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Headphones, and the discussion thereof.
Locklock
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey folks! I have a bit of a problem. I have this shiny mp3 player that is murdering my headphones. The earbuds it shipped with lasted about a month before they died. Then I switched to some large clunky Koss headphones I've been using for years and after about another month they're dead too. I testing them using other devices and the headphones are definitely fubar, but when I hook up a new pair of earbuds I bought to the mp3 player it sounds fine. It's only a matter of time though. These earbuds cost me pennies and they're pretty flimsy. A temporary solution at best.
So I ask you, what do you recommend to a guy looking for quality headphones/earbuds? I want something that will last me, and still have good sound quality.
So I ask you, what do you recommend to a guy looking for quality headphones/earbuds? I want something that will last me, and still have good sound quality.
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They fold up yet are also fairly rugged. I've had mine for over three years now and they're perfect. Only thing I've replaced are the foam pads (Sennheiser factory replacements readily available on eBay for cheap), but that's to be expected when you where something on your head for three years.
They come in regular black and OOOO LOOK AT ME white.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
I need some advice in portable headphones, I'm not really an audiophile, but I'm starting to be more demanding in quality. I've had recently noise cancelling headphones, all under $100, so I never expected perfect performance, but they did their job. Now I want to start upgrading, I've checked Sennheiser offerings but they are expensive (like this PXC300). Now I would be willing to make the sacrifice if the noise cancelling works noticeable better, I previously had sony and phillips headphones, so I think their performance wasn't exactly the best, however I'm a newbie in brands so I might be mistaken.
The other possibility is to just give up on noise cancelling, and just get a really good pair of headphones. As I said my past headphones did their job most of the times, but they could be better. If the only way to get some good noise cancelling is investing above $400 I'll rather try some good quality headphones. Again my guess is to get Sennheiser (PX200) but I wouldn't really know. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-7506-Pro-MDR-7506-Headphones/dp/B0002H02ZY
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It's not even that they just "flatter" music - I use them when I'm transcribing video game music, where I need sound detail and a good flat frequency response.
Oh also, I can't use earbuds because my ears start to hurt pretty quickly like SkutSkut, so they are out of the question.
My dad bought some of the bose earbuds a while back and I thought they were ok but I wasn't really in the market for them until recently (today actually). This morning I got into work and grabbed my iPod and had the right earbud literally just fall apart on me so now its time for a replacement. Any help would be awesome. (100ish price range)
You're in luck. I was just reading the pro audio magazines @ the library the other and they were raving about M-audio earbuds. http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=Earphones
The IE-10s are definitely available under $100 if you look around - my brother just got a pair for $85ish.
Edit: For example,
http://www.amazon.com/M-Audio-IE-10-Professional-Reference-Monitors/dp/B000JNNNBQ/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=musical-instruments&qid=1213208716&sr=8-1
Edit2: Whatever you do, don't go back to Bose. Bose gear is a standing joke among audio enthusiasts.
Can you explain this? I hear it all the time but I don't know why. I've listened to their stuff and it sounds pretty good to me.
This also doesn't necessarily mean it will sound bad to you when you listen. Thanks to the proliferation of mini HTiB and multimedia speaker systems, it's hard to even have a chance to hear good sound these days. Without knowing good sound, you can't tell what's bad.
...and sometimes bad sound gear sounds better... e.g. a 128kbps MP3 will sound better on crappy gear because it doesn't expose the compression artifacts and flaws.
And this isn't even touching on how most people lack a basic understanding the principles behind good sound, and how a lot of consumer gear (in design, marketing, and demonstration) is snake oil designed to exploit this
So is there somewhere that I can read up on some good(ish) earbuds? That link at the top of this thread only seems to cover headphones which is what I don't want.
The ones I suggested fold up pretty neatly. They come with their own leather sack too. The cord is detachable too so you can interchange for a longer one. They won't fit into a pants pocket but will fit into a backpack pouch rather easily. They're circumaural too, fit tight and comfortably around the ears and produce awesome sound.
Edit: A link!: HN-700
I came across a review while looking for the link and the guy was a douche don't listen to anything you see out there. There's no damn noise leakage and the cancellation works just fine. Also apparently these were worth $800 like 2 years ago...I got mine for like $60 from newegg even though they don't list then anymore for some reason.
They're not crap. I turn them up loud enough to get complete isolation from a relatively noisy cube farm at work (about the 60% volume mark on my iPod), and when I set them down on my desk with the iPod still playing, I can only tell the iPod is playing on particularly loud songs, and even then just barely. That's with them less than 4 feet from my head. Nobody in any of the cubes around me hears them. As for the bus, they're way more than adequate at tuning out everyone else.
