Headphone enthusiast thread! - Page 74

On May 26 2011 16:40 uriel- wrote:


The RE0 are $79. They were also my first ever "good" IEMs, and believe me I could appreciate the clarity. I have also introduced them to a decent number of friends as an entry drug into portable audio, and all have been appreciative of the RE0's strengths.

I do agree that the RE0 has a sound signature that is definitely not for everyone, that the thin-bodied bass will be an issue with most mainstream listeners and that there are other entry-level IEMs such as those from MEElec that are likely to hit home with many people. MEElec is of course an excellent budget brand. What I cannot agree with is how you assume anyone who hasn't had a listen to hi-fi in their lives will be completely unable to appreciate good sound, or that everyone who listens to music and aren't self-declared audiophiles are bass-heads. "People can't tell the difference", "people like their bass", well excuse me Sir.

Perhaps I will do to rephrase my previous claim to avoid your ire? IN MY OPINION the RE0s cannot be beat in their price range (which is decidedly not "$200") unless you absolutely need large bass quantity. For what it's worth, after sufficient burn in and after a tip-swap to Shure Olives I found the bass completely sufficient for my needs, and with a cheap amp like the FiiO E5 or with some EQing it's perfectly possible to enjoy a bass quantity that will satisfy most apart from hardcore bass-heads/those who listen exclusively to very bass-heavy genres.

On May 27 2011 04:47 Deadeight wrote:
For ages now I've been using an old pair of Sony MDR-NC50 which I got ridiculously cheap, as they were factory refit and had horrible reviews (way over-priced for what they were).

I'm starting a summer job soon and looking to get some new headphones, for about £100-£150 ($150-£250). I don't need a mic, don't want in-ear, don't want noise-cancelling again. I don't mind if they're big but they need to be comfortable. I listen to some electronic stuff, a lot of stuff like The Mars Volta. I'll use it for gaming too but the sound quality for music is more important to me.


Can anyone recommend me a decent set of headphones please? Or point me in the right direction of where to look? Thanks in advance for any reply.

On May 27 2011 05:37 Dakure wrote:
Edit: Oh, can someone recommend any good open headphones $100-150? $150-200?

On May 14 2011 14:55 Myrmidon wrote:


For headphones, an amp often times does amplify the input signal, but the primary purpose of the amp is to replicate the input signal as closely as possible (except that the output may be doubled or whatever--I'm talking about following the shape). That's difficult in practice because of the high current requirements. That's why you need a dedicated device or output stage of a device for exactly that purpose. Different amps will distort in different ways and by different amounts with different loads and different voltage levels. There are a lot of factors involved! An amp may perform well in some regards and more poorly in others. Amps that manage to follow the input very closely under many different situations will be better.

This is why a good amp can sound better than a bad amp even when both are outputting the same volume. It's not just about increasing the volume, but providing a cleaner output (that more closely matches the input).

A lossless audio format like FLAC decodes exactly (no loss) into the source material from which it was encoded. i.e. it's lossless versus the CD. The CD has finite sampling rate (44.1 kHz) and bit depth (16 bits), so that's a digitized and thus lossy representation of whatever the studio master was. Granted, nobody can actually hear the difference between a normal audio CD and the studio master, so that's hardly important. And you may say the signal the microphone picks up in the studio is lossy (noisy) compared to the real thing, but that's a discussion for another day.

To claim that the difference between a relatively cheap DAC and a high-end external DAC is like SD versus 1080p is a gross exaggeration. Also, SD versus 1080p represents how much data there is, not the implementation of how that data is decoded. That's a different domain.

On May 27 2011 05:23 ieatkids5 wrote:

My apologies if I came off as offensive. Just trying to help people out.

i'm not an elitist audiophile. I'm saying people can't tell the difference and that people like their bass because that's how i am and that's how most people are. i don't like the RE0. i like bass. and i can't tell the difference between a westone 3 and an entry level IEM. and most people i know share the same thoughts, so why would it make sense to get something they probably wont like?

another misunderstanding, i should've clarified, the $200 example was directed at people buying extremely expensive headphones when they don't know what they want, it's just a waste of money. wasn't directed at you.

On May 27 2011 09:37 Deadeight wrote:


@hellsan631
@Myrmidon
(@anyone with an answer actually...)


