15 ms·
No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price
- fffernan 9y agoHow about correlation between the amount of marketing dollars spent compared to the price.
- jdavis703 9y agoThat probably looks more like a bathtub curve. It's mostly mid-tier headphones I think that are advertised heavily. Everything else is either priced as a race-to-the-bottom or so very high-end that mass market advertising doesn't work too well.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoIt would be nice if we knew which headphones they tested. Since so much of a headphone's reputation these days relies on largely anecdotal evidence from self-professed audiophiles, some kind of objective rating on frequency response for major brands or well-known cans would be highly welcomed in the audio world. It's very easy to say, "I can hear so much more of the song out of my ATH-M50's than I can a pair of Beats", and you may be right. But something objective to back it up would be great, too.
- josefresco 9y agoConsumer Reports? Granted it's premium content, but I would imagine their reviews would include more than just frequency response. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/headphones.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/headphones.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/headphones/buying-guide http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/headphones/buying-guide
- eli 9y agoAnd to be clear, you have to pay for it because they buy all test products at retail and don't accept any ads or include any affiliate links. I don't always 100% agree with CR, but they are super committed to objectivity.
- creepydata 9y agoMost libraries have copies of consumer reports magazine.
- fencepost 9y agoIf you have the cash, subscribe and support a great resource. If you're ramen profitable and sharing an apartment with 8 other entrepreneurs, keep in mind that many libraries have online access to subscription resources that can include both CR (and other publications) and a variety of online learning resources like Lynda.com.
- lostlogin 9y agoWhen I know a subject well and then read a consumer report article, I'm yet to agree with them. Their other irritating trait is the strange battles they pick that seem aimed to get them in the news.
- londons_explore 9y agoTesting ~150 headphones varying in price between $5 and $5k, I assume it covers most makes and models.
- dom0 9y agoFrequency and phase response are just linear characterisations, they don't model any non-linear effects. That being said, speakers and headphones all have a sound (unlike any properly designed amplifier); there is hardly any right or wrong there, and while the best approximation of a flat response might seem technically most correct, people will probably prefer different sounds.
- codedokode 9y agoNon-linear effects can be seen when measuring THD. Any non-linearity will distort the sound and create additional frequencies in the output.
- dom0 9y agoThat's not correct. THD measures some non-linearities and is unable to detect others (e.g. IMD).
- genka 9y agoI don't buy headphones super often, and I'm not super obsessive over it, but the people at headphone.com have always made me feel at least a little better informed: http://graphs.headphone.com http://graphs.headphone.com
- falcolas 9y agoSadly, it seems like they're getting out of the resale business, and focusing back on their DACs and amps. Sigh.
- criddell 9y agoFor a lot of people Beats sound good enough, they are affordable (but still expensive), and built fairly well. Clearly, it's subject but to lots of people they also look good. For just about anything worn on one's head, aesthetics and comfort will be the dominating factors. When I was a kid, my friends and I would kill time in the library by flipping through Car & Driver, Motor Trend, and Road & Track magazines trying to figure out what car is best. The Camaro might be two tenths faster in the quarter mile than the Mustang, so clearly anybody that buys a Mustang is an idiot, right? This is what a lot of headphone evaluations sound like to me.
- throwasehasdwi 9y agobeats are built REALLY badly, look at any of the teardowns. They also use garbage no-name drivers that are identical to what you get in $20 headphones, again look at the teardowns.
- closeparen 9y agoCorrect, they are a fashion item. The point is to be seen wearing them, not to sit alone in your silent apartment with a nice headphone amp and concentrate on your music. Do Oakleys block the sun better than $5 checkout counter sunglasses?
- linkregister 9y agoOakleys are more scratch-resistant and comfortable than the checkout counter sunglasses. It's probably cheaper to just buy 15 pairs of the checkout counter sunglasses if you only care about durability.
- arethuza 9y agoI have a pair of Oakleys (Juliets I think) that are about 15 years old and must be on the fifth pair of lenses. Been hit directly by a dinghy boom more than once and survived fine. Headphones on the other hand - I go through maybe 3 or 4 pairs a year so buy fairly cheap ones because I know they are going to be destroyed or lost.
