When working in a lab or open office environment one gets used to the idea of listening to music with headphones. Anyone walking around with an ipod or other portable audio player also knows the charms of auditioning music in our own little worlds. But there's something else that can happen with headphones, especially if one enjoys music: one can get closer to an audiophile experience.
By audiophile experience i mean the audio experience one has when listening to awesome loudspeakers powered by awesomely clear amps in a space that can show them off (a colleague of mine in Music said that one of the best investments people could make in their stereo system is double glazing).
No but really, what *is* an audiophile experience? It's hard to describe unless you've experienced it. Or actually lots of people spend lots of cycles describing audiophile experiences (it is an industry afterall), but words like soundstage, air, black backgrounds, noise floor, etc etc mean little without some audio point of reference for them.
I had what i would call my first near-audiophile experience a few months back. I went into my favorite audio shop, Phase3 HiFi where i'd been getting stuff like rca connectors and bits and pieces, talked with Sam Lowe, a super friendly and knowledgeable sales person who i've watched give equivalent time and help to somebody asking about a £3 cable as to someone about to drop £3.5k on a cd player.
And that's part of what makes a store like Phase3 worth one's custom: every customer is important; the atmosphere is friendly, knowledgeable and not pretentious. And most especially folks are both keen about what they do as well as helpful. They convey a sense of passion, without ever feeling like you've walked into a scene from High Fidelity where you're made to feel like an idiot becuase (a) you don't know the difference between tubes and solid state or (b) you're not A Rich Audiophile Geek. An example of this kind of passion and easygoingness lead to this story:
I asked Sam if i could have a listen to the components he'd been saying were just oh so fantastic. So that's what we did. We went to their listening room (which looks like a normal living room - very sensible) and Sam sets up the £3K (in GBPs) preamp and £4.5k amp ("This is the set up the Royal Opera House uses") and that £3.5k cd player and the £3k speakers AND the £300 worth of cables to connect the amp, pre and cd player, and the £1000 worth of speaker cable.. (at one point Sam swapped out the £170 speaker cable he'd used for this £1000 Chord Signature UK cable. Don't let anyone tell you wire is wire: another myth shattered: there is a difference. and it's not subtle. Noise i didn't notice before was just gone. The effect that let the music stand out against a "black" background was jaw dropping in contrast. The effect of this absence was stunning).
When everything was set up just so, i was asked if i wanted a coffee while invited to sit on the couch and listen . We'd been benchmarking everything against the eric clapton's live and unplugged cd they had which was a revelation in itself. With this, Sam swapped around a variety of types of speakers and amps, too, just to show what effect each part had on the sound. And then he made one small adjustment (swapped one preamp for another) and my god (really) it was a religious experience. It was just so locked in, the combination. Then, going to another level, i popped in one of my fave instrumental tracks, and ok, i wept. It was piercing, the experience.
Now, i'm a musician and a music lover, and once upon a time i used to both gig live events and record music in actual real studios. I thought i knew what recorded music on a "good" system sounds like. I was SO WRONG. I had no idea that this sound experience of getting this close to (recorded) music was possible. You may be in the same position: you're heard the term audiophile, may have an idea that that means people with more money than sense, but perhaps you've not HEARD what a truly high end system can do to those bits on a cd (or to waves from vinyl for that matter). If you care about music at all, i am sure you will not walk away unchanged from the experience. It's an experience i'd pay for: to be able to use that room, that set up, say for an afternoon, just to listen to music like that.
Rent the audiophile experience rather than purchase it. Why not? Especially since not a lot of people i know are at a place either where they can or would think of heading into that heady space of forking out 7-10k for the "entry level" system above just to have that rush of an audio experience in their homes. They have kids to put through college; car payments, mortgages, student loans to pay off. And, just in passing, yes, £7-10k, the cost of a small automobile, is entry level. What would be "high end"? Consider something like the 75kUS/pair for british made Chord Electronics monoblock power amps and you go from price of car to substantial down payment on a house.
There is another way to get close to that heady audio experience: try headphones. Wiith a little help from some good headphone gear, which is about a tenth the cost for an equivalent speaker-based experience it's possible to get that kind of hi end audio experience. It's also potentially easier to check out this version of audiophile nirvana than requesting some private time in the room upstairs. Indeed, if you have a portable digital music player, there are some free ways to improve what you're hearing right now, too.
