3 ms·
It's not mostly marketing woo. Diminishing returns, yes. Marketing woo, no. When I make a song, I spend a lot of time listening for specific, subtle changes. L
by klodolph 5y ago
It's not mostly marketing woo. Diminishing returns, yes. Marketing woo, no.
When I make a song, I spend a lot of time listening for specific, subtle changes. Like I might be adjusting the EQ of a rhythm guitar in a mix by a couple dB, and trying to balance it with the hi hats. Making those kinds of decisions in a full mix, you'll notice lots of deficiencies in headphones that are supposedly high-quality reference headphones.
If you look at measured frequency response for headphones, even high end headphones, you'll see that the frequency response curves can really be all over the place. That's not even considering transient response (where you'd want to look at a waterfall graph).
IMO, headphone amps and DACs are where the real marketing woo is.
- hiptobecubic 5y agoYes, but then it gets streamed through Spotify or something to a 40 year old with diminished hearing acuity.
- klodolph 5y agoSpotify's audio fidelity is quite good. It uses AAC or Vorbis at decent bitrates... depending on network connection, but on a reasonable connection, you're going to get something very near to transparent, if not completely transperent. 40 is also not so old, when you are talking about hearing acuity. Meanwhile, you can see from frequency response curves, that high-end headphones might even be off by 5 dB in the high mids, something that should be audible even to 40-year-olds listening to Spotify over a congested network link.
- AstralStorm 5y agoThere's also the fit/refit variability so you cannot quite just correct some of them and call it a day. Plus the cheaper/worse quality products have resonances and other rather audible deficiencies not related to frequency response. (But visible to waterfall diagram or some temporal charts.)
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoFully agree about the DACs being the #1 spot for marketing woo. The key to navigating expensive headphone purchases is to find which ones are expensive because they're worth it and which are expensive because of the marketing.