- beat 9y agoThat only works if your objective measurements map well to subjective listening experience. Frequency response does not map well. Neither does THD. They're measured not because they're useful, but because they're easy to measure and sound "objective" and "scientific". It's an appeal to authority fallacy with a graph.
- stcredzero 9y agoBut something objective to back it up would be great, too. That brain-training game on the Nintendo DS -- the one that had you distinguish two voices saying things simultaneously -- your score on that game is a great way to evaluate headphones for vocal accuracy. Be careful though: the DS can't adequately drive all headphones, so you'll need an amp for high impedance headphones.
- calichoochoo 9y agoI predict a lot of wrong conclusions will be drawn from this. This paper does not preclude the possibility that there exist high-priced headphones with better-than-average or even spectacularly good frequency response. It only says that if you bin together all of the high priced items, their aggregate quality is no better than any other price bin.
- aeturnum 9y agoIt's also the case that people pay for features other than audio quality. Look and feel, comfort, connectivity all influence price. This feels a little like releasing a study saying, "No correlation between car top speed and retail price."
- londons_explore 9y agoMy underpowered very cheap car would like to say otherwise...
- TallGuyShort 9y agoBut a $75,000 model T Ford from the 1920's wouldn't. When there's no correlation at all you can find a datapoint anywhere you want.
- emodendroket 9y agoThat's true, but I would imagine people think that all the expensive headphones have the sound quality part covered.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThis is noted at the beginning of the piece: > Research suggests that factors influencing consumers' choice as to which model to purchase are mostly based on wireless functionality (Iyer and Jelisejeva, 2016) and attributes such as shape, design, and comfort (Jensen et al., 2016). Interestingly, sound quality does not seem to be a major attribute for purchase decisions.
- rb808 9y agoMany expensive headphones are overpriced, but there is a very obvious difference in sound quality between very cheap headphones and medium priced ones. Either they're measuring the wrong thing or their headphone sample isn't what I'd expect.
- 09bjb 9y agoYeah I'm not losing any sleep over the obvious subjective difference between crap headphones and medium- to high-end ones. If the metric du jour isn't picking up any difference then, sorry brother, probably not a good metric. "New study shows no difference in speed of blue vs. red light!" We always ascribe waaay to much importance to what we can measure easily.
- GuB-42 9y agoThey still say that : "However, the variance in low-frequency response seems to decrease with increasing price, indicating an improved bass response measurement consistency across headphones in the higher price range."
- crispyambulance 9y agoFWIW, it looks like half of the prices were within $10 to $100 USD, the bulk of the rest were >100 and <1000. About 1 was <10 and a few were >1000. I don't think they're measuring the wrong thing, although a human might be interested in more things than frequency response. Just goes to show that perhaps the most important thing in selecting headphones is comfort and the context in which they will be used. For "audiophile listening experiences" an equalizer and CA-style cans might be a good idea and give a lot more bang for the buck than shelling out several hundred just for the cans.
- mamon 9y agoWhat's funny is that people tend to buy headphones with insane top frequencies (20-22 kHz), even if most humans cannot really hear sound of such frequency. When you are a teenager and have right genetics then there's a chance that you might hear 19kHz tone. If you are over 30 years old you are probably limited to 17 kHz already. Of course it gets even worse with age.
- jmileham 9y agoAs long as there's recorded audio up there, you might as well reproduce it well, and even standard CD-audio goes up beyond 20KHz. Also there's plenty of individual variance in people's hearing. No need to fit to the lowest common denominator even if the majority can't hear it. As a tall person, I appreciate that airplane seats aren't pitched to cut your kneecaps off after 6'0" (ok, maybe that's generous to the airline industry, but you get the point).
- jacquesm 9y agoThe flyback transformer sound from CRTs used to drive me absolutely nuts. Fortunately now we have flatscreens, besides that if we'd still be using CRTs I would no longer be able to hear it. But that was proof to me that whoever picked that frequency didn't have children or dogs.
- codedokode 9y agoI don't think that is a problem. One could think that if someone doesn't hear sounds above 17 kHz then they lose 3/20 = 15% of sound spectrum but in fact they just lose a small part of the highest octave (from 10 octaves total) which is about 5%. In most cases those high frequencies contain only overtones from lower frequency sounds. The hearing can really get worse with age, but definitely not because of beeiong unable to hear highest frequencies.