The following describes some approaches to audiophile headphone happiness - a word though, before continuing. Some engineers accuse "audiophiles" of being people who just get intrigued by the gear, not the music. That may be for true for some folks - like sports fans who care perhaps more about the player stats than about the joy of the game (and so what if they do!) What follows is not about gear intrigue: it's about getting closer to that ecstatic experience, the joy of hearing music. The french have a word for such folks - it's mélomanes: music lovers (thanks to Sam Tellig's Stereophile July 06 review of Quads for this term). The following story of headphones is offered up for les mélomanes.
Headphones can offer a potential audio experience that is earth shakingly good, and possibly better than what many of us would be able to or want to invest to replicate in a freestanding loudspeaker system - especially if your accommodation won't let you let those speakers rip. There are several stages to this: data source, player source, amplification source, digital to analog conversion, and of course, headphones.
Improvement One is Free. The Data Source.
Most folks listen to data now either off a cd or off an mp3 file. Bit rate can and does make a difference, and you don't have to have the golden ears of a 22year old (you're golden ears are over the hill after 25) to appreciate the differences. There are encodings like FLAC or Apple Lossless that really do replicate what's on the cd, but at half or less than the size of the original recording. Try playing back a lossless file against a 128bit mpg out loud over typical external computer speakers and you'll hear a difference on these very not audiophile components. So that's a for-free audio improvement - or largely for free - larger files take up more space, but that space becomes less of an issue as larger and larger drives become common - why not try Apple Lossless or FLAC with some of your fave CD's and see what you think.
Alternately, there is a school of thought that says 128 AAC Variable Bit Rate (aac, not mp3 and VBR on) on itunes, combined with great headphones (discussed below) yields results that are indistinguishable from CD's - and that's the opinion of a recording engineer - who also councils to be SURE to turn on ERROR CORRECTION in the prefs/advanced/importing if you rip your cd's with iTunes. Truly, it's great to have smaller file sizes for one's ipod - smaller file sizes means less harddrive spin up to access all the data and therefore better battery performance, but try it yourself: put a 128 AAC VBR, error corrected file you know really well next to an Apple Lossless or FLAC encoding or your system of choice and see what works for you.
An advantage of Apple Lossless is that you have all the data and can later encode down from there to 128 or whatever AAC you want at some future point - that's thinking archivally.
Improvement Two - Headphones.
The next part of the experience of course is a good set of headphones. What are good headphones? That question is the subject of endless discussion at head-fi Let's just say that Sony rarely gets mentioned, but German companies are very well represented (Beyer Dynamics, AKG, Sennheiser, Ultrasone...), with each flavour of headphone presentation having their partisans. Discussions range around qualities like sibilance, sound stage, color, neutrality, micro and macro dynamics, harmonics - all to do with how much of the recorded experience your headphones replicate and how.
You can find many comparative reviews of various "cans" online. One exemple is the sennheiser HD 650 which does very well in
non-comparitive reviews likethis by Wes Philips of Stereophile, or this interesting one on CameraHobby, but throw them in with others, and the flavours in the review space show up. A great source for such reviews that's free is Stereophile , but again a keyword search on your fave search engine for "review headphone x" will pull up a plethora of information.
>Will that be Closed, Open or In Your Ear?
There is also the issue of whether you want in ear phones or closed back or semi closed back or open. There are excellent versions of each, and reasons for choosing one form or another. Closed cell headphones like the Ultrasone Pro 750 review pdf ) for instance are not by default better than in-ear (canal) phones like the very decent Etymotic 6i , or open phones like the Sennheiser HD580 . Hi Impedance headphones like AKGs (600 Ohms) are not always better than low impedance phones (Ultrasones at 75 Ohms). They do have different qualities tho. What to do? try great versions of each kind. Understand the pros and cons of any form and make your decision.
The point is, good headphones (usually in the 75£ plus zone, tho price is not always indicative) will let you hear MORE of the audio signal coming from your system.
