Tangential: is it just me or speakers made a huge leap forward over the last 20 years? I mean for given price range. Laptop speakers, headphone speakers, car speakers, any minisystem/potrable stereo speakers. Was there some prominent techonolgical improvement or just a miriad of small improvements?
I suspect a lot of the improvements have come from advancements in simulation fidelity and optimization techniques. The raw amount of computing power for computational fluid dynamics has gone up orders of magnitude, and there's been a lot of improvements in machine learning over the last 10 years. 20 years ago, it was still very much an art of designing a shape, fabricating it, trying it, then refining it. Nowadays a lot of that refinement can be done virtually. Not that someone at Boss or whatever is an ML expert, but the person that wrote their CAD tools might have been.
Also, there has been recent emphasis on rather aggressive software based automatic/factory equalization and optimization for human perception rather than flatness. That's an incremental improvement, but like smartphone camera photos, it can really elevate the experience.
Yes. It's not just fancy magnets, but that helps. The industry got much better at modeling and designing dynamic speakers about 20 years ago. Low cost IC amplifiers also got a lot better in the last twenty years, and anything decent that's fully integrated (i.e. name brand connected speaker devices, airpods, the speaker in your phone, etc) is going to have shockingly good DSP equalization by the standards of even 2005-2010.
I don't know about headphones per headphones, though. All the audiophile-approved headphones I have around here sound much better than my airpods and my Bose noise canceling things for travel, and they're all 20+ year old designs. That includes the Koss Porta Pro (back on topic!), by the way, which I like a lot better than anything I've listened to that cost less than an approximate order of magnitude more. There certainly seems to be a market for headphones that cost more than a pair of Sennheiser 650s these days though.
On the value side, I totally agree. Early 2000 offerings were just... sad, partly due to the over-digitalization (I own a Marantz from that time, which forces many optimizations, Dolby support and similar, but in the end sounds considerably worse than its cheaper predecessors).
For how I see it, in the last year there has been a huge increase of sound quality over price, probably partly due to the growing Chi-Fi competition (especially on headphones).
I bought some sad Sennheiser IEMs in 2015 for around €160, and in 2022 they sound like garbage compared to some €40 offerings from China IEM brands (KZ, TRN, ... whatever).
Also, awareness of Bluetooth and wireless sound quality has thankfully brought to something beyond extremely expensive devices that just sounded like excessive DSP and compression.
Neodymium magnets helped to make them more powerful wrt size, and I suspect newer materials also made easier building small full range speakers where one would have needed at least separate woofer and tweeter, which wasn't convenient in cheap devices. The membranes of many small speakers from portable devices look like they're made of two concentric sections having different consistency and optimized for higher and lower frequencies, so that the same speaker can reproduce a much larger spectrum. That's probably far from being anything audiophile, still much much better than the quality of any similarly priced speaker from say the 80s.
Yes, they did. What used to be considered very expensive state-of-the-art architecture is now pretty much universal: each driver with their own amplifier and electronic crossovers. The perfection of h-bridge amplification has been a major leap forward.
Hadn't noticed before but speakers haven't suffered the same fate as other tech where additions and improvements of tangential aspects haven't affected the core performance. A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. Your new printer might have Wi-Fi and bluetooth, but jams and leaks too often and probably has increasingly restrictive cartridge DRM.
A typical $30 bluetooth speaker has great battery life, is portable, usually rugged and often visually well designed too, and still sound as nice or nicer than I (non-audiophile) would expect from such a versatile budget device.
> A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power.
I don't know if I can agree with that. An M1 MacBook Air costs less than a thousand bucks and has more CPU power than anything that was on the market, mobile or not, before 2020.
I bought a $400 laptop in 2011. Trying to upgrade it in the years after for something at the same price point was an exercise in frustration - when almost every new mobile Intel CPU ended with a "U" and had the computation reduction that came with that.
I think you're fooling yourself. A characteristic 2011 mobile part would have been something like a Core i3-2350M, and a very comparable more recent part would have been the i3-8121U. They both had similar prices at launch, same core and thread count, but the later U-series processor is 2-4x faster depending on application and uses less than half the power.
The 2011 laptop was similar to that (i5-2410M) but the one you cite is from 2018. From 2012-2015 browsing for laptop deals to find an equivalent laptop for the same price point wasn't possible, never mind an improvement - I was worried about what to do if mine broke.
