digitalfrost
Major Contributor
When I was young, I spend hours in the living room while my parents were watching TV, listening to music on headphones. They were either closed or half-open, whatever it was, sound didn't leak out enough to case a nuisance. From that age, I remember that headphones were somehow more detailed, more in depth with the music than speakers.
I have a good hifi system. ER18DXT or KEF LS50 speakers, Benchmark AHB2 amp, Topping D50 DACs, corrected with DRC-FIR. I know what I'm doing. I use NAD HP50 headphones in the office, I bought them when they came out and they were 270€. For a closed-back headphone it was the only one that didn't give me that 'can' sound. That said, it's not really better than the hifi I have at home.
I never cared for headphones. Why would you use them unless you had to.
Recently, I bought a Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro for home use. It's an open-back headphone. It has a big bass boost and rising highs. Bascially a smiley face curve. I corrected it with AutoEQ to pretty much the same frequency response as my HiFi system. I feed it from a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 1st gen I have lying around. The thing is. I hear so much more details with the headphones.
I don't have the stage, and the 3D effect of the speakers - and this was something that has always been very important to me - but I can hear so much more detail. My hifi can come closer if I turn up the volume really high. I put my SPL meter into the headphones, and it read 70dBC. I'm not sure if that's a valid way to measure headphones loudness, however I feel I have use _much_ higher volume with speakers to get same amount of detail, and even then it can't reach the phones.
Now, this is funny to me. I have very good speakers, excellent DACs, excellent amps, I have everything corrected via DRC, and somehow this cheap 115€ headphone that I run from from an equally cheap interface destroys my whole hifi setup that easily cost 10x as much.
What is going on here?
More importanty: Can I have this amount of detail from speakers? If yes, what do I need to do? Is it just more expensive speakers or rather room acoustics? Or is this just reality? - I mean, you have room noisefloor at least at 30-40dB that you have to overcome with speakers, with headphones, probably not as much. Maybe that's just how it is.
However, given the extreme price discrepancy I wonder why headphones are not more often recommended then. I'm just blown away by the performance for this little money invested.
Since I was a child, this is the first time I have headphones that are better than my speakers.
I have a good hifi system. ER18DXT or KEF LS50 speakers, Benchmark AHB2 amp, Topping D50 DACs, corrected with DRC-FIR. I know what I'm doing. I use NAD HP50 headphones in the office, I bought them when they came out and they were 270€. For a closed-back headphone it was the only one that didn't give me that 'can' sound. That said, it's not really better than the hifi I have at home.
I never cared for headphones. Why would you use them unless you had to.
Recently, I bought a Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro for home use. It's an open-back headphone. It has a big bass boost and rising highs. Bascially a smiley face curve. I corrected it with AutoEQ to pretty much the same frequency response as my HiFi system. I feed it from a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 1st gen I have lying around. The thing is. I hear so much more details with the headphones.
I don't have the stage, and the 3D effect of the speakers - and this was something that has always been very important to me - but I can hear so much more detail. My hifi can come closer if I turn up the volume really high. I put my SPL meter into the headphones, and it read 70dBC. I'm not sure if that's a valid way to measure headphones loudness, however I feel I have use _much_ higher volume with speakers to get same amount of detail, and even then it can't reach the phones.
Now, this is funny to me. I have very good speakers, excellent DACs, excellent amps, I have everything corrected via DRC, and somehow this cheap 115€ headphone that I run from from an equally cheap interface destroys my whole hifi setup that easily cost 10x as much.
What is going on here?
More importanty: Can I have this amount of detail from speakers? If yes, what do I need to do? Is it just more expensive speakers or rather room acoustics? Or is this just reality? - I mean, you have room noisefloor at least at 30-40dB that you have to overcome with speakers, with headphones, probably not as much. Maybe that's just how it is.
However, given the extreme price discrepancy I wonder why headphones are not more often recommended then. I'm just blown away by the performance for this little money invested.
Since I was a child, this is the first time I have headphones that are better than my speakers.
Last edited: