When I turned in last month’s column, “What Playing Music Taught Me About Audio,” SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider replied, “I like it. But from reading the headline, I thought it was going to be about what you learned from recording your new album.” Fair enough—because actually recording, mixing, and releasing my first serious attempt at an album taught me a lot about audio and music, even after being deeply involved in both for decades.
Read more: The Four Things that Recording an Album Taught Me About Audio
When someone on Facebook recently commented, “Compressed audio sounds horrific, and even uncompressed 16/44.1 isn’t great,” I felt terrible. I knew he came to these conclusions not through any sort of careful, unbiased testing, but because the audio industry—manufacturers, press, dealers—has told him he shouldn’t like compressed audio, and that 16-bit/44.1kHz audio is, after decades of enthusiastic acceptance by billions of users, now unacceptable.
In past editions of this series, I’ve interviewed professionals from Dan Clark Audio, PSB, Focal, and HiFiMan to learn their philosophies about voicing headphones. In those articles, the focus was on headphones rather than earphones, simply because earphones are at most a sideline for those companies. This month, we’re focusing on companies that specialize in earphones—which may seem similar to headphones, but in actuality, are radically different from an acoustical standpoint.
Read more: Voicing Headphones, Part 3: Campfire Audio's Ken Ball and 64 Audio’s Vitaliy Belonozhko
In the latest round of debate about MQA, I was dismayed to see the company once again tout its endorsements from mastering engineers. This is an “appeal to authority,” a common logical fallacy. It’s often seen in ads for audio products—the advertiser uses the endorsement of an authority figure (such as a musician or recording engineer) to supplement or substitute for marketing claims based on demonstrable features and benefits. Appeals to authority are even more common in promotions for things like books, movies, and countless consumer products.
Read more: The #1 Red Flag in Audio Articles, Ads . . . and Everything Else
Headphones and smartphones have brought good sound to more people than high-end audio could ever reach. (Also, depending on the headphones, bad sound to more people than high-end audio could ever reach.) But headphones are also exposing billions of ears to sound—often very loud sound—for many hours a day. “Average people are now exposed to as much loud sound in the course of a day as audio engineers have been,” Jodi Sasaki-Miraglia, doctor of audiology and director of education and training for hearing-aid company Widex USA, told me.
A longtime audio-industry friend of mine, whose job straddles the consumer and pro audio realms, called me up a couple of days ago to thank me for my review of the HiFiMan HE400se open-back headphones. After seeing the review on Facebook, he bought a set out of sheer curiosity—they’re only $149 USD—and he actually considered my rave review something of an understatement. “I have headphones that are close to $2000 that don’t sound anywhere near as good as these,” he raved.
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