- zf00002 9y agoI'm in my 40's and can't hear above 13kHz any longer. :(
- svantana 9y agoThis makes for a cute soundbite, but it doesn't mean what it implies. You could, for example, have a bunch of expensive headphones with frequency response that varies randomly in the [-1,+1] dB range, and a bunch of cheap headphones that are in the [-10,+10] dB range -- that would also show up as uncorrelated. Indeed, they did find a significant difference in magnitude response _error_, although the effect was quite small.
- logicallee 9y agoDidn't read the link, but could a mod please change this title, which is obviously false? No correlation would mean that if I bought a random headphone that cost $2 (they exist, you can go to ali express right now and put in a maximum of $2 in a headphone search), and a random headphone that cost $500, then if you had to make a bet about which one would come closer to reproducing the bass of a song with a heavy bass, you would be betting even money. It would be a toss-up whether the $2 or the $500 came closer to producing that bass. Because there is no correlation. Here is an example of correct usage of "no correlation": there is no correlation between a headphone's price and the md5 checksum of its SKU. EDIT: I skimmed the paper. A better title (for HN) would be "No correlation between frequency response and price quartile in 283 headphones".
- navbaker 9y agoIf you read the link, you'll find it's the exact title of the journal article.
- logicallee 9y agoIt is still obviously false. It is a sensational title and should be changed so that it is true. (It's like saying, "Scientists find location on Earth immune from the effects of gravity." It doesn't matter what the article said, that obviously shouldn't be our title here.)
- zeta0134 9y agoI'd be okay with a very minor change for clarity. Prefixing the title with "Study finds" would make it far less sensational, while staying otherwise faithful to the original article's headline.
- logicallee 9y agoI suggest "No correlation between frequency response and price quartile in 283 headphones". (which fits HN's title limit of 80 characters.) As far as I can see they just judged the quartiles.
- swayvil 9y agoMy first though when I buy headphones is, "will these fall apart after a week?"
- jotux 9y agoI don't have ears good enough to hear the difference and I don't mind lossy compression but I really care about comfort and durability.
- wvenable 9y agoEven that is not an easy question! I got a really good deal on $300+ over-the-ear headphones and they physically broke within a year from just regular usage. I bought much cheaper Sony headphones to replace then and they've been going strong for way longer (and more comfortable to boot).
- frou_dh 9y agoI got out of that game by starting to buy bluetooth earbuds in bulk from eBay. They are less than $10 a pair (Bluedio N2) and surprisingly comfortable (YMMV. I take off the 'struts') One side stops working after ~5 months, they get chucked immediately and I pull a new pair out of the box. Zero anxiety about babying expensive gear.
- lostlogin 9y agoA little wasteful though. If you get an ok pair they can last 10+ years.
- frou_dh 9y agoNot in my experience of pricey Etymotic, Klipsch and Sennheiser earbuds they don't! Earbuds/IEMs in their contemporary form are just fundamentally fragile things. The manufacturer making a fat margin doesn't change that.
- lostlogin 9y agoInteresting. I was thinking of cans when I replied so that's presumably a big factor.
- o_nate 9y agoI thought it was weird that they found that inner-ear had better bass response than over-the-ear headphones, but they did mention that could be an anomaly because the artificial head they use for testing forms a tighter seal with inner-ear headphones than most people's real heads would do.
- zeta0134 9y agoI've found this to be true in practice though. I almost exclusively carry a decent set of sealing ear-buds for form factor reasons (they slip into my pocket) and the sound quality is just fine. Something about the way the little rubber inserts create a seal with my inner ear causes it to carry bass surprisingly well. When that seal isn't working (or doesn't exist, on cheaper hard plastic sets) the bass is nonexistant. I suppose it's surprising because of the bud's small size, but then again, it doesn't need to drive that bass very hard either. That may help.
- o_nate 9y agoI guess I haven't tried enough earbuds to find ones that fit my ear canal well. I don't like the feeling of them inside my ears, so I stick to over-the-ear models.
