Speakers versus headphones

[fish99]

I'm interested in finding out how close to headphones a decent setup with speakers can get, and what it takes to get such a setup.

Since putting together a hi-fi system, certain things have occurred to me about the advantages of headphones. Firstly, channel seperation. Headphones deliver all the left channel sound to your left ear and all the right channel to your right ear. Speakers mix the sound in the air. The result is that with headphones, I can focus on individual parts of the music if I choose to, and even if I don't, the headphones just present the music with greater spatial seperation between the instruments, and each instrument on it's own retains greater clarity.

Second, distance. The distance between your ears and speakers means that fine detail is lost in the air. As sound waves travel through the air, they inevitably loses conhesion and accuracy. Headphones are obvious a lot closer to your ears. On an equivalent volume level, it's not that the headphones are picking out detail the speakers are missing, but that the speakers can't deliver fine detail through the air, not without going to loud volumes anyway. Another related problem for speakers is that they have to battle with background noise and the sound gets reflected off wall, floors, ceilings, furniture etc.

Are these observations accurate, or is it maybe down to how my speakers are positioned?

My hi-fi system is - Marantz CD-5000, Marantz PM-66SE, Eltax Monitor 3 on Atacama SE24 stands (spiked). I understand this is a rather average setup by hi-fi standards. My speakers are 150 cm apart, 30 cm from the wall behind them, and the left speaker is about 30 cm from a side wall. I listen from about 2 to 2.5 metres.

I'm almost finding that my Sony MP3 walkman with MX500 earphones, are a more pleasurable listenning experience than my hi-fi.

Would I be right in saying that unless you have a room the perfect shape which you can totally dedicate to your hi-fi, then good headphones will perform better? Is it worth me continuing to experiment with speaker positioning, I may be able to work out something better.

Cheers,
Simon.

[pbirkett]

This is a subject I always used to get my teeth into.

Basically, i think in ideal circumstances, speakers will always be preferable to headphones, however, situations are rarely THAT ideal.

Speaking personally: my room sucks for hifi, its too small, it has too much crap in it, at least in terms of traditional speaker positioning. Also I am very much volume limited in how loud I can listen.

I prefer headphones overall - I can listen as loud as I please, and I dont get any unwanted room artifacts. My headphones also deliver more bass than I get from the speakers, although admittedly speakers will always be more visceral. The proximity of phones to the ears makes the sound much more lively too.

Basically my headphone rig sounds very exciting and I wouldnt be without it.

However, I can not make do on headphones alone. They are inconvenient to wear. They are more fatiguing than speakers and are inherently more unnatural to listen to.... sound just does not work like that in reality. Headphones can often be harder to perfectly match up IMO than speakers and there is less choice.

So now for my speaker listening i've turned to nearfield listening. I use a pair of Mordaunt Short MS10i speakers when I am at my PC as an alternative to phones. These are driven a by a Sonic T digital amp, which is small and takes up little room or electric. It only delivers a useful 5w / ch into 8 ohms, however, for nearfield, thats more than enough to deliver 90 + db SPL's at the typical 1m distance I find myself listening at. With nearfield, I pretty much rid myself of all room based interactions and can hear more detail. In fact its like a half way house between headphone listening and speaker listening: I get a proper soundstage and more natural presentation, and much of the detail I hear from headphones also, without the room interactions. The need for high volumes is much less due to the proximity of the speakers to my seating position.

Headphones definitely have their place, and I would never give them up, but I cannot live with them alone.

And to be honest, I feel if I was fortunate enough to have my own home with an acoustically perfect dedicated listening room where I could listen as loud as I liked at any time, then I may just ditch headphones altogether, but frankly, I can just never, ever see that happenning at all.

[alexs2]

I think that both of these posts fit in with much of my feelings about speakers and H/phones as well.

The room can often make speakers perform badly,and there are aspects that speakers will always do better,or simply do things that H/phones cannot accomplish(such as the feel of low bass etc).

I've found using speakers much more enjoyable in our house since getting Room EQ,as it makes a good job of cleaning up all the problems from a very old timber-framed house,but I still use both the H/phone setups I have for other things....

Like pbirkett,it would be wonderful to have a good,dedicated room for listening,when I would probably find little use for H/phones other than portable listening,but as above,that isn't going to happen!

[fish99]

Just wanted to add an example - Radiohead, OK Computer, first track - Airbag, first five second of the song there's an electric guitar riff playing in the left channel and electric piano/keyboard in the right channel. On my speakers I can hardly hear the electric piano at all, it's totally drowned out by the guitar. On headphone, it's clear as anything.

