[Bill Graham]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
William Sommerwerck wrote:
Why must it be so complicated, Charlie Brown?
Because human hearing is complicated.

And is probably the reason why "critical" listening should
be done over a good set of loudspeakers instead.

It depends on what you're listening for.

Though one would expect a pair of really good electrostatic
headphones to be superior to any speaker, this is not necessarily
true. WHY, I don't know.

Why?

Because recordings that are miked and mixed for stereo are done so
with the intention of playing them back in a room with speakers. So
there are room effects and crosstalk (well, crosstalk is a horribly
oversimplified way of thinking about it) created, rather than each
channel directly going into individual ears.

If you could simulate those effects (and there are devices out there
like the Sennheiser Lucas and its successors which do some of that),
then you would be able to get more realistic playback of stereo
recordings through headphones.

Most of the time when we use headphones in the studio, though, it is
precisely to get that unnatural, focussed, room-free sound.
--scott

When you hear real sounds, you hear some of the same material (with a slight
phase difference) in both ears. Headphones feed each ear different program
material, so the effect is artificial in some respects, part of the time,
and very artificial some of the time. Your brain senses this and tells you
about it.....