Absolutely fantastic video, please do more of this style of video Tyl. Really great to hear your wisdom on headphones in a different format to a review.
Tyll, this is a fantastic video. You've given me far more interest in headphones. I look forward to seeing the vast changes within the technologies of headphones.
Tyll is talking about the industry from such a comprehensive perspective, speaking to the different product segments, use cases, and consumer types. Not just audiofilets. While the audiophile world makes fun of Bose, Tyll has respect for all these companies enabling new experiences. Very nice video.
The Mrspeakers range has been very underwhelming. I agree with Tylls opinion that the Ether Flow isn't much better than mid range closed headphones. The ZMF Eikon/Atticus are examples of a high end headphones - resolving, great tonal balance.
Tyll, I was listening to Pioneer closed headphones back in '67 plugged into a Teac tape deck playing 7 1/2 ips pre-recorded tapes from the record companies such as Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Bob Dylan, etc. etc. and it sounded pretty damn good. My friends were into cans as well. Some weed never hurt the listening experience either. You don't look as though you experienced the "Summer of Love" first hand. I don't know how we ever survived without a cell and texting but we had no, none, nada products by Sony. Come to think of it, the world was a better place back then. People actually spoke to each other face to face. Peace, Love & Rock 'n' Roll man!
I'm surprised he didn't speak more on the subject of wireless and connection standards. They are subjects that I think many main-stream consumers have been misinformed (advertised to) about. Like when Apple ditched their 3.5mm jack and people inherently thought it was better, even though testing proved the FPGA based solution on the dongle measured slightly worse than the 3.5mm jack. Or that wireless headphones are hands down the only option of the future, but don't take into account all the current drawbacks that need to be engineered out, like battery size and capacity, wireless bandwidth, transmission rates and timing issues. I'm sure with time these will be rectified and such, but it is funny how much money, time and effort is spent to progress something to overcome extremely small inconveniences (e.g. wires), only to introduce a bunch of other issues that need to be solved before the system is as good or better than what they started with.
Marc Dostie i think that the smartphone manufacturers are hitting a wall they build for themselves. for marketing they started making phones thinner, now space for a 3.5 mm jack is seen as more useful elsewhere. then there are some positive byproducts of this practice, not for the consumer ofc. eventually we will have to migrate to wireless and that keeps the market flowing. cabled headphones seem to age like cars: with a little love and care they last for decades and nostalgia keeps growing. wireless headphones cant bring that to the table because the battery alone wont last that long and as a closed system it can become obsolete unlike wired headphones that scale with source. so no i dont think its an effort to match the wire, its an investment into a market that seems to start stagnating after the monster beats boom.
Most portable headphones will be wireless with few exception. When you say small inconvenience of wire you are talking like a representative of a group of people that walk around with bricks as DAP's and ad on DAC and amps to their mobile devices to reach better sound quality, but the average person find wires annoying. People absolutely hate to untangle their earpods every damn time they have been in the pocket. When it comes to home use we will see more wireless come in to the market,even really high end stuff, but it will be a slower path. The new Sennheiser Orpheus with it's secondary amplifier built in show that in the future really good sounding headphones won't need wires either. You just need a very easily driven driver, some miniaturization of components and some smart software.
IMO the major area for development is ambisonics combined with custom head related transfer functions generated from pictures. Take “soundstage” out of the headphone.
Google just announced the Pixel 2 (30min ago) ... it has synchronous voice translation, in 2 directions, when combined with the Google Buds (earphones) .... in 40 languages!! The future today!
There are already some out who do the same, but arent really ready yet. Now Google joining the same topic and I predict in about 5 years they work smooth af. Just imagine going to France and dont have to speak french. Amazing! Combine with the Google auto translate contacts....my god. I love future!
emm, as a trilingual person and native on two of them, I assure you, that machine translation is no where near acceptable to use on a day to day basis.
I imagine in the future just like cell phones, technology in flagships will slowly trickle down to the lower end, and the market will just get more and more competitive (which is a good thing) Flagships will become cheaper, and cheaper headphones will become better - Hopefully!! I do realize that flagships nowadays are just getting more prohibitively expensive, but I seriously do think the audio enthusiast community will mature over time to a point where there not willing to dish out thousands for a flagship product, and getting a good price and a product that's rich with features and quality will become the norm. Tyll is absolutely right about headphones and related features continuously growing to be homogenized such as latest offering that offer features such as DSP, ANC and Bluetooth.
I can't wait until surround sound on headphones matches up with a superior home theater setup.(Emotiva, McIntosh, etc) Gaming headphones are out of the question and even with the use of a home theater setup (because there are no multichannel DAC/amps) the returns are lackluster because digital receiver amps litter the landscape. Surround sound yes, dynamics and headroom, no.
I was recently on Sweetwater and found a company who sells a plugin for headphones that does headtracking 3D object based sound for PC games and movies when combined with their proprietary hardware and it looked fairly affordable, if I get their name I'll add it as a edit to this comment.
