just an idea but you guys could mimic podcasts and make a youtube channel for clips of the livestream with the most interesting moments/topics, going through 4 hours is tough =p
Soundstage is the most important sound characteristic for me, which doesn't mean I only use headphones that have the largest soundstage - it means I refuse to use headphones that have no soundstage or a small soundstage. HD650 is one of my favorite headphones, and I find it to have an average/medium or above-average soundstage. I don't know about others, but using headphones with no soundstage or a small soundstage is an awful sensory experience. Fortunately, I've come across very few headphones that have a small or worse soundstage, and funnily enough, most of them were open-backs.
Also depends. My sundara have a pretty wide soundstage but only in one axis basically, left to right. Front to back its much smaller but not sure if thats just the nature of headphones in general.
Yeah I'm confused as a majority of people say they have zero soundstage, but I find that hard to believe for an open back headphone. I don't know where that assessment is coming from, as an urban myth that gets spread out from a sub subjective review, and gets parroted online without real basis in reality
This "fight club" and comment section is hands down my favorite. Also, Resolve, I'm 100% here for your philosophical exercises, and I think we could all probably use a few more of them. Mayo-related: Put mayo on the outside of grilled cheese bread instead of butter. Zingy deliciousness....
I feel like the Neuralink idea would be better for allowing people to hear what other people hear on the same headphone to show difference in HRTF rather than between different headphones.
Whatever people call it, openness, spatiousness or a perceived sense of spatiousness headphone "soundstage" is an affect a lot of people enjoy and value above many other aspects. That said I noticed and think many would notice that as it somewhat correlates negatively with macrodynamics and overall clarity it doesn't necessarily win over those qualities the more you compare and pay attention. Like an HE6se V2 has a particularly small sense of space, but every other aspect is great and thus wins over most spatious sounding options.
You are very correct and this only comes from experience. I really preferred my dt770 for a long time due to soundstage, and since was used to this tuning i was disappointed at the Azurys. But the more listened and compared finally started to appreciate the Azurys more after getting used to their tuning. Because their accuracy, and much more refined performance. I wish to find a headphones with the best of both worlds
Regarding gaming with headphones, soundstage is a detriment. I mainly play Overwatch and what really makes me play better is something that just blares the important sound cues in my face. In this case, narrower with good imagining is more beneficial. Focal open backs are generally really good for this.
For gaming my best competitive experience was a Grado with a gaming DSP(I lost the DSP moving from a soundcard to DAC so it was one of my earliest audiophile setups.) Chasing competitive imaging/localization & premium passive headphones are mutually exclusive pursuits IME as the magic is all in the software. Outside gaming 'soundstage' is a probable coloration that I find correlates to less fatigue & more enjoyment: space/room size, separation/instrument size. I don't hear layering or imaging beyond standard panning mastering trickery.
Hello, my Schiit Asgard has stopped working I’ve had it for several years should I have it repaired or replaced with something new? Using HiFi man 4xx, DT 770 pro, Sennheiser 6xx & HD 580. Thanks for the advice in advance
Look into the Vali 3, there is an extensive forum thread on them on head-fi, upgrade the stock tube for $20 (if you want) and your good to go for under 175. Allot has changed in the 5 years since the asgard came out. And the reviews on the Vali 3 have been excellent.
Soundstage is a misleading distinction imo. Soundstage implies that all headphones are made with soundstage in mind. People often forget that a manufacturer might just be looking for their own kind of sound presentation, and that presentation just has a variation of that quality. For example my Focal Radiance has good sound separation and I like how it presents sound, better than any other headphone. Of all things, guitar sounds are always presented intimately and physical to the ears. I demoed DCA E3 one day thinking I'd go home with an upgrade but I ended up not purchasing it, because it had too much soundstage and it didn't at all replicate the physical sensation guitars have when listening to my Radiance. Soundstage is just a type of imaging quality. Just another presentation aspect of a headphone. Some headphones absolutely have soundstage in mind. Like HD800S. Some others, like Focal, don't have stage in mind. Instead they have dynamics. Air vibrations and physical impact is just Focal's way of presenting sound. Some people will say Focal headphones have a "small" soundstage. I would say they just have a unique approach to imaging. Its a completely different premise, because I don't think all headphone manufacturers care about soundstage. To me, I think my Focal Radiance has "enough" soundstage. Not too much and not too little. Enough stage to make imaging and separation far better than consumer level headphones I've tried in the past, and not so much stage that it would rob Radiance of its physical sound qualities. Demoing the E3 made me realize that I don't actually want a big soundstage. tldr - Everything is a tradeoff. Soundstage is too.
