A non-work-related post! (Audiophile geeking)

[dryfter]

The headphones I ordered on Monday arrived this afternoon - a pair of Sennheiser eH-250 supra-aural 'phones.
Sennheiser's site was annoying - the PDF specs of the HD25's (their benchmark headphones) contain more information than the eH series does, but on the limited info available for comparison, they seem inferior. However things like sensitivity and the range on which they provide a flat response doesn't tell you anything about attack, decay, or how tight the response is to any given frequency. Hmph.

Then again, these weren't exactly expensive headphones. I'll see how they sound after they've been run in for a couple of days.


(
Attack: Delay between start of a signal, and when the speaker is vibrating at that frequency
Decay: Opposite of Attack
The "tightness" of the response is probably the wrong term - what I mean is, if you provide a signal on a single frequency, eg. 1000 Hz, then a speaker will actually produce a response that varies a bit either side - say from 995 Hz to 1005 Hz, with a certain roll-off either side of the peak at 1000 Hz.
)

Comments

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

Attack: in absolute terms, you're not going to notice this. What may be an issue is phase shifting which can be frequency dependent, but given that I've never seen it mentioned anywhere I'm guessing it's really not important to anyone for this application.

(If the unit has a clean response up to around 20k, then it must be capable of moving fast enough to meet that response, and you are probably incapable of noticing most artifacts of that duration.)

Decay: I suspect this is exactly the same.

Tightness: most audio equipment gives a measure of harmonic distortion, or THD (the amount of your 1k input signal that ends up at 2k, 3k, 4k etc.) What you are talking about is non-harmonic distortion, which is mentioned much less often so is probably not important (because on a driver that isn't actually broken, it should be sufficiently low that you just can't hear it.)

What the numbers don't tell you is whether they sound any good, but that's dependent purely on you, and the only way you can judge is to go out and try a whole bunch of different ones out.

Physical attributes such as weight and pad pressure/texture are going to have a much greater effect on your listening enjoyment.

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

*nods* I tried 'em on too before buying them.

Oddly, the shop that had various display models in it, didn't actually want to sell me one. They simply didn't stock them. They didn't think it was strange that they had display models out then..