Headphones VS Speakers, which is best, the strengths and weaknesses

Original Articles from Here

I’ve said this stuff here and there, but I think it’s time to make my opinions official. For a long time in the past, headphones were considered the bastard step-child of audio reproduction devices. Heck, they were considered accessories and sold along side cables and power strips in the past.

That time has come and gone (thank goodness) and today headphones are on a more even footing as the cadre of headphone enthusiasts swell the audiophile ranks and consumers rush to tune up their smartphone. But the question remains: Are headphones as good as speakers? Let’s take a look.

Visceral Impact:

Visceral impact is the ability to convey a sense of shear power and presence felt in the body as opposed to being purely heard. Bass that thumps your chest and impact that makes your eyes blink. Here, headphones simply can’t, and never will, be up to the abilities of speakers. Even with the aid of tactile sub-woofers like the Subpac products (which was interesting, but not a perfectly satisfying substitute) you’re simply never going to get the body sense of being in a room full of sound.

Advantage speakers.

Audio Imaging:

Here too, speakers have a distinct advantage: They actually make real sound that propagates through free-space and approaches your head in the same was sound from and instrument would. The effectively planar sonic wavefront bounces off your ears and provides cues to your brain in a perfectly natural way.

Headphones are acoustic couplers, and do not present the ears with sound in the same way as if they were receiving sound through real space. Headphones are a completely un-natural way to listen in that regard, and fall far short of sounding like sound coming from outside your head.

Headphones also prevent you from hearing sounds in both ears as you would in natural space. In front of a speaker system, you hear the left speaker in both the left and right ears. But because the right ear is slightly further away from the left speaker than the left ear, it hears the sound slightly after the left ear. This is called the “inter-aural time difference” (ITD); for a speaker 30 degrees off to one side of your head, the ITD is about 300 microseconds. This time delay between ears as sound moves off to the side is the single most important psychoacoustic cue used to identify the left-to-right position of a sound source.

Original Photo form Ask. Audio

With headphones, the left channel is heard only by the left ear, and the right channel is heard only by the right ear. That means any audio on one channel only (quite a bit with a stereo signal) is only heard in one ear. This is completely un-natural. The only time you ever hear sound in one ear only under normal conditions is if a bug gets into your ear canal and starts buzzing. Other then that (horrifying) situation, you always hear sounds in both ears.

In my opinion, this is why with headphones you very typically get audio images that reside inside your head, and are often characterized by a blob on the left, a blob on the right, and a blob in the middle.

Headphones don’t image nearly as well or naturally as speakers. Advantage speakers.*

* Crossfeed and “audio virtualizers” can help headphones image better, but, to date, I’ve never heard anything that sounds like it’s really coming out of your head. On the other hand, researchers are currently working very hard to get immersive and convincing audio imaging into headphones. I think that with significant improvements in headphone designs to improve transient response, the aid of DSP algorithms that synthesize HRTF (head related transfer function), and head trackers to provide acoustic feedback that matches head movement, we will at some point get headphones that can do pretty amazing things in terms of spatial cognition. Maybe even stuff that speakers would be unable to achieve. But in the end, I don’t think we’ll ever get headphones that deliver a natural (relatively speaking, as speakers aren’t as natural as the real thing of course) acoustic image as well speakers.

Advantage, still speakers.

Resolution:

This is where headphones, theoretically, smack-down speakers. Speakers have: multiple drivers; cross-overs; are distant from your ears, send sound through a room with indeterminate acoustic characteristics; and power amplifiers that have to produce lots of juice from multiple output devices. (All that, generally speaking, of course.)

Headphones have: a single driver (usually); an inch or two from your ears; and with low-power demand from the amp. No room absorption; no cross-overs; no room reflections; and the intimacy and silencing effects of headphones. How often have you heard the exclamation, “I put the headphones on my head and heard things in familiar music I’ve never heard before on speakers.”

On the other hand, headphones, in my opinion, are not as mature as speakers, and transient response on headphones has a long way to go before they really get good. None the less, I’ve heard detail and resolution on headphones that I’ve never heard on speakers.

Advantage headphones.

Summary:

Headphones will never have the visceral impact and imaging of speakers. And speakers will forever be trying to play catch-up with the resolution of headphones…and will find themselves falling further and further behind as time goes on.

But in the end, headphones are a completely artificial way to hear sound while speakers deliver sound in a natural way. There’s no doubt in my mind that given the opportunity, I will always prefer speaker listening. That opportunity, however, will never be available on an airplane, open office space, or while mowing the lawn. Truth is: A music lover will always be best served by a mix of both headphones and speakers in their life.

I’ll add that there is a special case with audiophiles and their big rigs. When listening to your main stereo system and find yourself confronted with sound that you can’t quite make out, having a good headphone system in your rig will allow you to more closely hear the sounds of interest. I think every big rig should have a headphone component.

Headphones, like speakers, are a legitimate way to listen, and both deserve their own categories in which to stand on their own merit.

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