- mbell 9y agoThe seal on a binaural head is likely a bit better than you'd get in real ears so inflates the numbers a bit. However, it's still expected to have better measured bass response from the IE phones despite this. But, the frequency response doesn't tell the entire story in terms of what you 'hear'. For example you don't 'hear' much under ~60hz. What I mean is that frequencies below this are mostly not picked up by your ear drums but rather other senses feeling the pressure waves and your brain is wired such that it get's mixed into your perception of sound. The larger driver in CA headphones tends to activate the 'feeling of bass' more than in-ear headphones which can lead to the perception of louder-bass despite measurements favoring in-ear. This effect tends to be more significant if you're listening to music with a lot of sub-bass, EDM for example.
- frostirosti 9y agoIs anyone surprised here? Clothes must have the same trend (or lack there of)
- jmileham 9y agoI wonder if there's any effect that in-ear headphones are cheaper to produce but have advantages in accurate low frequency response? Of course all this is confounded by the fact that music will tend to sound best on speakers/headphones with a response curve most like the speakers/headphones that the mastering engineer used (or more accurately, the set of speakers/headphones that the engineer compromised among). You will probably tend to have the best experience listening to music with the popular devices within a given musical subculture, because mastering engineers will be targeting those devices.
- arnaudsm 9y agoDSLRs got the same problem : just compare the Canon 70D ($900) with a Nikon D3300 ($400) on DxOMark. The Nikon has better image quality despite its low price and bad reviews. We need objective benchmarks for everything. Especially when marketing is growing bigger each year. Even "Tech websites" are biased and not objective anymore.
- dom0 9y ago> We need objective benchmarks for everything. You might want to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which digs into this fallacy. You might also be surprised how misleading objective IQ benchmarks are; the post processing in the camera's JPEG (and RAW processing... raw hasn't been raw for a long time) does a lot of stuff which is not well reflected by photographing a Siemens star.
- grimoald 9y agoI'm curious, do you mind expanding on the fallacy? I read the book you mentioned some years ago but don't know what you mean.
- accountyaccount 9y agoAren't spec sheets objective benchmarks? Image quality can be subjective too. Also, the 70D might be $900, but that doesn't matter so much when someone has $4k worth of Canon equipment. Personally I've found I enjoy purchases more by making fewer of them and worrying less about specification minutiae. Does the product do what I want? Do I enjoy using it? Is it reliable? Done.
- arnaudsm 9y agoIt depends of the specs covered. It can lead to some kind of Cargo Cult. Think of the 128 bit consoles, the 128Gb of RAM and the 12 Cores CPU for Gaming PCs. It's meant for advertising, but useless for the end user.
- 9y ago
- mmaunder 9y agoI've spent some time on frequency correction for headphones and reference monitors in my home studio. If you'd like awesome headphones that have a truly flat frequency response, that you can then adjust with EQ to your taste, one option is to get Sony MDR 7506's and run the audio output through a VST plugin (Using soundflower, ableton, etc) which corrects the EQ. You can either buy precalibrated headphones from sonarworks or use a generic but headphones specific calibration profile for the plugin. It's really cool hearing what they heard in the studio control room for the final mix. And often surprising. You can get a range of other precalibrated pro audio headphones or correction profiles from sonarworks. Consumer headphones are just silly IMHO. Artificially boosted frequencies with prices up to $400. A set of precalibrated MDR7506's is around $220. If you don't care about truly flat response with correction, you can get a set of AKG K240's for $100 bucks and they're super comfy, amazing sound and loved universally by audio pros.
- kev009 9y agoIt's annoying that they provide the mfg of the acoustic model and DAC, but not the headphones which would be required to reproduce or filter the experiment. Most consumer audio equipment is a scam. I'd be interested in the subset of equipment from Shure, AKG, Sennheiser, Sony, Beyerdynamic where the design was actually intended to produce a broad frequency range correctly.
- FfejL 9y agoPrice has never been correlated with quality, for any product, ever. Price is correlated with perceived value, which includes quality, brand recognition, brand opinion, current style, and a long list of other factors. (And, yes, this is a horrible use of the word 'correlated.' 'Derived from' or 'based on' would be much better.)