Cool to see the HD800(s) get so much love from you guys. I reckon there’s EQ involved? Love mine with a bit of bass shelf and 6,5k-ish cut. ADI-2 DAC gang here, cheers for a cool hang!
Listening skill is a very big deal. How can someone who only listens to studio produced pop music or (please god) rap possibly understand soundstage in the same way someone who's experienced live symphonic music for decades? You people really need someone on the team who has extensive experience with orchestral music, opera, and ballet. This is music that studio produced shit cannot be compared to. Want to test a set of headphones? Hire someone who has listened to different recordings of a Bruckner symphony recorded in different concert halls and knows what the differences should be.
Have you guys thought about clipping these streams? I wish more people would hear conversations like the one about soundstage, but it is buried pretty deep here.
I was listening to iem sound demoes. And i found squig link. When i EQed my iem to a specific model and i listen to it does not sound like what i heard in the demo. There after i stayed away from sound demoes.
squiglink graphs are snoothed out. They reflect totality but not close to how iems actually sound at all. Also different measurer have different pattern, gizaudio and superreview have very different measurement for elysian pilgrim for example. U should only compare graphs that comes from the same measurement taker.
But with headphones, given the use condition of being worn on the head where the sound is effectively coming from no direction, unlike speakers at a distance, perceptually it DOES end up sounding kind of like things originate in the head - at least with stereo recordings. Contrast this with binaural recordings, or speakers at a distance and it becomes a more obvious distinction. Everything else people are chasing with soundstage is just an enhancement to the cues contained in the recording. Like... the more you look into 'soundstage' the more it stops making sense even as a concept in the first place.
Sound-stage matters if what you're listening to is mixed properly, and a good headset can give extra flavour to something that sounds flat. I'm guessing that people who don't value soundstage, or actually think it objectively takes away from sound / clarity, probably have some overlap with people who enjoy overly tinny, piercing headsets. This most likely has something to do with their overall hearing degradation with age. But that's just like, my opinion maaaaaan.
Without a good soundstage you do not have High Fidelity! I was taught decades ago from a true Hi Fi speaker CEO that the difference between Mid Fi and Hi Fi was Sound Stage and Timbre Coherence.
In the speaker world, that's more or less true. Headphones don't soundstage properly though, they can just be made to sound artificially large, like the HD800. That effect is inconsistent at best across a variety of recordings, and often comes with peaky treble that nobody enjoys listening to unless it lines up with a dip in their HRTF. It's a cool tech demo and party trick that makes music sound like steaming shit. That's the caveat we're working with here. Recordings that are made to stage properly on speakers require alteration to the actual recording itself in order to stage on headphones. No amount of acoustics is going to make you hear a mix of both drivers with each single ear with the proper time delay and directionality and field response to perceive soundstage the way you would on speakers. It's all made the fuck up. I'm a big believer in DSP being a way forward here, but nobody seems interested in doing it properly. Timbral coherence is 100% crucial though. Just to music in general.
re: weird music me: *laughing in gagaku* Btw the disagreements on ethics were very cool. Love it. Who would expect to hear Hume or Kant mentioned in an audiophile stream!
I think soundstage is the least important aspect of any headphone. Plenty of great headphones have been ruined attempting to achieve a good stage but ones like the hd600 and focal clear are among the best for a reason. If a headphone has a bad signature or is painful to wear it's a deal breaker, soundstage is a tiny thing in comparison. A lot of people I talk to seem to think separation and layering are the same thing and thats where a lot of confusion arises
Personally I don’t think so. Or, I think most people would differentiate them. Instrument separation is being able to clearly hear individual instruments while other sounds are playing. They don’t mash together into a homogenized macro view of sound, lacking perception of micro details. Good separation CAN help improve the sensation of soundstage though, but good separation does not always equal good soundstage (DT 880, HE-560, etc). Imaging is different too, or perhaps another aspect of soundstage: Imaging is being able to hear direction from where an instrument would be. Some people also refer to it as how clearly focused an instrument occupies a space; rather than being diffused and seeming to come from “somewhere generally over thereaways, approximately.” Soundstage is like the depth and distance you can hear. It’s an illusion since the drivers are literally very close to your ears. A lot of different traits go into helping create the sensation of soundstage. The ability to seem far away. The contrast between near and far. Sound outside your head (rather than the sound seem to emit from a point directly between your ears, inside your head).
