It’s not a matter of quality, but consistency of volume. When listening with high background noise, or with music played at low volume as background music, the quiet passages may drop below the ambient noise level when the peaks are at the desired level.
I hear you. The reality is that an overwhelming majority of people will never sit down in the optimum position in front of a stereo system specifically to listen to music. It was always a rare occurrence, even more so today.Thanks. It sucks that if you want to listen to the same tracks in your living/listening room, then the next day in your car, you're listening to DR optimized for the car, in your living room. Great.
On the other hand, the quality of headphone replay has never been better, there's more good headphone gear on the market now than ever before. From the standpoint of "optimum position" headphones offer an "optimal" position, though some prefer loudspeakers. I've always preferred open backed headphones in a quiet room. Right now I've got the best headphone gear I've owned so far. And I listen to recordings from all eras. Even pre-Dolby classical recordings have plenty of compression in the form of gain-riding. If one listens to recordings from the last century, one finds that most recordings deploy compression in one form or another. In order for a recording to be workable in a domestic environment some compression must be involved.
Really excellent article.
The same holds true for quality headphones though. I don’t personally know a single person who owns high end headphones. I have lots of musician friends and those that do own headphones only go as far as low end studio monitors such as the M50X. They mostly think I’m nuts for spending what I’ve spent on headphones. The fact that Sennheiser is trying to get out of the consumer headphone business says a lot, I think. Our little audiophile world is minuscule when compared to the mainstream, regardless of whether we’re talking headphones or stereo systems.
Used to have Stax earspeakers with the tubed energizer/amplifier. The Drop 6XX 'phones [with the Topping E/L 30 combo] overall sounds better, smoother on top, much better bass. Yes our world is small, but it's still evolving and still making audible improvements. It's no more of a lost cause now than it has ever been, the issue has been the same: Sturgeon's law will always apply.
I totally agree. The point I was trying to make (not very successfully) is simply that producers need to cater to their primary audience, and in other than niche markets, that’s going to be people listening in ways that are not congruent with audiophiles priorities.
Apple earbuds are about as bad as the earbuds I used in the mid-sixties with my Viscount pocket portable AM. I've been around folks playing music via their smartphone's speakers, sounded just as bad as the speaker on my Viscount.
Indeed this has been going on since the beginning of recorded music, FM radio had it's own compression wars between stations in the 70s, and translation has been targeting cars and kitchen radios since someone came up with the idea of translation.
The good news is that Apple AirPod Pros and the new AirPod Max headphones are pretty good when EQ’d, either through the usual software solutions or even the built-in iOS “Headphone Accommodations”.