- riskable 9y agoGold and silver buyers would disagree. Though I suppose "purity" is considerably more exact than, "quality".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bryik 9y ago> Price has never been correlated with quality, for any product, ever. That is an incredible assertion. I am willing to bet $10,000 that I can find a product where price is correlated with quality (assuming we can agree on a definition of "quality" for a particular product). How about GPUs with "quality" measured by average FPS in a selection of AAA games at 4K?
- falcolas 9y agoOr specifically related to this topic, Shure IEMs with Magnetic Planar drivers. Damn those sound good.
- 9y ago
- goodroot 9y agoNifty! A few years ago, a friend and I created an application that allowed users to import their own MP3s. We scraped the frequency data from the mp3. Once imported, you could then pick two different headphones; for each headphone, we scraped frequency data from headphone.com. The application allowed you to benchmark headphones in real-time, revealing "how accurately" your music was being recreated; you'd pit two headphones against one another: clash of cans! Ultimately, yeah, there's the uber-uber high-end, the really clear low-end, and a +-$900 muddle of everything else.
- ue_ 9y agoI don't understand this. Sometimes people don't want a perfectly flat frequency response. Sometimes other qualities matter more, especially things like noise isolation. The idea that a particular frequency response is the thing that separates good headphones from bad is ridiculous.
- kazinator 9y agoThe mere frequency response range doesn't correlate with how flat is the frequency response, or with other measures like sensitivity, distortion and whatnot. What's better: speakers that go to 40 kHz, but have a big dip at 4 kHz, versus ones that go flat to 15 kHz and roll off after that?
- codedokode 9y agoFrequence range is measured so that the response amplitude is within some range (like 6, 3 or 1dB for example). Of course allowing large amplitude range gives larger measured frequency range which can be used in marketing purposes.
- beat 9y ago"Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent." And with that, this study is bullshit. Human beings don't listen to linear sine sweeps. We listen to music. Recorded music has 8+ octaves of frequency range (the bottom octave plus a little extra is almost always rolled off in real-world recordings, to ease stress on downstream components that can't reproduce such low frequencies anyway), and 20-50db of useable dynamic range. Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device responses to real-world musical signals. Scientific, reductionist thinking is inadequate to get an accurate picture of the factors that matter to human listeners. Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren't measured in these cases because they're useful or relevant. They're measured because they're easy to measure. It's like looking in the wrong place, because the light is better there. And the results? It's like measuring a car's performance by how well it can drive in a straight line at 60mph. Acceleration, braking, and turning are too hard to measure, so we ignore them... I'm a musician and record producer. I've engineered and produced numerous albums, and rely on multiple different types of headphones for different purposes. The article's claim that one headphone can be easily morphed into another through mere equalization is, frankly, bullshit. The two headphones I rely on the most (Beyerdynamic DT880 and AKG K240) sound wildly different. Neither is "accurate". Neither are the Tannoy System 12 DMT midfield studio monitors I use for mixing, or the stock Subaru car speakers I use for reference to check the mixes from the Tannoys. Audio reproduction is incredibly complex and difficult stuff. Trying to isolate one factor and saying "That explains everything!" is bad thinking.
- baq 9y agoComments like this are why I don't even go to articles anymore. Thanks.
- sho 9y agoThis attitude might have served you well this time, but who's to say every other time will be the same? I detect a far too eager appetite to embrace the brisk dismissals of others. It won't serve you well in the long term. There are many articles posted here it will improve your very personality to read. Read them and don't make excuses not to. There will always be someone saying "XYZ article is bullshit". Many people here are actually pretty smart, and more than a hundred of them felt otherwise. Make your own decision.
- dep_b 9y agoI always buy studio oriented gear for listening to music. If it's good enough to mix the record on, then probably I'll hear enough detail as well. Speakers, headphones, amps. Still there's a difference between regularly priced headphones and the really expensive ones. They tend to be a bit too "honest" for some people, more tiring to listen to. They also might hurt your fashion senses.
- jlnazario 9y agoOver 11 × 10^9 units sold per year? This number seems unreal to me.
