What's your preference? The headphone industry has exploded in the last few years. People got used to the good old earbuds with their smartphones, the convenience of being able to listen to music while on the go. But there's been a huge increase in very, very expensive, very high-end, very exotic and very incredibly well-designed headphones over the past number of years.
It's commonplace that you'll find people that don't consider themselves audiophiles to be into headphones or at least know about them and possibly have a set of headphones that's way more expensive than you or I might have. So I'm curious to know. Is your main listening preference on headphones? Is that because of the environment that you live in or work in, that you want to be able to either keep the noise out or keep the noise in so that you're not disturbing other people while listening.
What do you find in terms of the experience? Headphone listening is very different than the acoustics of loudspeakers playing in a room. One thing that's pretty much removed is that visceral, tactile vibration information, particularly with bass heavy tracks. With subwoofers or full-range speakers, you can feel the music as much as you're hearing it, and most of that disappears when listening on headphones. I personally find that, that actually has a big impact on how immersive music is for me.
Now don't get me wrong. I have a very, very good set of STAX Electrostatic Headphones, and they do some things incredibly well. They do a number of things way better than any pair of loudspeakers I have ever heard and possibly any pair of speakers anywhere on the planet. That's just because of the fact that you've got very, very light diaphragms in most cases. You're dealing with very, very low power so a very good headphone amplifier, low wattage, low distortion, is something that's hard and difficult to build. But it's a different animal than driving hundreds of watts into a pair of loudspeakers.
Now, if you are a headphone and a loudspeaker listener, maybe it's different times of the day or different environments. Maybe you listen on headphones at work and speakers when you're at home or maybe headphones are just for again, late night listening when you don't want to disturb other people. What do you think? If you are into headphones, what headphones do you have? Why do you particularly like them?
One of the reasons that headphones have become interesting to me in the past number of years is the amount of R&D and research that's gone into not just designing the headphones, but figuring out how to measure headphones so that they correlate better with how they're going to sound, how they're going to hear. Some of the most sophisticated advancements in acoustic measurements, at least in the consumer electronics industry, has been taking place in the field of headphone measurement and headphone listening. Loudspeakers haven't changed a heck of a lot in decades, but headphones are experiencing what happened with loudspeaker research back in the 70s and 80s is taking place now to look at what's the best way to measure a pair of headphones. It's a very interesting topic.
Anyway, like I said, I'd just like to know, are you a headphone preference listener, loudspeakers, both? And when, if you're both? When do you tend to listen on headphones rather than your speakers?
Again, as always everyone, thank you for commenting. If you have any questions, I'd love to hear your input. Thank you very much for watching.
