• @ChicoSuaveEnglish
    6•8 months ago

    Soundstage is a very real, easily verified things that can be heard in a headphone. A regular cone driver versus planar magnetics will show how wildly different soundstage can be. It’s hard to be specific because I’m not an audiophile and don’t claim to be one but I did get a pair of planar magnetic headphones from a sale long ago and it changed my entire appreciation for listening.

    Music that’s played in a studio sounds way different from music played on a laptop. You can hear where in the room the instruments are in relation to one another. A laptop puts all the sounds on the same level, there is no depth to the tones and it sounds flat, as it everyone is sitting on the edge of the stage and playing at the same distance from the same spot. It’s artificial and makes some genres hard to listen to because there is so much variation between artists and songs. Studio songs feel more expensive and big.

    Headphones that cost more than 300 are not adding anything appreciable but the jump from 50 to 150 is enormous.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️English
      9•8 months ago

      I should clarify that I’m not saying there’s no such thing as a distinction between good and crap audio gear.

      But it bears repeating, perpetually, that once the threshold of 100% aural reproduction accuracy in regards to the limitations of human hearing is reached, there is nothing to be gained from further throwing money at it. In this field good enough is, in fact, good enough. This is why audiophile scammers have to resort to making up imaginary problems to allegedly cure, using silly inapplicable words like “quantum,” or “non-Hertzian frequencies,” or whatever. A pair of hypothetical headphones that output totally separated audio, one channel to each ear, reproduced with full range output between 20 and 20,000 Hz without gaps and a flat EQ is literally, mathematically, provably, physically perfect.

      We’re much better at deluding ourselves into thinking we’ve gotten some kind of nebulous positive result proportional to the amount we’ve spent, attempting to justify it to ourselves, than we are at detecting actual differences in audio reproduction. And, what different people think sounds “better” is indeed subjective – famously so. One listener might prefer a set of speakers or headphones or amp that sounds one way or another, more bass, more treble, whatever. But the fact of it is that once you have removed any imperfections between the production of the original sound and its playback reaching your ear, what you’re doing to those tune preferences is in fact deliberately adding purposefully tuned imperfections, which is exactly the kind of thing that audiophiles insist they’re trying to abolish. (And to be fair, the notion of a “perfect” audio recording is probably pretty close to unachievable in reality.)

      As long as you accept that’s what’s happening, that’s fine. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a big-assed subwoofer in my car.