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Audiophile equipment certainly is better than what Sony and Apple make. Mainstream electronics manufacturers design for a price-point that has a large assessabl
by Tarq0n 4y ago
Audiophile equipment certainly is better than what Sony and Apple make. Mainstream electronics manufacturers design for a price-point that has a large assessable market. This certainly leaves room on the table for marginal gains. Audiophile gear manufacturers are also willing to make use of hard to mass-manufacture technologies like planar-magnetic drivers that have some advantages, while bigger manufacturers pretty much exclusively use dynamic drivers.
Some of this can be demonstrated though objective measurements, for instance bass extension into the sub-100 Hz range can be much better on audiophile equipment.
(Sony also makes some very high end headphones that few people are aware of)
- astrange 4y agoPlanar-magnetic drivers certainly sound different, but the “plucked” effect from them is so obvious I’m not sure it’s actually lower distortion or just something people like because it’s noticeable, kind of like a tube amp. My Anandas do sound good in general too, but the entire class of headphones isn’t technologically advanced at all. They don’t have consistent reproducible sound because different people have different head shapes, background noise levels, are wearing glasses… fancy drivers with more theoretical bass can’t make up for not having an ear seal. Plus they look like you’re wearing football helmets on both ears. (AirPods Max are the only product I know of that claims to do something about this. Though I don’t think they sound great, I do think noise cancelling closed headphones sound better than open audiophile ones in any reasonably noisy location.)