Headroom has a list of their 10 top fave headphones of various stripes. I don't agree with all their findings, but it's a great way to get a sense of the ranges of types. With these definitions in hand, why not hit an audio shop and head for the pricier models (just as a first pass indicator) and experience the difference between say the Apple default ear buds, and some really good cans - just so you can gage the degree of difference - and if that difference is meaningful to you.
Improvement Three: Plugging them In - to what?
When you try different kinds of headphones, make sure you have an appropriate source driving them: an ipod on its own will not show off a 300ohm headphone like Senheisser HD600's - it just doesn't have the power to drive these things, as explained very well at Dan's Data. A 600ohm AKG will struggle with the ipod cranked to full. An ipod will be adequate for canal phones: they're low impedance devices. A good audio shop will make sure you're hooked up to an appropriate source to drive the phones you try. But don't think the fact that an ipod can't easily drive hi impedance phones means you can't use them with your ipods - we'll come back to that in just a moment. in the meantime...
Let's assume you've picked something you enjoy in the headphone space. Let's also assume you have an ok stereo - or at least an ok cd player (one that has a digital out of some kind will come in handy later in this discussion) but it doesn't have a headphone jack (most stereo components increasingly do NOT come with headphone out jacks) or you do want to use those high impedance phones with your ipod or your computer. What to do?
Enter the headphone amp.
A headphone amp is a dedicated box (read: with its own power supply) that amplifies the music signal from whatever source, and sends it directly to its headphone jack. There are many kinds of headphone amps: some have tubes in them; some are
solid state, like UK's Musical Fidelity X-Can-v3 (fantastic review by Edwin Leong). Some are hybrids of solid state and tubes.
Some amps are built for living within a stereo system, like those just listed, but there's a whole breed of portable headphone amps, too, built to go with portable players. Some of them are designed to reuse candy/coughdrop tins as the casing! As Dan's Data says, every geek needs a tin with a light on it.
One of my faves in this space is made by Robert Gehrke in Germany, taking up the Amp in A Tin concept, but taking the circuit design further, cleaner ( see description ). So far Gehrke has been selling these fine designs on EBay for both US and UK/EU customers in your choice of penguin tin design (he also sells the caffeinated mints that come in the tins, too, at penguinenergy ). As said, the design fundamentally lets you drive higher impedance headphones on an ipod (or from a laptop). They can also have some nice effects for even very low impedance cans sold specifically for ipods and similar devices. They can help open up the bass, eliminate audio clipping down there, especially on less well encoded tracks. Mainly, you notice that you can drive the headphones louder while maintaining very good clarity, without the amp coloring what you're hearing.
Depending when you find this page, he may not have many on offer, since he's hard at work on a Next Level design that will be similar to the
Total BitHead amp , with USB in, excellent DAC (see below), crossfeed, and digital optical out (very hard to get in the UK/EU). Can hardly wait. But i'm getting ahead of myself. And just to mention one more portable (tho slightly larger) amp that has lead to incensed debate among those who care is the Ray Samuels Emmerline SR-71 ( 6moons review ; stereophile review ).
The main thing about a headphone amp, whether a stereo/stationary one, or a portable, is what it does for listening via headphones. Using a headphone amp means that a dedicated amplifier is handling the volume of the signal, and can, especially in the ipod case, do so more efficiently than the ipod - can drive more demanding loads than phones designed for portable players. easier drive is smoother sound. Now a lot of audio geeks can tell you why this is the case, suffice it to say, it really is.
You may wonder about sound. A good headphone amp will help the audio "breath" so that your high quality headphones can get all those nuances out of the audio that's in that stream but which a less effective amp mayn't be able to deliver. Again, this is something to try out at your favorite audio shop - maybe when you try out the headphones.
Bottom line: with excellent headphones and a good source to drive them, along with well-encoded tracks, you are now in a position to experience that audiophile's experience of "wow, i heard *new* things in that recording i thought i knew - that's stuff i've never heard before; it sounded like they were playing with new instruments, in a better room, right beside me. "
And you could easily stop there. But in case you were wondering if that's it, it's not. You can also do things to squeeze those 0's and 1's better so that you get even better sound. Enter the role of the DAC.