Those more recently seated at the head table must take care not to erode the benevolent and inclusive gestalt that resolve, in his wisdom, has fostered here on TH-cam over the years. ☮️
Nothing in HiFi actually matters. It’s all just frivolous pursuit with no real consequence. Do you want your tombstone to read: Listened to 20,000 hours of nice sounding music. Doesn’t matter.
just an idea but you guys could mimic podcasts and make a youtube channel for clips of the livestream with the most interesting moments/topics, going through 4 hours is tough =p
Agreed!
Please at least timestamp the part, where you discuss the question raised in the title, thank you.
Edit: Thanks for timestamps!
Album/music recs 1:00:03
GoldenSound:
Thylacine (Album: and 74 musicians)
GoGo Penguin (Track: Murmuration)
Alarm Will Sound (Album: Acoustica)
Resolve:
Gojira
Tord Gustavsen Trio (Album: Being There)
Children of Bodom (Album: Hate Crew Deathroll)
Mad_Economist:
Tarahan
SKALD
Listener:
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Social Network Soundtrack & Challengers Soundtrack)
Hiatus Kaiyote (Album: Love Heart Cheat Code)
Clairo (Album: Charm)
Soundstage is the most important sound characteristic for me, which doesn't mean I only use headphones that have the largest soundstage - it means I refuse to use headphones that have no soundstage or a small soundstage. HD650 is one of my favorite headphones, and I find it to have an average/medium or above-average soundstage. I don't know about others, but using headphones with no soundstage or a small soundstage is an awful sensory experience. Fortunately, I've come across very few headphones that have a small or worse soundstage, and funnily enough, most of them were open-backs.
Also depends. My sundara have a pretty wide soundstage but only in one axis basically, left to right. Front to back its much smaller but not sure if thats just the nature of headphones in general.
Yeah I'm confused as a majority of people say they have zero soundstage, but I find that hard to believe for an open back headphone. I don't know where that assessment is coming from, as an urban myth that gets spread out from a sub subjective review, and gets parroted online without real basis in reality
This "fight club" and comment section is hands down my favorite. Also, Resolve, I'm 100% here for your philosophical exercises, and I think we could all probably use a few more of them.
Mayo-related: Put mayo on the outside of grilled cheese bread instead of butter. Zingy deliciousness....
I feel like the Neuralink idea would be better for allowing people to hear what other people hear on the same headphone to show difference in HRTF rather than between different headphones.
Whatever people call it, openness, spatiousness or a perceived sense of spatiousness headphone "soundstage" is an affect a lot of people enjoy and value above many other aspects. That said I noticed and think many would notice that as it somewhat correlates negatively with macrodynamics and overall clarity it doesn't necessarily win over those qualities the more you compare and pay attention. Like an HE6se V2 has a particularly small sense of space, but every other aspect is great and thus wins over most spatious sounding options.
You are very correct and this only comes from experience. I really preferred my dt770 for a long time due to soundstage, and since was used to this tuning i was disappointed at the Azurys. But the more listened and compared finally started to appreciate the Azurys more after getting used to their tuning. Because their accuracy, and much more refined performance. I wish to find a headphones with the best of both worlds
For a headphone show, the audio sounds pretty bad.
good mics torn apart by discord call quality
Feed your brainworms with mayo to increase soundstage
Regarding gaming with headphones, soundstage is a detriment. I mainly play Overwatch and what really makes me play better is something that just blares the important sound cues in my face. In this case, narrower with good imagining is more beneficial. Focal open backs are generally really good for this.
For gaming my best competitive experience was a Grado with a gaming DSP(I lost the DSP moving from a soundcard to DAC so it was one of my earliest audiophile setups.) Chasing competitive imaging/localization & premium passive headphones are mutually exclusive pursuits IME as the magic is all in the software. Outside gaming 'soundstage' is a probable coloration that I find correlates to less fatigue & more enjoyment: space/room size, separation/instrument size. I don't hear layering or imaging beyond standard panning mastering trickery.