You say FLAC is a lossless format, does it record the wave equation precisely? Or is it more of a case that it samples so frequently that the human ear could never tell the difference between the sampled wave and reproduced wave? I was under the impression that analog to digital was done by just sampling the amplitude at given time intervals, so for any finitely sized time interval there will be loss.

Because if it stores it as a wave equation (or superposition of lots of waves at any given time) that would be so unbelievably cool. I guess you then get loss from when measuring it but that kind of ruins it so not going to consider that.

On May 19 2011 04:25 JitnikoVi wrote:
i hear beats by dre are the best headphones there are

On May 27 2011 11:17 Myrmidon wrote:


FLAC is a lossless format in that it provides a digital representation that can be uncompressed (in real time as you listen or whenever) into digital audio data in PCM format that exactly represents the original source data. If you have a normal 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo audio stream from a CD (or anything else), you can compress it into FLAC. When you uncompress it, you get the exact same data back. This is opposed to lossy compression, where what you get back is something close to the original, but isn't quite the original.

You're talking about the sampling and reproduction of the original sound wave. FLAC and other audio codecs operate on the already sampled and digitized data.

However, yes, it's true that if you sample at a rate of twice the frequency of something you want to observe (say: twice of 20000 Hz or pretty much the range of human hearing), then you can theoretically have a perfect representation of all frequencies at up to that frequency. See the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. By sampling at finite-duration time intervals, you're losing information, but you're losing information here that's above the audio frequency range. Everything in the audio frequency range is captured even if you sample at 44.1 kHz, which may not be an intuitive concept.

As for why this works, it helps to have some background in Fourier analysis. Note that practical considerations prevent a perfect reconstruction from being possible, though you can get close. For audio, it's close enough, with good implementations. 44.1 kHz gives enough of a buffer for practical implementations that people have never been able to distinguish proper implementations with 44.1 kHz sampling rate from something higher like 96 kHz--at least in any credible studies I've heard of.

Most audio codecs store information in the frequency domain rather than time domain samples, but I'm not very familiar with any of the implementations. They tend to be pretty dense. Check the Vorbis spec, as an example of a modern lossy audio codec:

http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/Vorbis_I_spec.html

edit: please correct me if there's something wrong or provide a simpler explanation. I need to hit the books some more. I wish that DSP class I've been looking at was being offered next semester, but it's not.

On May 27 2011 10:53 kainzero wrote:
hello.

i keep breaking headphones. lately my yuin pk2s wires detached from the drivers and the grado sr80s that i had had a wire problem and the left can kept crapping out. i bought a soldering iron but i'm terrible at it so in the meantime i want to buy new headphones.

i got some koss portapros to tide me over at work, but i kinda want something in the $100-$200 range. since i should hopefully be able to repair my Grados, what are some good headphones in that range that don't sound like the grados?

i also have a cmoy amp and my main sources are either my computer or my ipod. should i upgrade those too?

On May 27 2011 06:49 Myrmidon wrote:

AKG K601, Sennheiser HD 595/558, I think. Senn HD 598 and Audio-Technica ATH-AD900 may sometimes be under $200. Senn HD 555 / Audio-Technica ATH-AD700 are usually under $100.

On May 28 2011 03:41 JSH wrote:
I would cry if my PK2s died

as for recommendations, Myrmidon gave a few earlier

The open-back Audio-Technica ATH-AD900 is amongst the lightest headphones in its class which means unequaled long-term wearing comfort even during extra-long listening sessions. The AD900 sound quality is also stellar with an airy acoustic presence and fully detailed tonal smoothness that's sonically engaging and musically accurate with any genre. Wonderfully galvanizing with complex or densely powerful recordings.

On May 28 2011 10:09 SixGun wrote:
so what is the opinion of TL on Bose products?

specifically, the IE2's. Cause I bought some, haven't opened them in case I wanted to take them back,I wanted to consult you guys. I tried a pair of them from a friend who does DCI so he'll be in a charter bus everyday for 3 months pretty much, and he liked them cause of their comfort and sound isolation. I thought they were super comfy, sound quality was alright though. And I couldn't really tell about isolation cause I was in a soundproof room anyways.

So for $75, should I keep them or look for something else? (I'm looking for comfort, isolation, and quality haha)

On May 28 2011 11:04 decafchicken wrote:
My klipsch image s4 earbuds are starting to die on me, cable is clearly getting loose near 3.5mm jack (right speaker goes in/out as i move the cable around). I've had em less then a year, can i send them in or something to get them fixed or am i shit out of luck and should start looking for a new pair?