[Closed] £35k Headphones

I'm not sure getting Gregory Porter to test them with that hat on is going to prove much.

Mmmmm, nice.

*starts writing 2016 Xmas list*

Valves in HiFi equipment?

That's going to colour your tone for a start. In guitar amplifiers that's the point, it colours you tone and distorts in a helpful way. Listening to data files?

8hz to 100khz?

Engineered in such a way that it's impossible to hear?

I'm so glad they exist! 😉

The world needs more beautiful bits of kit like this!

£35k?

You could buy an artisan scarf for that!

Does it say Rapha on it?

Engineered in such a way that it's impossible to hear?

It's quite well accepted, even by engineers, that sound in frequencies the human ear cannot hear, change the way the audible frequencies sound. This is why frequency response above 20KHz is still very important.

Some Audiofiles crave the creamy sound of valves as they do analogue (vinyl). I suppose these fall into the 'If you have to ask...' category but could equally be 'A fool and his money...' candidates...

Some Audiofiles

It's quite well accepted, even by engineers [etc]

Got a link for that?

Got a link for that?

Probably saved in his philes.

Geetee1972

I know you pointed at above 20khz, but why do sound engineers and mastering "masters" cut everything below 30hz and above 17khz to clean up the mix? It's either mud or tizz.

Nice bit of engineering, but all of those motors are going to add noise.

Amps sound different to each other.
Is there anyone who genuinely believes they don't?

I can never afford it, but I am kind of glad it exists

This^^

The film of it starting up was great.

I would spend all day switching it on and off 🙂

A product designed to solve the problem of having more money than sense....

Got a link for that?

Here's one [url= http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/09/sounds-you-cant-hear-can-still-hurt-your-ears ]article[/url]

Here's [url= http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095464 ]another[/url]

It's an interetng phenomenon.

I know you pointed at above 20khz, but why do sound engineers and mastering "masters" cut everything below 30hz and above 17khz to clean up the mix? It's either mud or tizz.

No idea; I don't know enough about the subject other than to point out that sound above and below the audible (human) spectrum does still have an effect on us and how we then 'hear' things and that consequently ther are hifi products that either add back into a system those frequencies lost by design limitations of the kit or else they seek to increase the frequency response natively.

Have they actually made any of these? That 'video' is an animation.

If you can afford it, then why not?
I struggle with the ridiculous cost of 'Beats Audio' headphones though, so doubt I'd ever be considering getting them even after a Euromillions win.

I suppose these fall into the 'If you have to ask...' category

No need to ask, It's £35k. It's in the title.

Have they actually made any of these?

According to the internet:

The Sennheiser Orpheus HE 1060 headphones and Orpheus HEV 1060 amplifier are expected to go on sale mid-2016 for around €50,000 and expect to be able to produce one unit per day and a maximum of 250 units per year

So there will be a few knocking about in the classifieds maybe 😉

Surely Richer Sounds can sell em a bit cheaper?

I'd get pissed off that every time I wanted to use them I had to wait 20 minutes for the bloody case to open

I struggle with the ridiculous cost of 'Beats Audio' headphones though

That's because they are genuinely cheap headphones made more pricey because of the name they attach.

The Sennheisers, while not '£35k good', by which I mean they are not 3500 times better than a pair of HD800s at about a grand, are priced like that because it reflects the development cost.

I struggle with the ridiculous cost of 'Beats Audio' headphones though

That's because they are genuinely cheap headphones made more pricey because of the name they attach.

..and made artificially heavier to give an impression of quality.

Richer Sounds tried a high-end store but it didn't work out and they closed it.

A mate restored some Pye HF25 tube amps from 1957 (I think) and they went all the way up to 160KHz :

http://www.audiomods.co.uk/pye1.html

[img] [/img]

Home hifi is imperfect and the recording studio environment is different from a live venue, if the distortion added by turntables and tube amps makes the reproduction sound more 'authentic' then that is good.

I have heard some fantastic tube amps and the one I had was pretty good and it has proved expensive to try and get the same 'beauty' from my solid state kit.

The big and expensive Brystons I have tried have sounded terribly 'processed' compared.

The difference between something sounding 'lifeless' or 'clinical' is often just a bit of 'flower' in the upper bass, or a touch more midrange around 1KHz, which is what you often get from tube amps.

My local HiFi place recently had a Musical Fidelity A1 in for £150.00.

Gone before I could rip their arms off.
🙂
Still not very grandchild friendly, but better than valves.

More hearing damage than I used too and tend to find cheaper valve amps a bit warm these days.

Here's one article

Here's another

It's an interetng phenomenon.