- untangle 9y ago> The target function suggested by Olive and Welti (2015) is fairly similar to the average headphone response found in this study, with the exception of a deviation of up to about 5 dB for frequencies between 50 Hz and 2 kHz. I find little fault with the arguments laid out supporting the paper's thesis. For those commenters making the jump to "sound quality" (which is not the topic of this paper), the quoted observation above conclusively proves that these headphones have differing tonal qualities. Even a casual listener will be able to hear a difference of 5dB in the critical freq range of human speech.
- DanBC 9y agoIs there a correlation between weight and price? I know some low end headphones add weights to increase "luxury feel". It'd be interesting to see some research about when adding weights stops.
- fizixer 9y agoRelated: - Someone with online alias NwAvGuy put the whole AV industry (ok maybe not the whole, but some big players) in a loop by showing in online forums that a totally inexpensive DIY DAC (with a free design he/she shared) could be built with quality rivaling elite products worth thousands of dollars. [1] (well a hazy version of the story goes that he/she exposed various audiophile review sites and forums as being full of sponsored reviews, and that eventually lead to his/her ban from head-fi.org I think) - As for capsule mics (commonly known as condenser mic), market is flooded with DIY designs and DIY kits which let you build/buy one for $200-$400 (the dominant cost being that of the capsule itself) that will rival the quality of multi-thousand dollar mics. They go by the names Neumann clones, etc. [2] (no affiliation), [3]. In retrospect, and given the shady things AV sellers do, like trying to sell you a USB or HDMI with gold-plated pins, claiming it to be superior, it should come as no surprise. Though, no offense, but audiophile consumer base is filled to the brim with hipsters who judge the quality of a product by its price (and some of the "experts" were busted after they failed blind tests; I think opus vs flac, I'm mixing a lot of things now). [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/nwavguy-the-audio-genius-who-vanished http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/nwavguy-the-audi... [2] https://microphone-parts.com/ https://microphone-parts.com/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtNH46jpwJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtNH46jpwJo
- snvzz 9y ago>NwAvGuy head-fi ban There's a recount of the story by some company NwAvGuy did shit on, for contrast. https://www.head-fi.org/f/threads/schiit-happened-the-story-of-the-worlds-most-improbable-start-up.701900/ https://www.head-fi.org/f/threads/schiit-happened-the-story-... Chapter 12: Schiit Goes Evil?
- Tyr42 9y agoThanks for that link, the tale of Schiit is great.
- fizixer 9y ago(replying to my own comment) Just looked up the issue related to audio encoding [1] There are "audiophiles" out there who claim they can discern the difference between a 96-kHz (sampling frequency) encoded audio vs 48 or 44.1 kHz encoded, which is a mathematical impossibility, given a source with 20 kHz max analog, let alone a biological one. But then some prefer 192 kHz over 96 kHz!!! [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ixkjt https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3ixkjt
- skywhopper 9y ago"Interestingly, sound quality does not seem to be a major attribute for purchase decisions." This is a silly assumption, and easily explained. 1. Most headphone purchases aren't and cannot be made by comparing sound quality. Reviews of sound quality are so universally understood to be subjective that most consumers probably ignore those details. 2. There is no one subjective or objective standard that is meaningful for all listening material. Podcasts, modern pop music, older pop music, classical recordings, television shows, and movies all have wildly varying acoustic profiles between and among each genre. 3. The vast majority of headphones have Good Enough sound quality for the vast majority of consumers. Sound quality is highly unlikely to be the primary reason most consumers buy a set of headphones, and it's unlikely to be the reason they are dissatisfied with certain headphones. 4. Headphone design, form factor, build quality, fit, feature-set, and even color are all much more important factors in terms of consumer satisfaction with headphones. They are, after all, a highly noticeable part of your ensemble. They are intimately in contact with your body. And you want them to work without thinking about it too hard. In addition to being more important, most of these factors are far easier for consumers to judge between headphones than sound quality, so again it's no surprise that an arbitrary single standard of sound quality would fail to correlate with perceived value. In other words, this is silly for reasons that have nothing to do with technical arguments about actual sound quality, whatever that means.