Making it Better - External DAC for the computer or home stereo (or yes, your ipod, too).dac
So you've got a good audio source, you have found the headphones you enjoy, you've found some way to plug them in, and now you'd like to go to the next level into your ears. We now circle back towards the data source. If it's digital, the DAC or digital audio convertor of either your computer or your cd player is the thing that turns the zeros and ones into audio signal. The circuits used to do that conversion do make a difference to the sound you hear. If you want to check this out, head to your favorite audio shop and ask them to set up an ok (100-200£) cd player, and have a listen on their sweet stereo system. Then ask them to hook up a dedicated DAC to their system using a good coax cable between the cd and the DAC. The Musical Fidelity X-DAC v3 is one well-regarded example of such a beast. On the somewhat portable side, there's the mainly USA-only Headroom Micro DAC . On the USB silly money side, there's The Brick . There's also chord electronics DAC 64 (review). Now listen to that set up. Take in your headphones and listen to that cd player with and without the external DAC. See what you think. Take in your own cd player for the comparison - that will show you, too, how to get better value out of your current cd player, using it as a transport only. Hell, take in your computer or laptop if it has an optical out, and do this comparison!
Why should you care about an external DAC? your CD player has a DAC as does your computer anyway! Yes it does, but as with anything, there's more than one way to skin a dac. Different quality parts make a difference. One issue addressed in translating zeros and ones into analog audio signal is "jitter" ( see this 1990 article for a clear discussion of info on a cd, how it's pulled off, and the jitter effect on the waveforms that make sound ; or here's a less intrigued discussion of what happens inside a cd player to create jitter ) - jitter is about timing of the read of the signal on a disc. If the timing is a wee bit out for whatever reason, it effects the sound. Timing of what? when a sample of the music represented by those zeros and ones gets played. Imagine a fence with pickets. The pickets get nailed against a fence rail at exactly the same distance apart. Now imagine someone marked the rail where each picket is supposed to go, and occaisionally gets bumped when measuring so the pencil mark gets pushed ahead. The spacing of the pickets is no longer regular. Rather than being regularly spaced, some are further apart; some a bunched up. The visual effect is that the pattern of the pickets gets changed. That's what can happen with digital audio: samples of sound are supposed to be exactly and regularly spaced. a clock is used to synch the samples up so that they'll be regularly spaced, like the pickets. Various things can happen, however, that the clock gets slightly out of synch (and there's not just one clock involved). The result on the wave pattern of the music is like the picket fence: the pattern changes, and consequently so does the sound or fidelity of the music.
Most systems have robust measures in place to address jitter and keep timing errors to a minimum (some are better than others). So, after timing, the next part of the process is translating the zero's and one's into electrical pulses to create the sound. There are different qualities of digital audio converters that do different things to make the 16bit audio of a cd sound richer, fuller. Remember that digital audio is composed by taking samples of the frequencies in an audio stream - it's not continuous like analog recordings. So, even though it is taking samples very rapidly within very short periods, there are still gaps between those samples. The size of the sample also effects how much information it can hold about that sample. The CD is 16 bit. Interestingly, most high level recording systems record in 20 or 24 bit, and audio is downsampled to fit the CD format.
Just to put 16 vs 24 bit audio in perspective, on a computer screen, once upon a time they were only black and white (or orange and black, or black and green...) That was what two bit color could do. Early color monitors were 8bit, giving 256 (2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2) colors. 16bit color came next, giving thousands of colors. The difference between 8 bit and 16 bit color can be seen when looking at color gradients (one color fading into another): the more bits, the smoother, and less noticeable the transitions from one color to another. Now, 24bit color (millions of colors) is common. The transitions are even more seamless. Same in audio: the higher the sample depth, the richer the information about the audio that can be stored in that sample. So, some of the newest DACs take that 16bit audio from a CD and up-sample it to 24bit sample depth and 192 khz samples a second - calculating/simulating richer information both in the sample and filling in the holes between the samples. Indeed, upsampling can help address jitter errors introduced by the sampling process itself.
It wouldn't be fair to say that there isn't debate in the engineering vs audio community about the role of such technologies , whether up sampling or oversampling in dealing with audio signals. But no matter what the magic is in the box, the only thing that matters is whether or not you hear a richer audio presence: does it sound like the musicians you love are playing better? suddenly have even nicer instruments? If you can't hear a difference, there isn't much point. I tried a DAC recently that didn't seem to sound any better hooked into the CD player than without it. I was using the CD players optical out. Someone suggested i try the coax out from the cd. WOW! that made a difference. The optical out (toslink) on the player was shite. Glad there was the coax. Suddenly a cheap-ish cd player was competing with players hundreds of pounds more expensive than it.
