Dynamic vs. Planar vs. Electrostatic Drivers | How they work and sound | The BASICS | 

“They are basically the same but completely different”

I feel interrogated

Man after watching your new videos i came here and i can notice how much of an improvement you have made in everything about your channel, congrats.

Been in this industry for long but I'm still surprised at how much I can still learn. Great vid as always.

OMG, those lights, my eyes

Awesome video it would be very interesting to see you redo this now that you have all the knowledge you have gained in the past 3 years

Watching old school Josh, really cool to see how much your content has progressed

I'm still amazed on how the hell Josh does not have at leat A MILLION more subscribers... This guy is a "no-bullshit" audiophile! His videos are awesome, information is concise and his opinions make sense. Amazing!

Hi Josh! this video was super informative! thank you :)

Your videos are really good dude.

I really appreciate the information you presented which was clear, detailed, and thorough on this abstruse topic.

Thanks for the video! Keep up!

Wow, great video man. Learned a lot

Crazy technology! thanks for the explanation!

Great vid, thanks!!

Thanks for the amazing video !!!

That was a very very good explanation. Great video

Subbed and liked on first video itself Thanks to this video, I learned something more 😊

Very well explained. Thanks.

Excellent explanation!!

Great explanation, thank you sir!

Josh, you're the boss. One of the greatest persons on RU-vid.

Tks bro good stuff

🥰 thanks for the awesome information

tnx 4 the songs, nice experience

Another great vid thanks. Koss ESP950 are very well reviewed budget electrostatic "ear speakers", cheaper than many planar headphones (Mr speakers, audeze etc.). They are worth looking at to round out a collection. After Sennheiser showing off their closed HD820 I predict they will release open and closed planar headphones. Edit: what are your thoughts (or impressions) on closed planar like the ether flow c or the upcoming monolith 1060c?

oh god very great explanation, im subs

Great tutorial mate, just getting into high end headphones and frothing

Thank you this was really easy for a laymen to understand

my wfey just bought me the audeze lcd-x. i'e wanted them for four years, and my mind was blown

Would it be possible to also explain how your hair works? thanks

Great content, but the lighting is not very good. Pretty distracting. Not trying to be an ass, just letting you know.

You do an excellent breakdown of headphone speakers. I know more about loud speakers that’s headphones. Seeing how each design or style of headphones has pros and cons. Has anyone designed a headphone or loudspeaker which uses the best of all three build types. Like electrostatic for the tweeter, planar for the mid range speaker then dynamic for the woofer. With your break down of the build types a speaker with all three styles would produce the best sound reproduction. Not to mention probable cost a fortune. Has that been done or just not economical?

nice video

Where can I find some planar or electrostatic headphones to listen to? Most stores only carry dynamic.

Josh, how about an update on this topic? So many IEMs are now planar (and I find them shrill and harsh). Would appreciate your explanation and thoughts. Thanks.

In one ear...out the other ear... But I'm wearing headset...so information will be retained 😂🤣😂😂

@5:30 looks like the Kanto YU4. I have a pair behind me I am selling at our next garage sale. I do not like the sound of the Kevlar cone material. They sound decent though. Thanks for the video explanation. I wanted a refresher on how my planar magnetic Audeze Maxwells (at twice the price) are different then my wifes Razer wireless traditional dynamic driver.

MAN you've come a long way in terms of production quality lmao That's not to say this video isn't already good, but compared to whether you out out nowadays... ;)

Very smart.

I was looking for fancy animation to explain it but this will do.

Do planar magnetic headphones require an energizer? Would be kinda cumbersome for taking it with me to the local coffee shop (but then again, it might let in some environmental sounds) BTW, the lighting isn't bad. Seems to help me stay focused on you a bit (instead of seeing what you have at your pad)

hmm, open back headphones means that the back of the cups are open. The other side of the cup can be sealed and still be called open back. SoO the sound can still bounce around inside. Try some of your planar headphones. push the cups towards your ears hard and quick enough and you can hear the driver crinkle. this wouldnt happen if the air was allowed to escape Shining a light through a planar headphone doesnt demonstrate that its acoustically transparent. the material on that particular headphone just happens to be transparent (or somewhat transparent). what you just did was like; shining light through a glass window and claiming its acoustically transparent. Like dnalekaw mentioned below, sound pressure isnt all about driver excursion. its about how much surface area is moving the air. a planar driver being larger in surface area can achieve the same sound pressure level as a dynamic driver with less excursion. Bass response on better planar drivers measure near flat all the way past 20hz, so yeah, they can do bass.