- pdkl95 9y agoI don't care about the accuracy of their response curve (I know it isn't flat) after I found Grado[1] headphones. They are the only headphones I've found that don't add a "headphone" quality to the sound. It's hard to describe what I mean - it's that most headphones don't sound like a proper set of (quality) speakers. I've speculated it's something to do with most headphones not being able to move enough air. Grado uses very large drivers (voice coil is about 4cm in diameter) in a supra-aural (open back) design, which may move more air? Whatever the reason, Grado Labs has discovered a design that I consider categorically better[2] than everything else. [1] http://www.gradolabs.com/headphones/prestige-series/item/1-sr80e http://www.gradolabs.com/headphones/prestige-series/item/1-s... [2] In terms of music quality. Other use cases may prefer designs that focus on other features.
- cgb223 9y agoThis reads like an advertisement...
- pdkl95 9y agoIt isn't, although I can see how it could seem that way. I'm just an enthusiastic fan.
- jimmyjazz14 9y agoI think the very open nature of Grados are what probably give them less of a "headphone sound". I'm a big fan of Grado as well, unfortunately since they are so open they leak sound like crazy, which makes them hard to use in an office environment.
- pdkl95 9y ago> leak sound like crazy That's very true, which is unfortunate. I completely agree they may not be appropriate in a office or other quiet environments.
- jamesbrownjr 9y agoThe "headphone quality" is usually resulting from the fact that there is no crosstalk. When listening to speakers in a somewhat reverberant room, the signal from both speakers reach both ears, directly and via room reflections. This substantially adds to the impression of the mix and usually mixes actively make use of these effects. (That's also why "mixed for headphones" is a real thing.)
- dharma1 9y agoI own a bunch of headphones and generally the good headphones aren't cheap - not because it's expensive to make headphones but mostly because of R&D. It's not rocket science though, so you can also pick up very good headphones quite cheaply. I like my Sennheiser HD600's (and MDR-1000x for the office) which are $300 headphones, but equally happy to use Superlux HD-681 EVO or Soundmagic E-10 which cost around $30
- ebbv 9y agoThis is like saying that there's no correlation between displacement and vehicle price. Of course there isn't because that is, while an important criteria on an individual car, and it has SOME correlation to the cost to produce a vehicle, it doesn't tell the full story. Nor does it tell the full story of why someone might pay more for it.
- Johnny555 9y agoIt is however unclear whether this improved consistency with a higher retail price is the result of better headphones or better repeatability of measurements with more expensive models. Isn't consistency an important characteristic of a headphone? Perhaps even more important than some ideal frequency response. You want the same sound every time you listen to a song, you don't want it to vary.
- eecc 9y agoThe most cherished earphones I've ever had - a pair of relatively cheap Audiotechnica - feel better than the triple price model I decided to treat myself with some years later.
- flavio81 9y agoAudio nerd here Study says: "Nevertheless, assuming that the perceived audio quality is largely determined by the spectral magnitude response of headphones..." This is a very wrong assumption. Audio component designers have more or less a hard time picking up which measurements can correlate with audio quality. And frequency response measurements using sine sweeps, like in the cited study, are almost of no value for discriminating between two transducers (headphones, speakers) with regarding to 'audio quality'. Also, the fact that one headphone can extend beyond 20KHz or that it can go below 20Hz will give zero guarantee of better audio quality. Frequency response measurements using white/pink noise can give a slightly better hint because they can take a look at resonant peaks that might be annoying to the listener, but even this is not a law set in stone* * Impulse measurements (and waterfall plots) can give you a clearer idea of how clear is the sound going to be; but then you can have a transducer with a fairly good impulse response but a slight resonant peak somewhere --- OR you can have sometimes a transducer which shows pretty flat frequency response but bad impulse response. A good test for intermodulation distortion (the big white elephant in the audio room) will REALLY give you a hint of which headphone will be least annoying to the ear when listening to loud complex music like classical music, vocal music, etc. It seems that the article has been written by experts in acoustics, but not really in "audio". TL;DR: Freq response measured with sine sweeps can't really tell you anything helpful to discriminate headphones with regard to sound quality.
- davidrhunt 9y ago> This is a very wrong assumption. The citation provided further down in the article is [1]. Dr. Olive is thorough in attempting to remove sources of bias and conducts a set of fully double blind listening tests in order to come to the conclusion: "The results provide evidence that trained listeners preferred the headphones perceived to have the most neutral, spectral balance". > A good test for intermodulation distortion (the big white elephant in the audio room) will REALLY give you a hint of which headphone will be least annoying to the ear when listening to loud complex music like classical music, vocal music, etc. Where is this proven? [1] http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-relationship-between-perception-and.html http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-relationship-betwe...
