[Frank Stearns]

(Scott Dorsey) writes:

William Sommerwerck wrote:
Unless I'm mistaken, the pinnae are considered to have a meaningful
effect on the "energy balance" of the sounds entering the canal.

They do, but it's not the most significant effect that causes the
headphone response to differ from the standard ear.

It is measurable, though. And when the headphone alters the
shape of the earlobe that causes measurable response changes too.

No argument. So why do we generally agree on the relative quality of
headphones?

I'm not sure that people overall really do. There are a lot of people with
very strong opposing views about headphones.

This thread has been fascinating, and surprising.

I am startled by those who've indicated that imaging is poor to non-existent on
phones.

Some of the studios I worked in decades ago had poor room treatment and speaker
imaging was terrible. Hit the mono switch for the monitors and not much really
changed. Yikes! This when you should have gotten an pencil-thin vertical line of
sound or spot of sound between the speakers that didn't seem to be part of the
speakers.

(The mono switch is your best pal for getting a sense of whether you'll be able to
get image cues from your monitor system.)

Now (and back then), in phones, I always got that perfect verticle sliver of sound
in mono. Pop back to stereo and I was able to do very fine resolution placement of
sound sources (pan-potted pop music stuff).

The results generally sounded pretty good, so much so that I even once had a member
of the general public track me down and write asking how I'd gotten such an amazing
"sound picture" with a group he knew that I'd recorded.

I eventually figured out he was talking about the pan scheme I'd used; in that mix
phones had allowed me to find a nice L/R location for everything, and that task
would have been impossible on the monitors of the day.

It was this rather than plain old thoughtless left, center, right. (This was 1970-75
or so; pan pots were relatively new, as most consoles of the previous generation
only had L-C-R placement options via switches.)

So let's see a show of hands: how many folks find headphone imaging "incorrect" or
non-existent?

And if so, I wonder why this is the case. With some people, are their two ears
different enough from each other in their response characteristics that bringing in
room sound (speakers in a modestly reverberant space) helps their brains do a
cross-correction/matching thing for their hearing? And in phones, with no "room
reverb assist", perhaps their cueing doesn't work optimally?

What do you hear with a mono source equally driving both the L and R elements of
your phones? A sound blob left and a sound blob right? Something vaguely in the
middle? Razor sharp in the middle? Just a big puddle?

(we're assuming reasonably well-matched drivers in the phones and upstream signal
path as well.)

Yours in Curiousity

Frank
Mobile Audio
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