Nice OLED burnin Test video

Nice video, but why did you put the lights behind you?

i think your hair is electrostatic here. great video

Come a long way in your video production.

Why the heck you're the only one doing this in the right way? Good work! Thanks.

Thanks for the explanation! If I understood correctly, plannar magnetic headphones offers more room for sound to leak out, resulting in a more precise sound signature over dynamic open headphones. Can we consider plannar magnetics to be very good for gaming too then? (identifying ennemy position etc). Also, I really like bass headphones, can open back headphones deliver great punchy bass too?

E

1:32 - When the ribbon, planar, electrostatic, and/or a moving coil transducer/driver within a set of reputable head phones (or speakers) are asked to simultaneously reproduce a high frequency and a low frequency signal what really happens is called "time averaging". As, clearly both frequencies (not to mention the thousands of other frequencies that exist at any 1 time within normal listening music) the ribbon/other transducer can’t possibly perform this feat and reproduce the same signals simultaneously, and therefore time averaging occurs. To minimize time averaging we (professional loudspeaker engineers) apply techniques such as frequency and amplitude division. Luckily for us that our ears - despite how remarkable they are at detecting small/large nuances of sound - are basically (I am trying to keep it simple with these terms) immune to most reasonable levels of time averaging - provided the source material is complex enough so that it has multiple frequencies/pitches within it and no 2 sounds alone can be individually detected (to be time averaging to the listener) by the listener at the expense of the others. Kim Shaw Electronic Engineer Electrical Engineer PhD Electroacoustics.

What about balanced armature drivers

Those lights.

It is less about the driver type technology and more about the implementation.

@3:07 is the phase the same on inside and outside?

i cant watch because the lights are killing me

I stumbled upon this old Josh video, and I still can’t believe he said Aud-“ease” lol. But yeah, I guess it could happen…

for the last time officer , i did pay my taxes

yosi horikawa has some great tracks for expirience the the sound espetially with wide sound stage headphones

holy fuck those lights

planars produce better bass then dynamics

let's simplify things a bit in terms of comparison, because how they work, You can't beat a piezo electric driver in low frequencies(taket h2), If you are ready to pay 5k$+ electrostatic headphones are just better at everything, cheap models&high-end electrostatic models with average amps will lack sound stage & bass but with good amps which can swing high voltage peak to peak (for example 1500Vpp) those can solve these problems. Keep in mind however, electrostatic headphones have an ethereal sound signature, their sound signature is like holographic presentation of the real instead of the physical representation. They are different, make sure you try them first before you consider buying. Ribbon drivers has the speed of electrostatic headphones, has the sound stage of planars and the impactful bass of dynamic drivers. The downside is that they require INSANE amount of amplification to work, 200W per channel at 8ohm for example. They sound a bit too thin & crisp also time to time. when you buy a pair of headphones, you don't only pay for the product & material used in the build, you pay mostly to the engineers who made the calculations involved in the making of the product. Dynamic driver calculations are relatively simpler compared to planars & electrostatic. I find dynamic driver headphones to be outdated, if you have enough budget go for planars or electrostatic headphones. I myself use STAX sr007 with KGSSHV carbon amp. (hoping to get RAAL SR1A soon)

Is this a good idea to buy the audeze EL-8 ? Which is a closed planar magnetic driver

I've never heard a dynamic headphone that matches the bass reach and quantity of the bassier planars. Some of those things are such bass monsters that I'm not convinced we'll ever see a dynamic beat them. When it comes to larger diaphragms IN GENERAL? Sure. I am team big woofer all day with speakers. There is no replacement for displacement. I don't understand the obsessions with itty bitty kilobuck speakers that will inevitably suffer greatly in the low end. I don't care what flowery words people want to attatch to it. They don't have the impact and viscerality of big honkin woofers or even horn-loaded compression drivers. That's me. It's just not even close. a 5" woofer will never have command over bass like a 12 will. Big dynamic drivers do bass exceptionally well. The key word being BIG. And that all STILL rings true in headphones... meaning, with headphones, we're talking about dynamic drivers roughly around the size of a half-dollar. Not much bigger than a tweeter, which though designed differently, face a lot of the same limitations. Maybe even less because they're not running full-range like a dynamic headphone driver - something else worth considering, you can only tune them to have so much bass before IMD eviscerates the highs OR you need to make changes to the coil that will negatively impact treble to keep the driver from just bursting into flames when the coil overheats. It would need to have exceedingly high excursion to output the deepest bass at audible levels. Those bass waves are very, very big... like dozens of feet long from peak to null. To produce them you need either a very large diaphragm or at least a medium-sized one with extremely high excursion. Headphone drivers, even the "big" 50mm simply aren't up to it, physically. And past that point, you are running into other problems due to the physics of wideband operation. The bigger the widebander, the tougher treble and upper mids get to hold together. So it's a pretty hard wall when it comes to how much bass dynamic headphone drivers can reasonably made to output on their own. We're talking yet unseen levels of rigidity, durability, and damping to make that work. The bass performance on dynamics is thus pretty predictable. IME they tend to lack that last bit of low end, but can slam a little more in the mid-bass - it's usually a little patchy, whereas a planar just grabs the whole bass spectrum and tells it what's what ;)