- stcredzero 9y agoOf course not! For one thing, as one's earning power increases, one's high frequency hearing deteriorates. So market forces could well be emphasizing features and capabilities other than frequency response. Fashion, build quality, social signals...these are all very significant factors in something you wear, the practical priorities of audiophiles and enthusiasts notwithstanding. In fact, those are probably stronger factors for that set of people! (Of which, I am a member.) Headphones also have a serious empiricism issue. You can probably pass off one high end Sennheiser for another in an A/B test. But you couldn't pass off an Audeze for one and have a valid A/B test. Also, you will often read or hear an expert say, if the measurements say something is bad, but it sounds good, or vice versa, then it means we're measuring the wrong things. I'm not saying that the Harman response curve isn't valid. It's just not the whole story. tl;dr -- Buy the cheapest headphones that you really like, and ignore whatever your coworkers say. ( Hell, there are actually Beats that are good headphones! https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/time-rethink-beats-solo2-excellent https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/time-rethink-beats-sol... ) Things are going to change in significant ways in the future as the price of signal processing, compensation, and active correction drops, however. Combining those with advances in the cheaper manufacturing of better drivers will result in the headphones of 10 years from now making the high end headphones of today seem "meh" and today's typical headphones seem trashy.
- Zenst 9y agoIf only there was a headphone maker that allowed you to upgrade parts (or offered the ability to) and break free of this cycle of obsolescence thru technological steps. More so when the ability to upgrade the processing is offered, or the easy ability to replace the various parts. After all how many of you have had to write of a perfectly good pair of headphones as you dropped them and one of the over-ear connections broke. But currently it is predent to go for something cheaper that works just as well and that way, later on when that price point offers you something better or you break the existing ones. You can spend the same token amount of money and still of spent way less than something with some fancy PR around it. So double win.
- stcredzero 9y ago
- low_key 9y agoI think the correlation is between advertising spend and retail price.
- acd 9y agoThe frequency response of the apple earpods are totally ok. https://www.innerfidelity.com/images/AppleEarPods.pdf https://www.innerfidelity.com/images/AppleEarPods.pdf What industry convinces you to buy things you do not need? Advertising
- aoeusnth1 9y agoTHD is terrible, though. You picked a stupid metric, and got a stupid result.
- sh87 9y agoIs there a good place or study explaining what accounts for "good" headphone audio quality ? I mean how do you quantify good and bad audio quality ? I can feel and get it, just not sure if there's a way to measure it.
- xupybd 9y agoIt's missing the data on the best cheap models to buy :(
- stuaxo 9y agoAudiophiles are probably experiencing the placebo effect. Placebos work though, so even if these people are not hearing anything different, if it makes them feel better every time they listen to music through their systems, maybe it is money well invested?
- mysterypie 9y agoWhere's the data by brand and model? The objective measurements on 283 headphones and their prices would be great resource for everyone. The article can make its point without giving the raw data, but I wonder what their reasons are for excluding such useful and interesting data. Fear of silly lawsuits from manufacturers?
- hullsean 9y agoSame science holds for price of wine. The more general truth is quality does not correlate with cost. Google Rory Sutherlands TED talk
- anigbrowl 9y agoThis shows the limits of quantitative studies. Just because you don't know how best to measure doesn't mean it doesn't matter, and there are strong preferences among people who are professionals in this area - of which I am one. I have spent years of my life listening to dialog on film sets; I like my favorite headphones because they have the least difference between how things sound with and without wearing them. I could quantify that, but why bother unless I'm getting paid a hell of a lot to to do it? I don't see anyone here who's championing this naive approach offering to pay for a study designed by an experienced professional, so don't complain about a lack of scientific rigor if you're not prepared to pay for it. I prefer the more concrete feedback of people telling me it's the best soundtrack material they've ever received in post production. You can talk about the scientific method all you like. I'm very fond of the scientific method. But rigorous testing costs money. If you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is, then accept the opinion of people who do this kind of thing for a living.