You don't need "noise canceling" headphones to not hear the people around you. They make it possible to ignore people at lower volume settings than you otherwise might use, but you tend to lose some sound quality and let's face it, good music sounds better louder.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
To elaborate further, take a look at Bose home theater. Acoustimass 6, for example. Their design makes it completely impossible for them to reproduce sound accurately. The laws of physics prevent it. The first problem is that their satellites are too small to produce enough frequencies, so the mids suck. The sats could hold tweeters.... but that would sacrifice ALL the midrange, so the highs suck. Then they have to set the crossover on the sub to a high position so that the low-mid even exists, which means that the quality of the lower end sucks because the subwoofer is pulling woofer duty, and then surround positioning is damaged because the sub is no longer perceptually positionless.
Well, ok, I can't tell just by looking that the crossover on the sub destroys the surround positioning. But, here's the thing. To avoid the problem I mentioned would require leaving out the low-mid frequencies entirely. A casual listener wouldn't realize they were gone thanks to a trick of acoustics called "subtraction harmonics", but yeah, this would be the equivalent of running your music through a band reject filter right in the middle of the male voice range.... sound quality would be massacred.
I have a set of 200s I use every day, they are pretty great phones. Not as good in quality as the 100s I had before, but close. And the added isolation is worth it in my opinion.
As a rule of thumb, closed phones will always sound worse then open ones, everything else being somewhat equal.
http://www.headphone.com/ is a pretty decent site to compare headphones. Even though they sell them all, they are quite honest about what you are getting.
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For smaller budgets Sennehieser offers quite good closed headphones in the 50-100 range. I had a set that cost me 45 bucks and sounded better than the Bose ones.
Right now I've got an older set of Shure earbuds. For the size they're fucking terrific. You won't get thumping bass out of them cuz of the size but the sound is crisp all around. The earplug tips are really great for blocking sound on the subway without adding the extra static of active noise cancelling
The reason I had for choosing noise cancelling is that I hear some music that isn't exactly loud, like classical music and similar, so turning up the volume some times isn't enough. However I really want to try open headphones, because as Rigor said, we are so used to bad audio that we possibly don't even know what good audio actually is. What surprises me is that you can listen well with the ipod at 60%, not even in the loudest metal songs I have I can listen well if it isn't at least above 80%, I hope I'm not losing my hearing...
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
So something like these? Also when you are saying you like Shure are you talking about the 99.95 ones you can get at like Best Buy? I actually picked up a set today at the store and thought out it but didn't buy them.
I'm not looking for over the ear. I need/want in ear
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
(yo classical music fo lief dawg)
I've only own senns closed headphones. Haven't heard much about thier in-ear ones. But yeah that's the shure's I'm talking about. The line I have, the e2c's, are not being made anymore. They have the SE line now for similar prices.
Also after reading what you guys had to say I'm leaning towards the Shure SE110. Are those decent or should I step up a price point?
Oh and one other thing, I know its stupid but for personal preference I like the straight on connection for the jack, not that angled style. What style do the Shure's have?
It's good when a speaker's response range has some buffer on that because at the bottom end of a speaker's frequency response curve things tend to be inconsistent. There's not much to be gained by going 3000 Hz beyond the audible range but it's better than falling 3000 Hz short.
But that's not the only technical aspect that counts. Efficiency matters, it's measured typically in db SPL/W/m for normal sized speakers, with higher numbers being better. This is basically how loud the speakers are going to be given a standardized amount of power and a standard distance from the speakers. Of course, these can be manipulated by not taking an RMS average of the entire response range, or by not taking an RMS average for the entire audible range.
The best way to judge any set of speakers on paper would be to get the frequency response curves for all of the cones involved (at the resistance appropriate to the configuration they'll actually be used in), superimpose them, and look at the result.
Is it relatively flat? You'll get pretty uniform response across the audible spectrum and therefore easily be able to EQ your music to sound accurate to the performance.
Are there huge bumps or spikes or drop offs? You'll have to manipulate your EQ to compensate for those as well as for the flaws in the recording you're listening to and it might be impossible to get anything resembling an accurate reproduction.
Is this information readily available (or even available at all) for most consumer level gear? Of course not. If it were a lot of these companies (Bose) would be out of business in a week.
So basically, any technical data you're going to see can be endlessly manipulated unless you're given the whole picture, which you won't be. So ignore it all because you can't tell whether it's a sack of lies or not and go with reviews you feel to be trustworthy. Deciding arbitrarily on the trustworthiness of reviews written by complete strangers on the Internet based on the way they're presented will actually give you a more accurate picture of what you're gonna be buying anyhow.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
There is one review site in particular I suggest reading. It's rarely updated anymore, but the guy who runs it is big on proper audio testing. You can learn a lot from him.
http://www.theaudiocritic.com/cwo/Our_Philosophy/
My other biggest suggestion when buying gear is to ignore consumer audio entirely. Buy as much as you can from pro audio companies. The nature of the market forces them to make better gear cheaper - it's easy to bullshit John Doe, but hard to bullshit pro musicians and engineers. Behringer, M-Audio, KRK, and Tapco are good brands to start looking at, since they're good but budget-friendly.
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/
And for what it's worth, Klipsch>>>>>>Bose.
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