DACs aren't just for CD players - they can be applied to any digital audio source that has a digital output (toslink or coax). If you have iTunes coming out of a mac with a digital audio out (new macs, including the laptops, do; g5's also have optical out), you can feed that optical out right into something like the X-DAC. Indeed, because of the way the x-dac works, you can hook up a toslink from your computer (monster makes the appropriate cable as part of the airport express cable pack) into the optical port on the x-dac, and have a coax connection going from the cd to the dac as well. The box detects which machine is on and locks onto that source. Magic. But again, hear it for yourself (or read the pdfs of copious reviews but much better to hear it).
Review: putting it all together.
Audio recordings played through really good stereo equipment does make a difference to the audio experience. It improves the audio experience on so many levels - whether it's the clarity of bass as it becomes distinct notes rather than a low thump, or the real silence of the spaces between notes, or the presence of the scratching of bow against string.
Hi Fi audio experience is possible in the headphone space at a fraction of the cost it would take to create a similar stereo system. There are four parts to consider, particularly for the ipod/computer based source to move closer to music nirvana.
And yes sure you don't NEED any of this to be moved by music (just like a photographer doesn't need the most expensive digital camera on the planet to take great pictures) . Some of my best memories of music have been of cheap nearly worn cassettes played during long roadtrips on gnarly car stereos with one speaker bust, BUT it can be emotionally very satisfying as well, moving even, to really hear something the way some better gear can bring out that experience.
Indeed, being able to hear a recording on good gear can make you appreciate stuff you may otherwise have brushed aside. This has certainly been the case for me with brahms string sextets . I'd passed it over. even said "yuck" and then i accidently heard it with a headphone amp plugged into the cd player and it was a revelation. It's since become a favorite recording.
So, yes, two main things, then two bonus bits:
(1) decently encoded data - whether AAC 128 Variable Bit Rate, or, my preference, Apple Lossless
(2) great headphones - closed, open, canal; high or low impedance
(3) a good source to drive and open up whatever cans you're using - headphone amp!
(4) and finally, if you're getting really into this, a dedicated DAC to squeeze the most from your digital source.
Lest you think this is the end, it's not: there's external power supplies to drive the devices better; there's the quality of the cables connecting the bits (don't let an engineer tell you cable is cable: it's not - you can hear the difference. It doesn't mean the most expensive stuff is the best, but you can hear the differences between cables - try a blindfold test with different ones. For example, with an x-can v3 hooked up directly to your fave store's cd player, and your headphones on, ask to hook up that cd player to an x-dac using, for instance, UK made
Chord Electronic 's CoDac cable then try the same set up with their prodac cable - just don't let them tell you which is which, and see what you think. And that's not all: there are a myriad of aftermarket headphone cable upgrades that tune the sound of the headphones themselves for AKG and Sennheissers - see groups like Cardas or Stefan Audio Art for examples).
But before getting super intrigued about the path towards perpetual upgrades, the simple truth is, a really good pair of headphones can go a long way to openning up music in ways that you may not have experienced before, and in a way that only could be approximated for 10x's the cash to set up an equivalent speaker-based system.
Headphones to try for starters?
- Sennheiser HD 600's or 650's - open cans
- Beyer Dynamics 770's - closed cans
- Etymotics Research 4s - canal phones
There are all sorts of others in here - AKG, Grados, Ultrasone and more
The thing is, this is also a relatively cheap proposition to test: first, improve the encodings for your own current portable digital music set up; next, take a few cd's to a good local audio shop (someplace not pretentious, but knowledgeable, helpful - you'll get the vibe as soon as you go through the door) and give it a whirl. If nothing else, you'll have a grand audio experience, so not a waste of time. If music is important to you, you'll be glad you tried - it may be a revelation.
Many thanks to Sam Lowe of the most excellent
Phase3hifi for his time in walking through the differences between cables, dacs, headphone amps and other components, and letting me experiment with different combinations.