One of my obessions: Headphones. I own a few pair of excellently-constructed, and great-sounding headphones. Not too expensive, all of them are on the lower realm of the price range. They all look, sound, and feel, quite different. They are all great in their own ways. But if you look and listen hard enough you realize each pair of headphones opens up their own little sonic Universes.
It's a rabbit hole, for sure. I do lots of serious close listening. Put on a pair of headphones and a unique sonic Universe is revealed.
You want to know which pair of headphones are the best? Ha. Aye, there's the rub.
I recently had an email exchange with one of my favorite headphone makers, I asked a question about two different models, wondering if there were "sonic differences." The anwswer was maybe obvious, slightly confounding, and pretty much perfect:
"You’re asking the question we get asked all the time and feel we can’t answer. How do we quantify a subjective topic? What we hear and our preferences differ from person to person, making it impossible for me to tell you what you’ll hear. Then determining if the difference is worth the cost can’t be done."
Yes. Reminds me of that Philip K. Dick sentence: "You are the authority." I would add two extra words to that idea: "You are the authority, of you."
Go to a headphone site such as DIY-Audio-Heaven and you will quickly get lost in soundwave charts, and detailed descriptions of features and functions of all kinds of headphones. And you quickly, inevitably drop into a knotty, gnarly, mystifying philosophical discussion: Are you a Subjectivist, An Objectivist, or an Inbetweenist?
Right. Kind of interesting. No clear anwsers. The more you look, the more you see, the more you hear, the less you know. And you realize it's not all about the headphone, it's also about you. You end up in your own little hall of mirrors. You can read expert opinions, you can study all the fancy, colorful charts, you can try to be a bit "scientific" in your studies, but finally, definitely, you have to put your headphones on for yourself, and you are left with your own head, your own pair of ears, your own internal, & personal experience of what you hear when those soundwaves start to bounce around inside your body. You are your very own uniquely-you instrument of perception. You, and only you, get to decide what's what. Objectively speaking, it is all quite a subjective thing, indeed.
This topic totally resonates with me, and rattles around with complex reverberations. I imagine that it opens up into all realms of my life. Life, and all the phenomena contained within it is what you see, what you feel, what you hear, what you think, what you know, and really, what don't know too. Wisdom, it seems to me, is to know that ulitmately what you know is quite limited, bounded by the vast sea of what you really don't know at all. And of course, you don't know what you don't know. A conundrum right there. A deep lesson in reality and perception. A lesson played out in your own head and body. Headphones, a heady topic, no doubt. You are left with questions, lots of questions, for instance: What do you hear? How does it feel? Do you like it?
