By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1989, The Syracuse Newspapers
My son taught me the importance of headphones one night about
13 years ago, when he was 9 years old.
I was listening to a tape recording I had made. The music was
sweet, the sound was true and my son was in tears as I turned
to see him slumped at the top of the stairs.
"It's too loud, dad! I can't sleep!"
It was 2:45 in the morning-an ideal time for recreation, considering
the hours I worked. But that was not the kind of argument that
a father makes to a son who is losing sleep, and so I invested
in a pair of good headphones.
They've served me well in the intervening years and my son grew
up sleeping soundly each night.
At first I missed the sense of sound in the room when I enjoyed
my music at those odd hours in the morning. But after a while
I began to appreciate the virtues of private listening, too. The
sound was a lot better in some ways.
For one thing, I didn't have to put up with the boxy echoes that
always made the music sound artificial in my living room. The
room was the wrong shape for sound: it was practically square.
Sound waves b-bounced l-like t-this a-all t-the t-time. It had
been driving me c-crazy.
For another, I discovered what J.S. Bach and Virgil Fox knew all
along—that nothing sounds as sexy as a pipe organ. This revelation
might not have come to me if I hadn't drained a half-year's petty
cash on the best headphones I could find.
They were big and heavy and almost unforgivable uncomfortable.
But they made up for everything by the way they coaxed the big
pipes of my favorite organs to life inside my head.
Those headphones were electrostatic models. They had thin metal
plates that vibrated straight out and straight back. Most headphones
of that day had little loudspeakers inside the earcup that had
paper or plastic cones that vibrated, and these cones stretched
out in an uneven motion and then pulled back in. The straight-out-and-back
motion of the metal plates kept the sound clear and pure.
Metal was soon replaced by a special kind of plastic in the fanciest
headphones and the electrostatic design has pretty much given
way to a simpler magnetic system. That's the way my current headphones
work and the sound is even better than what I heard from the monster
electrostatics of 13 years ago.
Best of all, my headphones are so comfortable that I can wear
them for an entire evening without feeling like I had been starring
in a Visegrip commercial.
But I began to wonder if it was time for a newer model so I checked
out a half-dozen contenders at local hi-fi shops. (Unlike loudspeaker
auditioning, in which you must hear them in your own listening
room to know how they really sound, headphone trials can take
place in any quiet room. So feel free to take your favorite CDs
to an audio store and compare all you want.)
None of the headphones I listened to sounded more accurate than
my own headphones, which are made by Yamaha. But there were a
few that seemed to sound better, mostly because they had more
punch to the mid-range and higher frequencies.
How can it be that one device can be more accurate while another
can sound better? "Accurate," in this case, means honesty in
playback. An accurate loudspeaker or headphone won't emphasize
one sound over another.
But in this age of fast food and quick desires, accuracy can be
dull.
Engineers who mix rock albums already know that and they usually
add a punchy mid-range even before it gets to your amplifier.
So the punch—whether it's added before or after—can often add
some life to the sound. That's not bad, but it's not necessarily
good, either.
Take the case of a chef, for example. If the chef added pepper
to everything, the food would taste pretty tangy—all the time.
You'd get tired of it fast. (And you'd get a new chef, too.)
And of course you'd hardly think the food tasted natural.
But back to headphones. You'll probably be a lot happier with
an accurate-sounding model than one that's been spiced up. Unless
the engineer's twiddling has been nixed in the mix, you'll end
up with a double boost-once at the studio and once alongside your
head.
You can get tired of that pretty fast.
technofile:
[Articles]
[Home page] [Comments: afasoldt@dreamscape.com]