Purchase Advice
Purchase Advice
Hey all,
I'm looking for a decent pair of headphones around $100ish US. I would like the following:
- Wired
- A mic or a slot to put one
- Some kind of spatial audio
- Comfortable to wear for long periods
- All features available without the use of proprietary software
The headphones will be driven by a desktop computer and used for communication, gaming, and listening to music. Can anyone here recommend something?
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What do you mean with spatial audio? Most of the time it's done by software simulation of HRTF, which means that you can do this on any headphones. Windows for example has a Dolby plugin that you can purchase. However, most games and songs are already mixed with "spatial audio" baked in, so you'd only be applying double spatialization to the audio.
I guess I just meant something a little more precise than just left and right for directions you can hear audio from. I didn't realize this was more of a software thing. I don't know a whole lot about audio tech.
Spatial audio is a confusing topic because of years of marketing. In the real world, directional audio works through the shape of your ear. When sound comes from a direction that's not directly inside your ear, it gets modified by the skin and bone, through frequencies being boosted and suppressed but also some reverb. This modification is different for different directions, and your brain can pick up these cues. Software can try to simulate this for headphones, by applying this processing in software, as long as you can "guess" the shape of someone's ear and then run a simulation of how sound interacts with it. There's some clever tricks for how to do this very quickly without having to execute physics code.
And logically this makes sense, there's only one measurement place in each ear, why would you need more than one sound stream going into each ear?
So looking for good "spatial audio" headphones is in my opinion a scam. You're better off just buying the best audio quality headphones you can without really paying attention to spatial audio.
Terms you might hear online are soundstage (how well you can separate instruments) and imaging (how well software/recorded positional cues are reenacted by the headphones). These two are acoustic qualities that might be important to you.
Thank you for the write up! It was very informative.
I hope I'm not imposing, but you seem knowledgeable. Could you recommend a resource for a beginner to learn about audio technology? I'm thinking of upgrading from my old PC speakers to a proper surround setup for my home and want to know what to look for in a quality product.
Sure! I love Oratory1990 and Crinacle's explanations of concepts. Most of what I know, I know from reading Oratory's Reddit threads (yeah sorry, swear word for Lemmy users lol) and watching Crinacle's videos. They focus mostly on IEMs and headphones though.
For speakers, I can't help you much, as I also still need to look into that. The same concepts of frequency response and distortion will apply, but you also have to worry about crossover and phase. Plus, I've heard acoustic treatment and measurement of your room is very important too. All things that you can ignore with headphones/IEMs but that become important for speakers...
I also learned a lot from reading people arguing in /r/headphones, but since I left Reddit entirely as a protest it's hypocritical to now recommend it as a good source of discussion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