I think you missed the boat on what the future is and where it should go . You can only go so far with what you place in or on your ears . I have contacted several makers and have given them my feedback and they've done nothing . The technology is in the players and amps. How is it headphones lack any components that 2 channel systems have ? Headphones amps lack any full separate tone control or equalization . The closest thing I have experienced is Mcintosh MHA100/150 which has bass boost and tone slant . Not really separate treble and bass control but actually which one is preferred most . Here's the history on the components side cheap amps and dacs with phone chargers style power supplies to amps and dacs with internal power supplies to tube to solid state amps. I contacted woo and asked him if he planned a real system for headphones one based on 2 channel thinking . He responded with great idea a year ago . The MHA100/150 doesn't cut it, it is way under powered over priced no separate tone controls and the speaker section is nothing like their 2 channel receivers . I hold my breath when any company says I'm going to combine a tuner dac pre-amp and amplifier with full tone controls tailor made for headphones . On one of my systems I use an old school EQ and I can make my HD800 purr . With my EQ I say What 6 K spike? and have super tight deep bass . It's time to start taking the hobby seriously. Tone slant is when a component gives you a choose of either more bass or treble so you have to slant in that direction , wouldn't it be nice to control both ? Finally the size I want a system that doesn't look like a toy I want full industry standard . get away from power switches in the rear and toy like power supplies . last but not least is pull old RU-vid videos and update them . Impedance matching full tone controls and equalization full size components with remote should be the standard .
Love surround sound and DSP laden speakers ( and headphones done correctly ), but still believe 2 channel speaker and headphones are still best for music. Games, movies are a totally different experience to music/live concert I think.
One point that I think is fundamental but ignored in audio in regards to headphones. The sound ( or music ) is heard mostly FROM INSIDE YOUR HEAD. Why aren't there more "out-of-head" music experiences out there? Among the few recording studios that do binaural music is Chesky Records for example, and there aren't many out there. I am hoping for the future of headphones that the video game industry and cinema industry have the influence to change this staple in the music industry so as to give wide spacious soundstage listening pleasure while being finely tuned tonally.
I'm very much looking forward to the release of the Monoprice Monolith Portable THX Headphone Amplifier/DAC that will feature Dirac Sensaround processing. Could be a game-changer for out-of-your-head music/sound with headphones.
I have recently purchased Sennheiser Gaming Series X 1000 (GSX 1000) headphone amplifier that does 7.1 virtual surround sound binaural processing. It's a low impedance Amp ( drives up to 150 Ohm headphones ), but the DAC part is the groundbreaking news. I can't go back to anything else in terms of music, multi-channel movies or tv, let alone gaming. This thing is amazing, and coupling it with an open-back, wide sounding headphones really emphasizes the binaural effect ( I got Philips Fidelio X2, but the dream is Audeze LCD-X or HiFiMan Edition X ).
This could help, if you put in the effort to create your own personalized calibrations. I can vouch for it as a great method to create tonal corrections for your headphones and your own HRTF, and can confirm it works to place the virtual sound source out of your head and in front of you IF using Griesinger's own recordings; doesn't work much for frontalization with either standardized binaural recordings or with "flat" stereo recordings (unless you get lucky with the odd recording here and there). ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1VaKZr208Dc.html
The HD6X0 line with its tuning is breaking the market. Is there anything at any price that is objectively better (better bass extension while maintaining that midrange and treble)? With this thing costing around 300$ I will always feel disappointed by any headphone as non will be 100% better no matter how much I spend. I don't want 1k$+ side grades... Of course there are more resolving headphones with wider soundstage, better imaging or ones that have better bass but all of them fail in the mids and treble of the HD 6X0 line up. If anyone knows a 100% better headphone let me know as I wanna upgrade ;)
Tyll, this is my take on flagship headphones and the furore over astronomical prices. - when I started in the hobby, headphones were seen as a much cheaper option to speakers. The VFM equation for bookshelf speakers, particularly active speakers, is now so much better than it is for a large chunk of the headphone market. - said VFM speakers are almost exclusively manufactured in Asia, regardless of where they're designed, while we continue to insist that our flagship headphones (HiFiMan notwithstanding) are built in Europe or the US. That costs money, folks - the Abyss is, at least IMO, one of the ugliest flagship *anything* I've ever seen, but no-one seems to have a problem with the price. Feng slaps a 6K sticker on his headphone and we scream blue murder, in part because HiFiMan's quality control record isnt great but there's also a hint of racism in that reaction for mine. It's as though we're saying 'Nothing made in China should ever cost more than a thousand dollars !' and that just doesn't reflect economic reality in 2017. End of the day, the trend will continue for as long as people come up with the ponies to own these headphones. The upside is that the research that goes into them can spit out cheaper alternatives like Mr Speakers Aeon and the Audeze Sine : whether you like these headphones is a whole other debate. The trend to be able to buy the latest-and-greatest shows no signs of waning on any of the major headphone forums, even allowing for review samples and fake-it-till-ya-make-it sigs. How anyone - other than reviewers like yourself - can hope to stay on top of the curve completely escapes me but the hobby has been turned completely on it';s head when you have a 3K portable player driving 2K in-ears it's a bit rich to start telling KEF that their LS50W is too expensive ;)
Umm no. I've had a good pair of Sennheiser's since I was a teenager back in the late 70's. Most people got their start with Headphones to curb their parents anger blasting their music throughout the house. My audiophile and gaming headphones are completely different because the sound requirements are completely different .. beyond the mic requirements. In gaming it's called sound whoring (narrow sound spectrum), in music it's wide fidelity accuracy.