Hello, my Schiit Asgard has stopped working I’ve had it for several years should I have it repaired or replaced with something new? Using HiFi man 4xx, DT 770 pro, Sennheiser 6xx & HD 580. Thanks for the advice in advance
none of your headphones are terribly hard to drive. Get a JDS Atom AMp 2
Look into the Vali 3, there is an extensive forum thread on them on head-fi, upgrade the stock tube for $20 (if you want) and your good to go for under 175. Allot has changed in the 5 years since the asgard came out. And the reviews on the Vali 3 have been excellent.
Soundstage is a misleading distinction imo. Soundstage implies that all headphones are made with soundstage in mind.
People often forget that a manufacturer might just be looking for their own kind of sound presentation, and that presentation just has a variation of that quality.
For example my Focal Radiance has good sound separation and I like how it presents sound, better than any other headphone. Of all things, guitar sounds are always presented intimately and physical to the ears. I demoed DCA E3 one day thinking I'd go home with an upgrade but I ended up not purchasing it, because it had too much soundstage and it didn't at all replicate the physical sensation guitars have when listening to my Radiance. Soundstage is just a type of imaging quality. Just another presentation aspect of a headphone.
Some headphones absolutely have soundstage in mind. Like HD800S.
Some others, like Focal, don't have stage in mind. Instead they have dynamics.
Air vibrations and physical impact is just Focal's way of presenting sound. Some people will say Focal headphones have a "small" soundstage. I would say they just have a unique approach to imaging. Its a completely different premise, because I don't think all headphone manufacturers care about soundstage.
To me, I think my Focal Radiance has "enough" soundstage. Not too much and not too little. Enough stage to make imaging and separation far better than consumer level headphones I've tried in the past, and not so much stage that it would rob Radiance of its physical sound qualities. Demoing the E3 made me realize that I don't actually want a big soundstage.
tldr - Everything is a tradeoff. Soundstage is too.
This guys vocal fry is killing me😂
Cool to see the HD800(s) get so much love from you guys. I reckon there’s EQ involved? Love mine with a bit of bass shelf and 6,5k-ish cut. ADI-2 DAC gang here, cheers for a cool hang!
02:47:40
Well, that's certainly not something I would have ever expected to come up on one of these streams
Listening skill is a very big deal. How can someone who only listens to studio produced pop music or (please god) rap possibly understand soundstage in the same way someone who's experienced live symphonic music for decades? You people really need someone on the team who has extensive experience with orchestral music, opera, and ballet. This is music that studio produced shit cannot be compared to. Want to test a set of headphones? Hire someone who has listened to different recordings of a Bruckner symphony recorded in different concert halls and knows what the differences should be.
💯 👍👏👏👏
thanks for the gain on the stream audio. This is great. appreciate it
Have you guys thought about clipping these streams? I wish more people would hear conversations like the one about soundstage, but it is buried pretty deep here.
Which 7 thacoustics do you mean? Wheres best place to get them?
I was listening to iem sound demoes. And i found squig link. When i EQed my iem to a specific model and i listen to it does not sound like what i heard in the demo. There after i stayed away from sound demoes.
squiglink graphs are snoothed out. They reflect totality but not close to how iems actually sound at all. Also different measurer have different pattern, gizaudio and superreview have very different measurement for elysian pilgrim for example. U should only compare graphs that comes from the same measurement taker.
In a parallel world soundstage is deemed to not matter by this discussion and all headphones hereafter sound like the voice inside your head
But with headphones, given the use condition of being worn on the head where the sound is effectively coming from no direction, unlike speakers at a distance, perceptually it DOES end up sounding kind of like things originate in the head - at least with stereo recordings. Contrast this with binaural recordings, or speakers at a distance and it becomes a more obvious distinction. Everything else people are chasing with soundstage is just an enhancement to the cues contained in the recording. Like... the more you look into 'soundstage' the more it stops making sense even as a concept in the first place.
ok so i'm listening to this late but goldensound is surely hallucinating the thing about a whole esports team wearing susvaras right? there's no way
Sound-stage matters if what you're listening to is mixed properly, and a good headset can give extra flavour to something that sounds flat. I'm guessing that people who don't value soundstage, or actually think it objectively takes away from sound / clarity, probably have some overlap with people who enjoy overly tinny, piercing headsets. This most likely has something to do with their overall hearing degradation with age. But that's just like, my opinion maaaaaan.
Without a good soundstage you do not have High Fidelity! I was taught decades ago from a true Hi Fi speaker CEO that the difference between Mid Fi and Hi Fi was Sound Stage and Timbre Coherence.