excuse me, may I use some of your videos to translate and share for my group of friends

You've come a long way from using lights behind you pointed at the camera. Oh my goodness, what were you thinking lol

Which one is fastest

in short mechanisms is different but based on principle of vibrations

What sounds natural? Planar dynamic or electrostatic?

👍👌

What about closed planar? OPPO PM-3, for example.

So why do my LetShouer S12 IEMs create better bass than my Phillips SHP9500

Animated graphics definitely would have helped.

Does anyone make a headphone that has a hybrid of all the different types for the best of their class performance in one?

why you're not verified. i liked you

why the lights tho

Low voltage electrets?

Thanks You saved years ....of Research Time

I know this is an older video; but would really appreciate a reply/your-thoughts: I've heard than planar headphones have a durability issue. Is that the case &/or what are the general (there's always the exceptions, of course; level of quality/product or whatever... what's the average) durability differences among these three? Thanks!

I haven't listened to too many (o_o)phones, but so far the OG type of driver, dynamic, reproduces sounds in the most realistic and natural way. That means I will gladly deal with the inherent quirks (bass rolloff, something you forgot to mention, and uneven treble) when searching for my dream. Dynamic 4 Lyfe basically.

Planars and Electrostatics won't take a lot of abuse. I'm an electric bass player, and I've never seen a bass guitar cabinet that uses anything but a dynamic cone driver. Sure some extended range cabs will use a piezoelectric speaker for the tweeter. Now I'm not saying nobody has ever made one, a bass cab with a planar or electrostatic driver, but I've never seen one, or heard of one.

THERE ARE TWO LIGHTS!

My boy young fly boy young thug valour

It's easy math the: dynamic driver will definitely damage your ears XD

is the Electrostatic Drivers magnetic?

Looking at an old video, Joshua seems depressed. I don't think I've seen him talk about it.

Dynamic headphones are the Best overall, and thats because of the price

There are 4 lights!

a headphone without base is like a planar woman

Am I being interrogated?

Glad you stopped filming with lights pointing directly at the camera; I can't look at this without wincing

Whyyyyyyyy why this lights? 😭😭😭

Too much technical will stick with dynamic drivers

Josh, that was academic shit grade, awsome, you could defenitly be a teacher bro. Really Nice educated explanation.

Nice video, I understand that you are talking about deep bass from a Subwoofer, a system dedicated to making bass, but I don't understand why you say that a dynamic driver is good at doing just that and the Planar is not....headphones like LCDx or AB-1266 they can make a much deeper bass than any dymanic headphone. So why is deep bass in planar headphones so good when it wouldn't be good to make a planar subwoofer?

i think you should redo this video. It was one of the first videos of yours that i saw (a few months ago) and it didn't give me a first impression that is consistent with the high quality of your typical video so it put me off from your channel, until now

Dynamic drivers also come in the form of open acoustic design, e.g sennheiser HD600, philips fidelio X2, and the list goes on. so your explanation as a benefit for planner magnetic or static membrane in that regard is not correct. second, the speaker designer may design the speaker element with an acoustic absorbent material behind and around the driver to dampen most of the reflections. third, music instrument as we all know have resonant chambers made usually from wood like piano, drums and guitars. the resonant chamber is placed there for a reason. in the music world we do want some time resonant chambers and some headphones and speakers are designed with that Technic implemented. usually to balance the response curve. The professional world will use Dynamic drivers rather than the other two method simply because considering all aspects: efficiency, dynamics: spectrum, and cost - they are the best combination of all merits. you will not find professional studio equipment made from other types of drivers than Dynamic drivers, that tells us a lot.

Less on talking let us hear how they sounds

Bad lighting btw

That's incorrect, planars have more bass extension and will go lower in frequency than dynamics. They by nature don't have as much slam or punch in the bass as dynamics. Although there are some really hard hitting planars to.