It's interesting, but it's not quite what you said. To wit:

It's quite well accepted, even by engineers, that sound in frequencies the human ear cannot hear, [b]change the way the audible frequencies sound[/b]. This is why frequency response above 20KHz is still very important.

Ignoring the appeal to authority and appeal to the masses for a moment; I don't doubt that frequencies beyond our audible range may still cause a physical reaction, that doesn't necessarily imply that it magically changes what we can hear. If I shone a laser into your eyeball that operated in the non-visible spectrum it doesn't mean that the beam will suddenly become visible (though there's a good chance that plenty of other things might become less visible pretty quickly).

So, whilst there's potentially an argument for filtering out what we can't hear (because, why amplify inaudible frequencies?), I'd hazard that the notion a system is superior because it operates in a spectrum beyond audible is pure snake oil. (There needs to be a name for this hifi-marketing BS; audiophoil?)

You could always just have a listen and make your own mind up?
🙂

I always preferred vinyl to CD, until I bought a pair of speakers with an extended bass - so much more info on the CD.

That's very kind of you. What time shall I come round?

Whenever you like.
We can do the speaker cable experiment whilst we're at it.
🙂

I'll buy the pizza, you bring the amp and the headphones, OK?

The BBC specified supertweeters on some of their monitors from the late 1960s.

The LS3/6 had a response to 25KHz.

But maybe they didn't know what they were doing ?

I have plenty of CDs that go waaaay below 30Hz.

The BBC specified supertweeters on some of their monitors from the late 1960s.

There's that appeal to authority again. (-: I can only speculate as to why they did that. Maybe there were valid reasons I'm not aware of; maybe they were simply over-engineering; maybe they believed marketing; maybe they had a budget to spend. Oh hey, maybe they were making programmes for dogs?

Ah, Google.

http://www.markhennessy.co.uk/rogers/others.htm

the BBC started the LS3/6 work again and finished it. Rogers took on the manufacture and they proposed adding the HF2000 super tweeter which the BBC approved.

So the BBC didn't specify it on that speaker; rather, the manufacturer suggested it and the BBC didn't say no.

Maybe they used their ears?
I genuinely don't know.

Surely we can rig something up to test this.

Anyone know any Cathedral organists?
They use sounds way beyond the standard range of human hearing, don't they?
A bit of Googling suggests 8Hz.
[url= https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_stop ]Link.[/url]

So the BBC didn't specify it on that speaker; rather, the manufacturer suggested it and the BBC didn't say no.

Supertweeters were also used in the Spendor BC-1 and SP-1, maybe the designer also didn't know what he was doing and had learnt nothing from his pioneering work at the BBC Research Dept (the BC-1 was designed whilst he worked there and was later used as a monitor by the BBC).

the addition of the superteeter "improved the overall dispersion characteristics"

see :

I always preferred vinyl to CD, until I bought a pair of speakers with an extended bass - so much more info on the CD.

I think that video was made for April 1st and deemed to stupid to bother with at the time. I mean, who would fall for that?!

the addition of the superteeter "improved the overall dispersion characteristics"

see : http://www.cicable.de/pdf/bc1story.pdf

Nicely cherry-picked. "This addition was for purchase tax reasons" is what that document says, the improved dispersion characteristics (whatever that means) and broadcast breakout detection (presumably looking for out-of-bounds signals?) are listed as happy side-effects.

I'm not convinced, sorry. Sounds to me like a tax dodge hidden in a spot of audiophile smoke and mirrors, and any differences in sound is for the benefit of detection equipment rather than human ears. Which, y'know, are all valid reasons but won't improve your listening experience one jot.

[i]who would fall for that?![/i]

And the use of a bloke famous for wearing something over his ears... its just silly.

If you're aiming for near perfect transient response within the audible spectrum it cannot be achieved unless the frequency response extends beyond this bandwidth and then rolls off with a gentle slope with no resonant peaks or dips.

I'm not convinced, sorry. Sounds to me like a tax dodge hidden in a spot of audiophile smoke and mirrors

where's the audiophile smoke and mirrors in that letter I linked to ?

that doesn't necessarily imply that it magically changes what we can hear.

No it doesn't but if you want 'proof' of that all you need to do, indeed all you [i]can [/i]do, is ask someone if the music sounds different.

There is no ontological test to proove that you hear something differently because of the addition of higher frequencies except for self report (which is only that person's reality; it's not an external reality).

If you want a higher confidence interval, you need to ask a lot of people, but I won't struggle to find a lot of people who will report this phenomenon to you.