This is one prediction that I'm not wild about in terms of what it could mean for personal audio: www.businessinsider.com.au/ar-glasses-to-be-hotter-than-phones-in-5-years-facebook-exec-predicts-2017-4?r=US&IR=T AR glasses are obviously right in line with where the 'wearable technology' geeks have wanted consumers to go for at least a decade, but if Google Glass is any indication of how quickly the technology will be adopted, I dont share their level of certainty. www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glasshole From the POV of headphones, Bluetooth is much better than it was 10 years ago, but for those of us who favor a wired connection to high-end IEMs, I struggle to see how the silicon needed to make it all happen can be seamlessly integrated into a pair of glasses that anyone would regard as fashionable or desirable. I'm all for the other applications, but if the current smartphone/tablet is an acceptable alternative to a high-end DAP, if only as a transport into another device, I struggle to see how industry can jam everything into such a slimline profile. The current AR prototypes look like something Clark Kent wore to the office in the original Superman series - I get that phones have gone from bricks to slimline fashion accessories in less than 3 decades : that timeliine will need to be much shorter if we're going to have something like the LG V20/V30 in a pair of glasses. DSP or no. For now, the biggest tech leap IMO is a relatively massive device called the Smyth Realiser, but that's a whole other thread. Thanks again for the vid.
The Walkman (1979) as an example is already OK, but when it comes to history of headphones than apple earbuds and beats are more of a negative example of worsening. There were good headphones long before that and reviews in professional magazines long before RU-vid. Since when does the AKG k240 already exist? I think this is even older than the HD600 (1997)... And after a short googling I see that there are open headphones since 1968... the Sennheiser HD414. And frankly, if the future really looks like this, I'd rather stay in the past when it comes to headphones.
I think headphones were a big thing for consumers well well well before apple came with its crappy headphones and ipod. my mother had some over-ear headphones back in the 80's that weren't some crappy cheap ones. being from asia, these sorts of devices, I guess, were much more available and known to everyone. Not only that, Sennheiser was well into high quality headphones in the 90's which is well well well before apple's crappy white in-ears. so some of the timeline given is a little inaccurate.
Augmented reality techs require safe urban infrastructure. Otherwise, a car may run you over while you are in a virtual reality. Until that time none of the above is possible to the full extent.
Nice run down on the recent history of headphones. However Byer Dynamics and AKG have been producing headphones for over 50 years. The future of headphones is Bluetooth, with the decline of wires. Bluetooth is now a vital part of audio electronics, with it being accessible on headphone DACS and amps. However the human ear can only hear so much. The technology of Dolby Atmos allows for more realistic surround sound, at an affordable price, without the need for multiple speakers or annoying wires.
Exactly. (or any other wireless technology that will emerge) "Matched headphones and amplifier?" LOL. No. Future is something like Airpods or the earbuds seen in movie Her. (And those already exist, just aren't really ready for prime time yet). I use headphones a lot more when I have them in my pocket in a neat box (Airpods), even for few minutes on a break or to make a quick call when my hands are full. Sure, I have big cans on my desk and those are wireless too, but I don't have them on me all the time. The only prediction that I think is spot on is Augmented reality - the biggest barrier here will be a language one. Siri has been with us since 2010(?) and it still doesn't speak or understand Czech, and the world isn't US only. More automation and machine learning is needed for this to become universal and available everywhere (and for cheap).
Wi-Fi 5g And other wireless technology along with better hires codecs with lower latency and dropouts Better wired and balanced options Better adapters to allow professional wired headphones to use the latest wireless Wi-Fi 5g and Bluetooth codecs in balanced mode a nd single ended at hi ohms and power requirements with an extra small and efficient adapter and likewise adapters to make disposable wireless headphones wired and thereby give them access to various dacs and amps and primo audio gear Of course latency and timing issues must first be solved
Too much credit to apple and beats The military has already weoponized audio Sonicwerks and others are doing this for audiophiles now of course Great future talk 5g Wi-Fi Bluetooth will all improve wireless quality and latency and drop out performances
