Oh boy - sensitive subject for me. The "20-20k" thing is very generic and highly person-dependent (I used to be able to hear ultrasonic alarm systems. That is long gone, but they really hurt when I could - somewhere around 28khz I think?)
You don't "hear" music at the high end - (well.....) this is what "Attack" is (oh man, this is rough, but...). Middle-C is about 261Hz, and 6 octaves above that (does anything normally play notes this high? Other than a synth?) is a bit over 16.7khz. A "High C (soprano C) is only two octaves above Middle-C. Think of a cymbal crash (miserable example) - nearly all of the "crashiness" is very high freq response, but the actual "sound" is quite low. Lack of response on the high end of things will cause a "muddiness" - the cymbal won't "crash" as vividly. The "freq response range" is going to be where the phones are "most flat" in their response - but I guarantee that either will reproduce frequencies well above and below those ranges. It just won't be as "flat" a response to them. You tend to more physically feel the low-freq sounds and hear the effect of the high-freq response. Notes and what one thinks of as music is all well in between - roughly 100-2000hz or so. A bit higher for soprano stuff. There's a good chance you know all this already, but there you go. To justify the additional $20, do things old school. Play short sections of music that you like and know well through both. You are not listening for particular frequencies as much as "realism" as you, personally, define it. Measurements are generally useless (unless you are trying to prove that the more expensive/wider range phones really are NOT ;-) since individuals vary dramatically in what they actually hear. I love data as much as the next guy - but feel that data in this respect really doesn't help much. JC On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 4:26 PM, Ed Nisley <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 2011-08-31 at 14:52 -0400, Joseph Apuzzo wrote: > > but both headphones have a wider frequency range > > Pure, raw, unadulterated specsmanship! > > For a quick test, go to (for example) ... > > http://www.audiocheck.net/ > > ... to determine whether you can hear the test tones. If you can't, then > any further tests won't be useful. The descending tone from 22 kHz to 12 > kHz should be revealing. > > Some years ago a virus ate my hearing down from the high teens to 3 kHz > in one fell swoop. For *sure* I'm not going to be hearing any difference > between those headphones and, say, an old landline phone... [sigh] > > -- > Ed > http://softsolder.com > > > _______________________________________________ > Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org > http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug > > Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium > Sep 7 - DIY 3D Printing and the Makerbot Thing-o-Matic > Oct 5 - Distributed Authentication Systems > Nov 2 - Nov 2011 > -- Eschew obfuscation and pompous prolixity. Light a man a fire, he is warm for the night. Light a man afire, he is warm for the rest of his life.
_______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Sep 7 - DIY 3D Printing and the Makerbot Thing-o-Matic Oct 5 - Distributed Authentication Systems Nov 2 - Nov 2011