All you can ask for in this situation, where you require 'proof', is that there is empirical, physical data that shows situation A (music without higher frequencies) to have a different cause to situation B (music with those higher frequencies). The 'effect', is metaphysical; I can no more prov that someone hears something differently as being 'real' than I can prove that that peson is even conscious.

I would like to say this didn't go as I expected it to, but I think a tiny part of me knew what was coming.

Right, I am off to buy a directional unobtanium cored HDMI lead.....

CGG - that's real info.

+1

All you can ask for in this situation, where you require 'proof', is that there is empirical, physical data that shows situation A (music without higher frequencies) to have a different cause to situation B (music with those higher frequencies). The 'effect', is metaphysical; I can no more prov that someone hears something differently as being 'real' than I can prove that that peson is even conscious.

But that's not true, is it? You could prove it fairly readily and conclusively with a properly controlled double-blind test to see if a suitable sample size of people can reliably hear any difference.

If you're aiming for near perfect transient response within the audible spectrum it cannot be achieved unless the frequency response extends beyond this bandwidth and then rolls off with a gentle slope with no resonant peaks or dips.

That sounds plausible, though I guess that's really about working around shortcomings in the reproduction equipment? Ie, if you're filtering right on the edge of what someone can hear then you presumably risk a form of clipping; or perhaps it's simply not possible to filter to that degree of accuracy, I don't know; but if you can't hear it you can't hear it, end of story, surely?

As an analogy, would we buy Dulux claiming that their purple paint is better because it's visible in the ultra-violet range? It's patently nonsense, we can't see it, so why are our ears special?

You may all be right, I'm not a sound engineer and there may be more technical goings-on that I simply don't understand. But the Hi-Fi and AV industries are absolutely rife with BS and sorting fact from wild claims is challenging. And quite interesting.

As is the bike industry.
Frame materials anyone?

You can only experiment and trust your own judgement.

At 35 grand I'd expect bluetooth, cables my arse.

But that's not true, is it? You could prove it fairly readily and conclusively with a properly controlled double-blind test to see if a suitable sample size of people can reliably hear any difference.

Er yes, quite, that's precisely what I'm saying. But approach to data collection is is still based on self report of what people say they hear. It cannot prove, externally, what they [i]actually[/i] hear.

Your problem is going to be the sample (rather than the size). If you asked 100 'audophiles' their opinion, you will almost certainly get a very different positive response rate than if you asked 100 people who, like my wife, were either tone deaf or 'amusical'.

You could try to sample those two 'populations' evenly but then your data would be inconclusive; it would just tell you that some people can hear a difference and some can't. In that scenario, you might as well make the objective of the study the differences in hearing perception between individuals, rather than whether there is any actual differnce.

So then you'd try to get a graduated sample, but then how would you do that? You'd have to prequalify people first but you could only do that by using the very test parameters your hoping to use to prove whether there is a difference in the audible spectrum or not.

Ultimately, we agree in some way, which is that the only data you can really use to prove whether the conjecture is true or not is self report data but that's been done time and time again among the audiophile commnity and I can assure you that they (audophiles, and I include myself in this sample) can hear a difference in this test.

As an analogy, would we buy Dulux claiming that their purple paint is better because it's visible in the ultra-violet range

Did you see the worldwide phenomenon of 'thedress' earlier this year. A picture of a blue and black dress posted on the web elicited 50% of the population claiming it was white and gold.

That sounds plausible, though I guess that's really about working around shortcomings in the reproduction equipment? Ie, if you're filtering right on the edge of what someone can hear then you presumably risk a form of clipping; or perhaps it's simply not possible to filter to that degree of accuracy, I don't know; but if you can't hear it you can't hear it, end of story, surely?

Pretty much everything in hi-fi is about working around the limitations of the reproduction equipment.

According to standard filter theory any change in magnitude will cause a change in phase and the quicker the rate of change of phase, the greater the group delay and thus the worse the transient response. Sharp filtering close to the audible spectrum will result in under-damped response, which you can hear as ringing in the treble region.

Bear in mind this is true whether the filter is acoustic, mechanical or electrical - the acoustic filter caused by narrowing of dispersion as the wavelength approaches the diaphragm size will cause the same problem.

As an aside, this is an interesting read: http://nwavguy.blogspot.de/2012/04/what-we-hear.html

....I wonder what happened to NwAvGuy?

At 35 grand I'd expect bluetooth, cables my arse.

Bluetooth is so last year, WiGig is where it's at now....

Is that what Donald Trump uses?

Pretty much everything in hi-fi is about working around the limitations of the reproduction equipment. [etc]

Interesting; I think I follow most of that! Thanks.