Headphones
Sep. 26th, 2002 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cdybedahlAt work I've got a pair of Beyerdynamic somethingorother headphones. They're pretty good. They were the first even remotely serious headphones I ever bought, costing around $100. When I first got them, I was surprised how much better they sounded than the old $40 Sonys I'd got as a birthday present from my father.
So, having realized that I actually could hear the difference between good headphones and not so good ones, I decided to buy a pair for home use (so I could listen to music without disturbing the wife). And, I thought, I'd buy a really good pair. Costing maybe twice as much as the work ones. I asked an audiophile co-worker which brands were good, and then went to hifi store to listen to them.
I walked out of the store with a pair of $350 Sennheiser HD600:s.
It was a "bloody hell" kind of experience. They were the most expensive ones the store had, and I tried them out just to see if I could hear the difference between them and the ones I'd been thinking about getting. I could. Big-time. Like, night-and-day kind of difference. I told the guy at the store that I wanted them, but that they were a tad more expensive than I'd planned for, and could I maybe return them if I after all didn't like them after a few days? "Sure," he said. "We don't normally do that, but for those, sure. They're addictive. Never had a pair returned yet."
When I'd got home and plugged them in, I put an album I know very, very well in the CD player and turned it on. KaTe Bush's "The Dreaming", to be precise. It's an album with lots and lots of small, strange sounds in it, and I've listened to it several hundred times at least. I know that album. Suddenly I could hear tiny little things in the far background of the songs that I'd never noticed before. The sound in these things is so crystal clear. Next, I put on a Sisters of Mercy album and heard a stupidly deep bass drum that I'd just plain never heard before. Never before head a speaker or 'phones that could reproduce frequencies that low...
And the reason I'm blathering about this is that I got Fields of the Nephilim's album "Dawnrazor" the other day, I've been listening to it most of the day at work in the phones there and now I put it on at home as well and the difference in sound quality is still there and it's still bloody huge.
So, having realized that I actually could hear the difference between good headphones and not so good ones, I decided to buy a pair for home use (so I could listen to music without disturbing the wife). And, I thought, I'd buy a really good pair. Costing maybe twice as much as the work ones. I asked an audiophile co-worker which brands were good, and then went to hifi store to listen to them.
I walked out of the store with a pair of $350 Sennheiser HD600:s.
It was a "bloody hell" kind of experience. They were the most expensive ones the store had, and I tried them out just to see if I could hear the difference between them and the ones I'd been thinking about getting. I could. Big-time. Like, night-and-day kind of difference. I told the guy at the store that I wanted them, but that they were a tad more expensive than I'd planned for, and could I maybe return them if I after all didn't like them after a few days? "Sure," he said. "We don't normally do that, but for those, sure. They're addictive. Never had a pair returned yet."
When I'd got home and plugged them in, I put an album I know very, very well in the CD player and turned it on. KaTe Bush's "The Dreaming", to be precise. It's an album with lots and lots of small, strange sounds in it, and I've listened to it several hundred times at least. I know that album. Suddenly I could hear tiny little things in the far background of the songs that I'd never noticed before. The sound in these things is so crystal clear. Next, I put on a Sisters of Mercy album and heard a stupidly deep bass drum that I'd just plain never heard before. Never before head a speaker or 'phones that could reproduce frequencies that low...
And the reason I'm blathering about this is that I got Fields of the Nephilim's album "Dawnrazor" the other day, I've been listening to it most of the day at work in the phones there and now I put it on at home as well and the difference in sound quality is still there and it's still bloody huge.
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Date: 2002-09-27 01:53 am (UTC)