[PaulBoy]

I'm with Paul on this one - furthermore it has been said that a decent headphone setup (of say £500) can sound as good as a audiophile setup (of thousands of pounds) I am never going to afford such a setup with speakers and like Paul live in a place with a small odd shaped living room etc
When I move into my "house in the country" I'll definately have a "stereo" room (as well as my "AV room" of course )
Paul

[NicolasB]

fish99, most of the things you're listing as advantages for headphones there are actually disadvantages. Think about how a stereo recording might actually be made (and let's choose recording a classical orchestra as a particularly clear-cut example). You've got the orchestra playing. You set up a couple of microphones, perhaps 7 or 8 feet apart, well back from the orchestra, and perhaps 8 or 9 feet from someone sitting in the front row. The microphones record the sound passing through them. If you then remove the microphones and place loudspeakers where the microphones were, then play the recording back through them, you are reproducing at those two points in the air the same sounds that were at those points in the air during the recording process. Someone sitting between the speakers in the front row of the audience will thus hear a very good approximation of what he would have heard during the live performance.

You will note that the sound passing through the places where the microphones are during recording does not have perfect channel separation, and it does get "mixed up" in the air, etc. etc. - so, if your goal is to reproduce the original sound of the orchestra as faithfully as possible, removing those factors will make the recording sound less realistic, not more. If you take the sound that, during the performance, was passing through two points about 8 feet apart and about 8 feet from the audience, and reproduce that right next to the listener's ears, it doesn't sound real at all.

I'm actually a big fan of headphones, but it's important to understand what they can and can't do. Most recordings are intended to be listened to on speakers, and, other things being equal, headphones will not reproduce them faithfully. What particularly suffers is what's called the "soundstage" - the ability to recreate the original space of the recording, to be able to tell where the first violins are sitting relative to the second violins, etc. With headphones, all of the sound comes from right next to your head - it can even feel as if the sound is inside your head. This doesn't make for an authentic listening experience.

Another problem is that not all of the experience of hearing happens as a result of sound hitting the ears. A significant amount of sound from speakers (or a live orchestra) is transmitted to the inner ear through bone: it hits the outside of your head, and the skull transmits the vibrations. Headphones can't reproduce that, and this also limits soundstaging and authenticity.

However, it's by no means all bad. First, as has already been pointed out, if you're listening to a recording with speakers, you're sitting in your own room rather than in the auditorium where the recording was made. The acoustic properties of the listening room can mess up the sound in all kinds of ways: the sound from the right speaker can reflect off the left wall, for example, and hit your left ear, thus also messing up the soundstage; or the room may have resonant standing waves which amplify certain frequencies at certain points in the room, while making the same frequencies quieter in other places; or the sound may echo around the room for longer than it did at the original recording; there are lots of possiblities. Headphones eliminate the influence of the room, which is a good thing.

Secondly, a pair of headphones will typically do a far better job of actually reproducing the recorded signal without noise or interference or distortion than speakers at the same price level. My Sennheiser HD650s, for example, are rated all the way down to 10Hz: that's deeper than most dedicated subwoofers will go, and far deeper than most so-called "full-range" speakers are capable of. If you're listening to a recording of (say) a large pipe-organ, one that has a 32-foot stop, there will be a lot of stuff going on in the 16-31Hz range, which most loudspeakers simply ignore completely. A good pair of headphones will let you feel your skull vibrating. And it's not just frequency range: the levels of distortion will be far lower in headphones than they are in speakers at the same price-level.

There are, of course, a few recordings around that are specifically designed to be listened to with headphones. These are called "binaural recordings" and they are made by constructing a model head and then putting the microphones in its ears. Listening to a recording like this over headphones can be quite stunning, but there very few such recordings around, so, sadly, it's just a curiosity for practical purposes. It's sad, as there are things you can do in a binaural recording that are impossible to do with speakers; most notably, you can authentically reproduce a sound that is closer to the listener than the speakers are (such as someone whispering directly in his ear).

You can get a similar, albeit less convincing, effect by using a system like Dolby Headphone. What this does is to simulate a person sitting in a room and listening to the recording on speakers: it works out a reasonable mathematical approximation to what the sound would be at his ears, and then plays that through headphones. The result is a long way short of listening to real speakers (in terms of soundstaging) but still a significant improvement over plain headphones.

So, all in all, it's a matter of personal preference and cost. I remember once auditioning a Denon A1SR home cinema amp. I had the chance to compare its Dolby Headphone output on a £200 pair of headphones (Sennheiser HD600) with its speaker output on £4000 worth of speakers and sub, and, on the basis of that audition, I would choose the headphones every time without any hesitation at all - it wasn't just better value, it was better, full stop.

