Portable music and Headphones verses "earbuds" UPDATE

Gentle reader,

Yes, I know that I JUST made a post last night about Airsoft versions of Glock pistols. However, as music and accurate reproduction of music is one of my main passions, I wanted to write a post about headphones.

If you are of the Ipod generation that has transitioned to "smart" phone for your aural pleasure, you probably listen with earbuds. They are small, easy to pocket and unobtrusive. I get it, and believe it or not, in the audiophile (mostly guys, that have lots of money to spend on expensive equipment in the belief that they can buy good sound) world, one can buy custom-made-to-fit- your-ears, earbuds that cost several thousands of dollars. You read that right!

Think about it from those manufacturer's point of view: Our eardrums are TINY. Yet, before we get old, they are capable of hearing the deepest bass, 20 Hertz or cycles-per-second, to the highest treble, 20,000 Hertz or cycles-per-second. So, why cannot premium earbuds, with even tinier diaphragms inside them, be able to reproduce that same range of sound? I suspect maybe they can.

However, most casual listeners of the, (what is it now, Z generation?) are probably listening to MP3 music. Perfectly content with that because they know no better. "Know better that what?", you may ask. That to make digital music files small enough to fit lots of them in portable players and cell phones, they had to remove a lot of the music. Mostly at the top and bottom of the sounds. Since you are listening to your tunes through cheap earbuds, you have no idea that the music can sound a LOT better. a WHOLE lot better! So who invented MP3 anyway? 

According to Eureka People: "How Karlheinz Brandenburg invented the MP3. Brandenburg, part of the MPEG team, had been a PhD student at the German University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in the 1980s, when one of his professors instructed him to work on the conundrum of how one might transmit music over a digital ISDN phone line." 

What pleases me and the headphone industry, is a lot more people, are buying real headphones to listen to their tunes. Look around, I know that means looking up from your phone, and you too will see people using headphones. This is very good. 

If you know someone who is really into music and has a nice stereo at their place, ask if you can come over to see it and hear it. You won't be sorry you did. I had just such an experience in 1975 and there was no going back to what I thought was perfectly good sounding music.

Being that I am an old fogy, (old fart, if you prefer) I have been listening to music at home, in my car and at work since those 1970's. So, my idea of "portable music player" is this:

Lest you not know so, SONY for all practical purposes, invented portable music with headphones. Yes, "transistor radios" were the first and they came out in the early 1960's. But taking your OWN music with you and listening to it, well SONY invented the "Walkman" for that. They played cassette tapes. If you saw the fantastic film, Super 8, the clerk in the gas station was using a Walkman, thus not hearing the unseen monster outside the station. Others electronics makers quickly copied it, but SONY were the first. The silver thing above is a later iteration of the Walkman, it plays CDs and this one also has an FM radio in it. CDs like records which spin at 78, 33 1/3 and 45 RPM, are subject to skipping if the player is jarred. Well, the engineers solved that problem with CDs so they could be played in cars and in portable players like the one above.

You may be like, "CDs. Who listens to CDs anymore?" A lot of people do, they have gotten a lot better in quality than the first attempts back in the 1980's. SONY, by the way, along with Philips co-created the CD as well. I still remember being shown one in 1985 or so. An older friend asked me if I'd ever seen one of these, and he was holding a CD. I hadn't. He opened an early version of the player above, it had a window so one could see the disc spinning. He pressed "PLAY" and handed me the headphones. I listened, he then pressed "PAUSE" and the disc KEPT SPINNING! Then he pressed "PLAY" again and it started right where it left off! "How do they do that? I asked. He didn't know. Well that player cost hundreds of dollars back then and it would not be until 1995 before I bought my first CD. Only because the particular album I wanted did not come in cassette form. I didn't have a CD player, but my girlfriend (now my wife of 20+ years) had a CD boombox and I was able to play it. But I digress. This is supposed to be about headphones.

So, those headphones are similar to the ones that shipped with the player. The original 'phones ear cushioning foam fell apart. How I got those particular headphones is also part of why I decided to write this. Below is how I found them at a thrift store:

My mother and sister are life-long knitters so I bought them to show to them. Plus I wanted some smaller headphones to use with the Walkman as my only 'phones are way too big for that purpose. I was very curious what was inside all that red yarn. So I performed a headphone-ectomy. The headphones survived, but the knitting died. Inside were some really cheap COBY units. If you look at the font SONY uses and the one COBY uses, well imitation is the sincerest form of flattery or perhaps they were hoping people would think they were buying a SONY product. 

See what I mean? They sounded OK, but only OK. Probably not much better than earbuds, which I have never used. So, I'd read that Radio Shack was back in business with the idea they would go back, somewhat, to what they were famous for. Intrigued, being a lifelong Radio Shack customer, I went to the local store to see. To my surprise and delight, they had things I hadn't seen in YEARS. They even have "transistor radios"! What I was looking for was better headphones than those COBY ones, but still light enough to use while moving along. They had a few and I picked out a pair of fold-able ones:

"AUVIO" is Radio Shack's high-end products line for the discerning audio and video customers. And these headphones do sound very good. 

