Headphones + Frequency Range

02005-01-04 | Uncategorized | 3 comments

Tito Martinez said…Wow, I wish I had a pair of Stax’ for my studio. My only quetion is: With the hearing spectrum being from 20Hz to 20KHz, how useful is this extra definition? Is the frequency response flat, or are there any eq curves on them? I bet these things must sound freacking incredible, and then a tube amp to go with them… man!!! My budget allows me only to buy consumer grade stuff, so you bet I would give my right arm to mix a project with one of these.

Your right arm – would that be your strum and pick arm or your finger arm?

Over 40 years of age we would be lucky to hear 20-20K. Most likely we are left with hearing up to 16K, or less. Babies hear up to 20 or 22K, which is why I find it troublesome when parents bring little children to concerts and sit right in front of the speakers. We have often handed out hearing protection to babies and little kids who are brought to our concerts. Now imagine the possible damage when one takes a baby to a rock concert?

Anyway, I am going off the subject again. See, frequency is a funny thing. What you can’t hear is incredibly important to how you perceive a sound. In the early Eighties people thought they would only need 20-20K to make a digital recording sound as good as an analog recording. They were, of course, very wrong. Most digital recordings from those days sound terrible – brittle and sharp.

Then people figured out that even if you can’t perceive something above 20K, you will still hear it’s reflections and reverberations. In other words, the higher a frequency you can sample, the richer the sound.

Or, in case of the Stax: if your headphones, I mean Ear Speakers – Stax does not like their headphones being called headphones – go all the way up to 41K, you can be assured that you get all of the transients, the reflections, the reverbarations – all the richness of sound you so like to hear!

By the way, for an amazing listening room. all you need is a pair of Stax and a nice sub-woofer. Just imagine how much money you will save over buying a regular stereo. And if you live in an apartment, your neighbors will thank you. If I were to live in a city I would have a couple of small self-powered speakers, which I would connect to a laptop or iPod to play background music and then I would have a nice Stax plus self-powered subwoofer set-up for really listening to music.

3 Comments

  1. Tito Martinez

    LOL!!! That would be my picking hand (you’re good!). Thank you for the response. Very insightful. This is just like pitches coming out of musical instruments. When you play an E, for example, what you hear is not just the E, but a combination of frequencies that make up the overall sound. The string vibrates at varying levels, the dominant vibration being 83Hz. If we were to eliminate the other overtones, we would hear a completely different sound. These overtones (or frequencies) are there for a reason, to give the predominat pitch life and support. I completely understand what you are saying. Thank you.

    Reply
  2. Ottmar

    This post has been removed by the author.

    Reply
  3. Ottmar

    Exactemundo! It’s the subtle shit that always trips us humans up. Makes you wonder what sort of subtleties they will discover a few decades down the road about genetics, cellphone-waves etc…..

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Ottmar Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Archives

Images

Social

@Mastodon (the Un-Twitter)