In the speaker world, that's more or less true. Headphones don't soundstage properly though, they can just be made to sound artificially large, like the HD800. That effect is inconsistent at best across a variety of recordings, and often comes with peaky treble that nobody enjoys listening to unless it lines up with a dip in their HRTF. It's a cool tech demo and party trick that makes music sound like steaming shit. That's the caveat we're working with here. Recordings that are made to stage properly on speakers require alteration to the actual recording itself in order to stage on headphones. No amount of acoustics is going to make you hear a mix of both drivers with each single ear with the proper time delay and directionality and field response to perceive soundstage the way you would on speakers. It's all made the fuck up.
I'm a big believer in DSP being a way forward here, but nobody seems interested in doing it properly.
Timbral coherence is 100% crucial though. Just to music in general.
#letListenerTalk
Audio levels were great on this one. Thanks gentlemen
Putting Sean on Toast on my next bingo
re: weird music
me: *laughing in gagaku*
Btw the disagreements on ethics were very cool. Love it. Who would expect to hear Hume or Kant mentioned in an audiophile stream!
You guys should check out the Jameszoo Album with the Metropole Orkestra.
I think soundstage is the least important aspect of any headphone. Plenty of great headphones have been ruined attempting to achieve a good stage but ones like the hd600 and focal clear are among the best for a reason. If a headphone has a bad signature or is painful to wear it's a deal breaker, soundstage is a tiny thing in comparison.
A lot of people I talk to seem to think separation and layering are the same thing and thats where a lot of confusion arises
"IEMs are lo-fi"
If IEMs are low-fi, then what closed-back headphones are?
@@juanblanco7898 almost as bad as IEMs
They are worse than iems.
Resolve flexing with a new pair of headphones each stream 🌚
You guys should try out hunt showdown once it releases the new Update
"Does Soundstage ACTUALLY Matter?" Not to me.
It depends on the taste of the listener.
The streams are way too long lol
That’s 4 hours I could be listening music for!😅
I wish they were longer. I think the majority of the internet collectively has ADD caused by Tik Tok and TH-cam shorts.
You know you can just stop watching them and then come back whenever you want, or not. This isn't a doctors appointment.
@@mikecast20 the doctor can MRI and bandage a broken leg before this Livestream is finished. I wish they would do an actual podcast.
I am confused as to the difference between soundstage and instrument separation. Does good separation imply a wide soundstage?
Personally I don’t think so. Or, I think most people would differentiate them.
Instrument separation is being able to clearly hear individual instruments while other sounds are playing. They don’t mash together into a homogenized macro view of sound, lacking perception of micro details. Good separation CAN help improve the sensation of soundstage though, but good separation does not always equal good soundstage (DT 880, HE-560, etc).
Imaging is different too, or perhaps another aspect of soundstage: Imaging is being able to hear direction from where an instrument would be. Some people also refer to it as how clearly focused an instrument occupies a space; rather than being diffused and seeming to come from “somewhere generally over thereaways, approximately.”
Soundstage is like the depth and distance you can hear. It’s an illusion since the drivers are literally very close to your ears. A lot of different traits go into helping create the sensation of soundstage. The ability to seem far away. The contrast between near and far. Sound outside your head (rather than the sound seem to emit from a point directly between your ears, inside your head).
Often even the opposite. HE6se V2 as fantastic separation, but tiny stage.
I really enjoyed the philosophy debate. 😄
Those more recently seated at the head table must take care not to erode the benevolent and inclusive gestalt that resolve, in his wisdom, has fostered here on TH-cam over the years. ☮️
God I hope this is sarcasm
@@ChrisStoneinator Hopes are nothing but wishes soaked in creosote. 🪣
Headphones dont really produce proper soundstage no matter what, so no not really.
Nothing in HiFi actually matters. It’s all just frivolous pursuit with no real consequence.
Do you want your tombstone to read:
Listened to 20,000 hours of nice sounding music.
Doesn’t matter.
Ayn Rand is back from the grave, everyone. Take your objectivism to the dead, please. The living shouldn't need to suffer for it.
Andrew Stop using Lords name in vain.
If you think it's cool, it's NOT.
Goad!! If we could get rid of the bigots! Jesus Christ
and I thought my ex-wife could rattle on forever. Good grief. Find girlfriends.