Well, the R/S clerk told me they had a buy-one-get-a-second-for-half-off, sale, so I picked out another pair of AUVIO headphones:

I liked the red color and they seem of high quality and looked comfortable. And they are. 
 

 

Now, these particular headphones have the dual purpose of having a microphone as well for computer use, I suppose.

Note the extra ring on the plug above, near the black part? That's the microphone's connection and that black thing is the mike itself.

These two sets of 'phones sound really good, yet being "closed-back" they are unsuitable for using while walking or riding. While one can enjoy the music, they can't hear outside noises that one might need to hear for safety's sake.

Here are a couple of the headphones that I have had in the past:

Both sets are KOSS brand. Very expensive when new, in fact I could not afford them then. Each was a thrift store find. As you can see, I had to replace the plug on the HV/1A models. This was before I got good at such things.

The HV/1A models are "open back" design. See the slots inside and outside the colored ring? This is similar in purpose to the "reflex port" on some speakers. They also allow the wearer to be aware of sounds around them. The foam on these were also rotted away, and I found ones of similar size at, wait for it....Radio Shack!

These are also vintage KOSS professional headphones. They are closed-back as you can see. The substance, whatever it was inside the black ear cushions had fled the scene years ago and replacement ones from KOSS were smaller is size, so I devised a way to put them inside these cushions. Black RTV glue sealed the holes I'd made to insert the new cushions.

I don't know what the silver thing is for above. Perhaps to put a microphone on the headphones. One can still buy the descendants of these. They are called PRO 4AA, or maybe 4AAA by now. Be prepared to pay a lot, however.

I have not had either of these for many years. Frankly, the PRO 4A ones are not very comfortable for long listening use. 

I subscribe to several Audio magazines these days and decades ago read High Fidelity, Stereo Review and Audio. None exist today, I think Stereo Review joined with a video magazine and thus still exists in spirit, at least. 

While most things in Stereophile and The Absolute Sound are WAY beyond my humble means, I still read them for the music reviews and less expensive products they review sometimes. One of the writers, (when did writers become "editors" anyway? Isn't the Editor's job to edit what the writers wrote?) anyway, one of them was raving about these Audio Technica headphones that used to be JDM* but were now available in the USA. From their "AIR" line, the ATH AD700 models were what he was talking about. I found them for a fraction of retail at a camera store on line. *Japanese Domestic Market. In other words, not made for export. I think the car industry invented the JDM acronym.

I have been just thrilled with them too! Take a look:

Most headphones clamp to your head. Frankly, this can get old. One of the reasons I don't like going to the shooting range is the ear protection (like most headphones) hurt my head after a while. THESE do not clamp. The little devices at the top, REST upon the top of your head and the music making parts REST on your ears. Rather they rest AROUND your ears. These things are big!

Obvious by the many holes above, these are clearly open-back design.

The two photos above clearly show just how big they really are. Oh, but one quickly forgets how silly they might look with these on once the music starts!

UPDATE!

We decided to stop by Tuesday Morning, a local store that sells a variety of stuff, usually at a great discount. My wife was looking for a couple things, and as often happens, MANY things are picked out. I found two things, a book I've been wanting, but forgot all about: WINNING The Racing Life of Paul Newman by Matt Stone and Preston Lerner. Yes, THAT Paul Newman. Awesome book, which I'm nearly done with. AND a perfect set of compact, but high quality headphones made by KOSS, as in the two pairs I used to have above. They are PRO35A units which you can see below:

As you can see, they have titanium drivers. Titanium is a very hard metal. It seems to me it would not be suitable for drivers, being inherently stiff. But since the drivers are small....All I do know is that they sound very good and I'm happy with them.

The black device on the cord is a sliding attenuating device. A volume control, in other words. If you can read the specs on the back of the package above, it shows they put out 103 db @ 1meter with one watt. That is a SPEAKER measurement, not a headphones measurement! But anyway, they are very comfortabe, sound great and are just what I was looking for to use walking or riding.

TA-DA!

If you really, truly want to hear ALL the music and sounds the artists and musicians went to so much trouble to make and the recording engineers and producers worked so hard to make the music sound just so, buy some really good headphones and plug them into your AV receiver and play some music! You DO have an AV receiver for enjoying all the surround sounds in your favorite movies and shows, right?

No cell phone or other portable device that plays less than 100 per cent of the music honors all those that made the music in the first place! So do your self a favor and really get into your "tunes" the way they were meant to be enjoyed!

Last words:

One drawback to my getting interested in something, as this exercise and post has done, is started me in on collecting headphones! When will it ever end?!

Thanks for looking!

Scott