But that's me: I'm excruciatingly sensitive to distortion and I can't tolerate the kind of harshness that substandard speakers tend to introduce into a movie soundtrack. If you're the kind of person who cares more about soundstaging than he does about distortion, you'll prefer the speakers. And that, of course, is with Dolby Headphone - simple stereo listening may be less clearcut. But it's still going to come down to personal preference.

[Reano]

I do have a dedicated listening/cinema room, with all the mumbo jumbo e.g. seperate mains ring, bass traps, blah, blah and I do agree with Nicholusb. For detail you have to go with headphones but for just sheer pleasure (I will not describe that) it's the speakers. If your CDRom and senn mx500 beat your speaker set up then it is very poor What budget do you have and how much would you get if you sold your current speaker set up. The Marantz are a good CD Player You could then look at improving your speaker setup.

[fish99]

Thanks very much for the replies Fascinating stuff.

I do take the point about an orchestral recording, but I mostly listen to bands and they're recorded very differently, although the band play together, the instruments are recorded seperately and then mixed. I know the channel seperation you get with headphone is a little artificial, but it does have the advantage of letting you pick out sections of the music that are lost with speakers. It's less natural, but it does let you hear more of the music, and personally I find it exciting to hear something in a familiar piece of music that I've never heard before. I know it's not necessarily what the band intended though.

I think I'm gonna have to try rearranging my room again. I'm sure there's a way to get my speakers the recommended 2m apart and further away from walls. I need to hear what they're capable of.

[fish99]

Originally Posted by Reano

I do have a dedicated listening/cinema room, with all the mumbo jumbo e.g. seperate mains ring, bass traps, blah, blah and I do agree with Nicholusb. For detail you have to go with headphones but for just sheer pleasure (I will not describe that) it's the speakers. If your CDRom and senn mx500 beat your speaker set up then it is very poor What budget do you have and how much would you get if you sold your current speaker set up. The Marantz are a good CD Player You could then look at improving your speaker setup.

It's not that the Sony Walkman/MX500 sound better than my speakers, they don't, but that I miss the detail the headphones pick out and the directness of the headphone sound. I also have some Grado SR80s btw, and they pick out even more detail, but I don't use them since I've really gone off the Grado sound recently.

I don't really have any money to think about upgrading anything at the moment, but I'm planning to get some HD650s and a headphone amp in the future, and possibly upgrade my average Marantz CD for something like a Marantz CD63MKII KI, then maybe look at speaker options. All stuff for the distant future though, at least a few months.

[Reano]

The 63 ki signature class.....

[NicolasB]

Originally Posted by Reano

If your CDRom and senn mx500 beat your speaker set up then it is very poor

Well, it's all about budget, isn't it? My Sennheiser HD650 'phones, plus Graham Slee headphone amp sound pretty good. The total cost of buying that lot new would be about £600. If you had only £600 to spend on a pair of stereo speakers and an integrated amplifier, you would not get anywhere close to that level of detail, or to that absence of noise or distortion.

In terms of detail, transparency, neutrality, lack of distortion, etc. it's not unusual for a headphone system to be comparable to speaker/amp system costing ten times as much.

My hi fi is much much better than my headphones.

My phone are HD650 with an E-Mu 1820 soundcard.

My hi fi is PMC FB1+ speakers with Cyrus MonoX preamp and poweramp.

The hi fi cost litterally about 10x more than my headphones. They sound much much much better, left to right pans sound more realistic. The music is more alive and detailed. However, spending that much money I would of been massivly dissapointed if it had not.

My phone setup sounds great, really good, but for quality I would choose my hifi over it any day.

Given the choice, I'd have headphones over speakers any day. My preference is for the intimacy that cans give you, which just isn't quite the same through speakers. That feeling of the sound somehow 'belonging' to you - especially when you're travelling and enjoying the scenery while listening to something beautiful - is just beyond compare.

The downside to cans is, of course, the inevitable listening fatigue and the 'complaining' ear flesh (particularly if you've had phones on for a few hours, which I often do). But overall, it's the better experience of the two for me, and I never pass judgement on music till I've heard it through phones a couple of times at least.

[pbirkett]

Originally Posted by shadowritten

the 'complaining' ear flesh

You should try some Beyers, this is a thing of the past with those.

Originally Posted by pbirkett

You should try some Beyers, this is a thing of the past with those.

Sorry, I meant with supra-aural. Think my ears might be on the larger side!