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I find quality in-ear headphones extremely revealing of poor quality output. Shure e5c, to pick an older set that I own, are especially unforgiving of noisy out
by jrabone 13y ago
I find quality in-ear headphones extremely revealing of poor quality output. Shure e5c, to pick an older set that I own, are especially unforgiving of noisy output stages and cross-coupled interference. The additional acoustic isolation really helps your brain focus on the audio by cutting out the masking effects of environmental noise. This isn't always a good thing.
For example, the Cowon S9 audio player was supposedly designed for high output quality, with a pile of DSP presets for EQ etc. With the e5c's you can really hear the poor quality processing of the EQ, especially on reverb tails. Have to turn the EQ off completely to eliminate them.
- jablan 13y agoBy EQ you are referring to equalizer? So if I don't use EQ on RPi (which I don't), I'm good? Is there some particular audio clip which I can sense the crappiness when listening to?
- jrabone 13y agoI was talking about a specific hardware player, but in general any additional signal processing has the potential to add artefacts. To hear these sorts of things, listen for reverb tails on drum hits, high frequency percussion like cymbals, high-hats, solo human voice (we're quite good at hearing unnatural artefacts in voices) - that sort of thing. Beware it has to be good quality source material to start with though!