worth arguing the point.

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@Nyquist, fully agree!

´Less than perfect´ - or the mix simply does not meet the listener´s taste.

In this regard another big red flag is ´the recording is not audiophile because it is overcompressed, has no natural dynamic´ or alike. I specifically checked recordings which people disparaged for their low DR or as particularly bad examples of the ´brickwall loudness war´. They sound actually pretty good, if you like powerful, dense, slightly crunchy rock or hiphop mixes. Even Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” and Madonna’s “Hard Candy”.

This might be a problem in some cases, but a lot of decently-sized bass drivers nowadays are dynamically pretty capable if you do not squeeze the lowest audible octave out of them. Regarding bass i would assume that more people have problems with room modes and narrow-banded cancellation. So some recordings sound as if they lack bass, others are boomy or bass comes subjectively ´late to the rest of the spectrum´.

According to my experience, this is (aside from bass booming) the No. 1 problem which most of people have with speakers in their living rooms: Directivity index of the speakers being either too low to allow reasonable amounts of direct sound at the desired listening position (while sounding perfectly fine in studio-grade setups like Darko´s or under nearfield conditions), or very uneven.

It is a complete mystery to me why there are not many speaker manufacturers addressing the latter problem. Some are completely ignoring it, in particular those with free-mounted tweeters, convex or very slim baffles with flat-mounted tweeters. Some, on the other hand, are seemingly aware of it as they are deploying horns and waveguides but making things worse to the opposite direction by narrowing the radiation solely in the brilliance and treble region leaving midrange untouched.

While the latter (heavily promoted by the ´Harman target curve´ fraction) might work under open-space or overdamped conditions and is in most cases capable of reducing ´overly annoying, harsh treble´, it leads to reversed problems like mid-laden, muddled complex mixes, lame dynamics, distant imaging and dull ambience.

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34

From my 30 years of experience in loudspeaker design, I’ve consistently found that small woofers struggle when music becomes complex. This is why simple arrangements, like a solo singer with a guitar or heavily produced, slow-paced music (think Diana Krall), often sound great on small speakers, while more intricate, dynamic recordings do not.

When that happens, many audiophiles blame the recording, but in reality, the issue is often the small woofer itself. It simply can’t keep up, suffering from high Doppler distortion and significant harmonic distortion below 200 Hz. Take the well-known KEF LS50, for example—it reaches 100% distortion at 40 Hz at 90 dB (yes, that’s not a typo). Below 200 Hz, distortion skyrockets, whereas a well-designed large woofer, for instance, my 15" drivers—maintains around 2% distortion at 40 Hz and 90 dB.

Given this, it’s worth considering: if someone is meticulously comparing subtle differences in cables or power supplies for example while relying on tiny speakers with severe low-frequency limitations in a room with bathtub acoustics they might want to rethink their priorities.

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35

So what, no singing in the shower? :rofl:

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Nothing wrong with singing in the shower as long as you do not believe that a golden shower-head will make you sing better.

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Hey @Mike_O_Neill, unfortunately, we learned that the folks who run CanJam no longer record the individual seminars. So we’re unable to provide a replay of the talk. :cry:

They put together some lovely gear preview episodes for the events and have recorded a few panels recently that are on their YouTube channel But, sadly, we don’t have a recording of the seminar we can share. I’m sorry for any disappointment.

38

I agree with your theory. My experience is that intermodulation effects plus distortion is the worst combination. One effect alone is in most cases tolerable if the driver is not completely, well, driven to its limits.

Well, that is a particularly horrible example, way below what I meant by decently-sized bass drivers and leaving out the lowest octave.

The diaphragm area is south of what an average 4" would be moving, it is a 2-way concept, the cutoff frequency is pushed down to 43Hz, the diaphragm is not stiff, has limited linear excursion and acts as a waveguide extension to the tweeter. That is all ingredients of a worst-case scenario according to your standards.

The example also leaves the question unanswered if your or my theory is more applicable. The directivity index is as horrible as the distortion you were mentioning, particularly the behavior beyond 2K narrowing down the usable angle and in-room sound power significantly while opening up below 1K. So the distorted, muddled, dominant lower mids lacking clarity might also be annoying simply because they are much more audible due to a lack of treble energy in the room.

I personally had the impression that recordings which are more demanding and complex mainly in the mids, like male choirs Ă  capella, were even sounding worse compared to bass-laden material. Bass was strange, subjectively lacking the feeling that any air is being moved despite from low frequencies being present, but would not say overly terrible given the driver size. Tried them in my bedroom because I really liked the concept and connectivity options, but could not get used to the sound. Wonder why so many people do not hear this?

Understand your points and agree, but I rarely meet people being into high-end tweaking, cables and stuff while having speakers with their main flaws lying in low-frequency limitations. It appears to me, that we are rather talking about different groups. Those with sub-4" woofers and dynamic limitations are seemingly more often believing in almighty DSP correction with their iPhones, cutoff frequencies in the spec sheet and straight lines being added to the frequency response graphs.

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There is a compromise that some of us use. Either the Smyth A16 Realiser (at the expensive end) or Virtuoso software (much cheaper) can convincingly emulate speakers through headphones, with up to 16 channels rendered for surround. Set up correctly, the Smyth can emulate the exact frequency response and directionality of any given room/speaker combination, and it provides a convincing speaker-like sound for those of us who don’t have dedicated listening rooms. However, it does cost over $4000, so you would expect high quality sound. It deals effectively with all the beaming and separation issues you mention - which is why Dolby use Smyth equipment in their Atmos mastering studios in San Francisco. Yes, speakers are always better, but buying a full set of 16 studio Atmos speakers, and building a good listening room, is never going to be cheap.