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Introduction - Audio Hell
The purpose of assembling a mass of popular and eclectic headphone audio equipment is different for every person.
Without detailing every way a person could enjoy headphone audio I would like to say I first and foremost love music.
Delivering music from author to listener has changed drastically and rapidly since the invent of the phonograph.
I've learned most everything I know about audio, like with most things, from my father. He has been pondering hi-fidelity
since he auditioned a set of ADS 810 floorstandin speakers to use with his Denon DP-1200 turntable during the late 70s.
His stories about that time were about how valuable it was to know how the sound gets to the listener. People without his
acquired knowledge would sink tons into amplifiers, or the turntable itself without thinking about the transducers.
Full circle back to reasons to amass headphones - headphone audio is neat because headphones house transducers!
This is where you will experience the most or hopefully the least color in your audio path. The amount of distortion that
comes from a transducer has to be particularly engineered for accuracy or a compromise to remain musical. In this day
we have digital sources eliminating one whole transducer, the needle/cartridge, from the audio path my father was
accustom to back in the 70s.
With newer, cleaner, sources we should be able to criticise the presentation of our favourite recorded events, movies, and music.
This new clean era of ours has been muddied by a lot of greed. There are only so many ways of putting together an amplifier
and everyone wants to say their sound is magical. We have so much control these days with advances in engineering that
it's possible for those with the knowledge to build their own audiophile grade headphone amplifier for under $80/unit if
they were to make even a small run of PCBs.
Today's cost effective materials and abundance of engineering knowledge an absolutely serene source and amplification is well
within the reach of anyone willing to wade through the marketing lingo and statistics and... well Audio Hell. I've compiled a number
of sources, amplifiers, and headphones in order to prove the worth of transducers, the importance of a clean source, and chastise
the human mind for constantly adapting to better accept the things which annoy us.
Stay tuned and follow this thread for a rather lengthy comparison and look at some neat pieces of equipment.
Table of Contents
1. Getting to Your Ears: The Signal Chain (#post_pt1)
2. Sony MDR-V6 (#post_pt2)
3. Fischer Audio FA-003Ti (#post_pt3)
4. MrSpeakers Mad Dogs 3.2 (#post_pt4)
5. The End of MOG as I knew it (#post_pt5)
6. The Inevitable Return to Lossless/Signal chains revisited! (#post_pt6)
7. Sennheiser HD 650 (#post_pt7)