And yes the CPUs saw improvements at the same component cost, but actually finding a real laptop with even an equivalent CPU inside at the budget end wasn't possible. The laptops got features in some places, but at a cut processor cost. I'm talking about the lower end of the market (the M1 you mentioned is way way wayyy above there) for people who can afford the bare minimum. As you go up in price you get more options, but the low end was noticeably more difficult to purchase in if you weren't looking for the newer features and just wanted the same benchmarks.
It depends: I think the advent of MP3 pushed the concept of psychoacoustics* into the spotlight and the smartphone "revolution" made it mainstream.
Therefore speakers just sound like they would sound good without being physically "better". But for example your average smartphone is just one update away from sounding like crap.
My first half decent pair of earbuds were the Spark Plugs and I had several pairs of PortaPros before I realised they were blasting whoever was sitting near me on the tube! Good bits of kit and exceptional value for money.
My first ever "wireless headphones" were a a pair of standard PortaPros with a cheap bluetooth DAC taped to the top of them, got many strange looks, but it was a fun setup!
I never understood how they could make money on that deal. Those headphones were not built to last. I went through at least one pair a year back when I used them.
Maybe it was the sort of loss leader that's financed by the marketing department.
I've also had multiple pairs and they've all broken within a year from sitting-at-desk usage. The frame is surprisingly sturdy but the internal/external wires are absolute garbage, not suitable for frequent travel at all.
They sounded good while they were alive, though.
Last year I was traveling and needed a cheap pair of headphones (that I didn't care what happened to), so I grabbed a ~$18 pair of Koss UR20s. I was quite surprised at their decent quality & sound given the price, as my expectations couldn't have been lower. I'll probably get many years of use out of them given how they're holding up.
RIP. Not sure about their other headphones, but the portapro is great bang for the buck and the esp950 is technically inferior to stax but still a nice headphone and I generally like it.
I have a pair of esp/950 which are getting a bit old in the tooth. Very nice headphones, but also very expensive. I've been dithering between buying a new pair of headphones without buying a new amp, if that's possible, or then just getting rid of the entire package and buying something cheaper.
If you like the electrostat sound, you should check out the cheaper stax models like the L300 or L500. Generally they are more resolving and have better extension at the ends of the frequency spectrum than the esp950, which is kind of "soft" sounding and has a mid-forward frequency response. The stax use a different connector and voltage, so they won't be compatible.
Doubtful. You're probably into the range of diminishing returns with those. Switching will get you something different, and possibly more to your tastes, or more comfortable, not necessarily objectively better.
I personally love the sound of electrostatic speakers and would try an affordable pair of electrostatic headphones as a step up from that class of open-back dynamic headphones if I were in the market today, but I don't listen to headphones as much as I used to.
Yeah definitely, I had heard that hd650s paired with a nice amp were about as good as you could get for under 3-4K wasn’t sure if anything made it to market that’s been really revolutionary. Really my problem is music discovery. Spotify doesn’t really do it for me, it just finds more of the same and never invites me to branch out.
I built the nwavguy O2 kit from jdslabs and like it. It does perk up the Sennheisers and would probably work well for your headphones.
I don't hear a lot of difference between the Apple headphone adapter and jdslabs' "Objective DAC". The $10 Apple adapter might even be better than the ODAC, but it only works with my phone.
I haven't used Spotify in years; I think I never reinstalled it when my old laptop died in 2018. I could never get past the audio quality of their free tier, and never tried the paid tier. Maybe it's better now. Their recommendations back then for me were really odd; I can understand why some people would complain. I am about the only person that likes Amazon's streaming service but their recommendations are just bland-to-bad. I've noticed Pandora channels have become much more repetitive. Maybe the whole industry has been pushed by their metrics to some horrible least-common-denominator point.
Objectively, Sennheiser HD600 (closest to harman FR, low distortion, distortion is shaped to avoid midrange).
Subjectively, depends on the person. A majority prefers HD600, while some swear by the HD650, a colored (less neutral, warmer) version of it; I do prefer HD600 myself, while I've heard both extensively.
What’s “best” is, of course, quite subjective. That said, I tried a bunch around that price-point, and the Focal Clear was my favorite. I had the AKG k702s, and the Clear was a substantial step up.
In terms of sound quality, I want to say any of the planar magnetic headphones. It's hard to beat the agility and clarity of planar magnetic with dynamic drivers without spending a lot more money.
But planar magnetic headphones tend to be quite heavy and bulky, and you might be willing to sacrifice planar magnetic sound quality for comfort.
Never been able to try Koss headphones because of their unavailability (or availability at a near 100% markup) where I live, but they come highly recommended by the community from what I understand. Will grab a pair of KPH30i's when I can.
Also RIP to mister Koss.