Gadgetory

headphones I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket now and hopefully this video can help take some of the angst out of your next headphone purchase now we can drive ourselves crazy looking at all the different headphones out there that we can buy and chances are if you're a fan of this channel then you probably also agonize over other technology purchases combing through all of the specs and the reviews and the benchmarks on various phones and tablets and computers and audio equipment we do that because we care but audio equipment for many people can still be a mystery and it exists at this hellish intersection between professional and consumer applications there's an enormous amount of subjectivity involved when it comes to reviewing things like microphones and interfaces and speakers and cans this video as an overview will be far from comprehensive but it should serve as a decent place to start the conversation in before someone in the comments says this is a crap video because I didn't reference some obscure audio metric or I oversimplified a very complex audio concept rule number one for me and buying any piece of technology is setting a budget this is a dollar amount I refuse to go over and we can kind of fudge the numbers on things like smart phones maybe you're on some kind of contract or some kind of leasing program but if you're putting a lot of really expensive purchases on credit cards that might not be the best situation for your long-term financial health we should immediately diss a value of the notion that if you only have 20 bucks to spend on a pair of earbuds that you somehow can't get a decent pair of earbuds for that cash just to get our term straight we're gonna take a quick look at the different types of headphones starting off with cans these are circumaural headphones that means the ear cups will wrap all the way around your ears they shouldn't be squishing your ears in any way now personally I find circumaural over ear headphones to be the most comfortable for longer listening sessions and these are usually my go-to solutions for things like watching movies next we have supra-aural headphones or on ear headphones now these rest on your ears I don't find these to be as comfortable for longer periods of time but a decent pair of closed back on ear headphones do a better job of clamping to the side of my head and blocking out surrounding noise so I like these for when I'm working it's often the situation where I'm taking them on and off repeatedly while I'm listening whatever it is that I'm editing in video or an audio cans can come in open backed and closed backed varieties clothes bag varieties typically have an exaggerated bass response just because the cups are closed and that low frequency energy just doesn't have anywhere to go so it just keeps reverberating inside your skull now I actually don't own a pair of open backed headphones right now but those open ear cups should do a better job of letting sound frequencies pass freely through the headphone design and around your ears though obviously they won't do as good a job of blocking out any noise in your surrounding environment then we move to inner aural ear buds and these are the ear buds that actually go inside your ear canal for the really fancy stuff you'll often see the abbreviation IEM which stands for in-ear monitor and that's another tricky aspect of talking about headphones is that professionals typically call their progear monitors not speakers not headphones maybe we'll call them cans but monitors denote a particular focus on accuracy over trying to make music sound better so when a company is advertising a pair of studio monitors they're really saying we're trying to make an accurate solution as opposed to a consumer-grade solution which is probably going to influence the frequencies of sound to make music sound a bit brighter or a bit bassy or a little juicier lastly you've probably encountered these rest on your ear earbuds and I don't get snobby about a lot of things when it comes to audio but these things I really feel most consumers should probably throw away if you're listening to a lot of music on the go these things create such a poor seal around the year that you're probably listening to music louder than you need to and that kind of constant audio abuse will really wear out your ears over time and not a long period of time either we're starting to see evidence that the way we listen to music today that we can stream constant audio information into our skulls with very little interruption is degrading our hearing much faster than previous generations so these are fine to get you started but do yourself a favor find something that fits better and does a better job of blocking out audio around you so that you can turn the volume down a little bit and still have a higher quality listening experience for phone calls and music and now we're done with these if there's less environmental noise leaking into your ears then your audio will sound louder by comparison the two different ways that we have to block that noise are active and passive noise reduction passive noise reduction is really easy to explain basically you block the ear a closed back pair of headphones or inner aural earbuds should create a seal which blocks noise from your environment from intruding upon what you're listening to active noise cancellation works in a very similar way to how our phone works while taking phone calls there are microphones built into these headphones which sample the noise around us and then create an opposite audio signal which should eliminate a lot of constant background sound it is kind of magical the first time you use a pair of active noise cancellation headphones and you click that switch and then all of a sudden the hiss and background sound that you're just sort of naturally accustomed to vanishes the drawbacks to active noise cancellation though these are solutions that you need to charge so you need to charge them alongside your phone especially if you're listening to them for long periods of time throughout your day and active noise cancellation doesn't do a great job with sudden spikes of audio it's going to do an amazing job of killing the engine sounds while you're sitting on an airplane but if you're sitting next to a crying baby those shrieking crying baby sounds are probably going to cut right through now when you're buying headphones you're gonna see a ton of different numbers on the side of the box we're not going to go over every single minut audio detail there but one of the things that I do like to pay attention to is the frequency response the generally accepted range of human hearing is from 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz but for nicer headphones you'll often see those numbers swing wider than what our human hearing range is generally set at to be sure if you pick up a pair of headphones that are from 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz you're probably gonna be fine but one of the reasons why people look at expanding beyond that range even though we might not be able to hear below 20 Hertz there's a lot of information to suggest that we can still feel that audio information below 20 Hertz and that sound might influence frequencies of sound that we can hear so if your headphones have really good support for infrasound sound below 20 Hertz those lower frequencies might be bouncing around inside your head and influencing how higher frequencies of sound are reproduced now I'm in my thirties so I have a hard time hearing above 17.5 kilohertz I give myself pretty regular hearing tests but I still look for headphones that expand beyond that kilohertz range because I feel it's going to give me a more accurate sound profile when I'm listening to higher quality audio files they're going to do a better job of representing the frequencies of sound that I still can hear another important number to look at on the side of the box especially for people who listen predominantly on mobile devices like smartphones is the resistance or impedance I used to pronounce that impotence but that sounds like a completely different kind of problem impedance is measured in ohms you're going to see a number with a little fancy Kerli symbol next to that number and it loosely to oversimplify represents how much of the audio signal is cut before it makes it through those headphones really fancy studio grade equipment is usually plugged in to very powerful amps so you kind of want to make sure all those things are playing nice so that you don't blow out the headphones or worse blow out your ears now the headphone amps built into our phones are not nearly that powerful so the higher that impedance number goes the more difficulty our phones are going to have in producing a bright punchy err colourful audio signal that's why there can be some confusion when someone has a really nice pair of studio cans they plug them into their phone and all the sound terrible you're probably dealing with a situation of impedance audio impotence modern flagship smartphones they built over the last two or three years probably have amps powerful enough to drive mid-range consumer solutions anywhere around that 32 ohm resistance and you sometimes got to be careful with really nice smart phones my LG v10 which has a pretty decent DAC and amp combination can overdrive the 16 ohm earbuds to the point of distortion and that brings me back to one of my initial points for this video is that there is a huge amount of subjectivity involved when talking about audio equipment first of all just think about all the fights that we get into trying to figure out what a mid-range smartphone is the audio world is even more brutal when it comes to those kinds of discussions for an audio professional spending five six seven hundred dollars on a pair of in-ear monitors is often considered something of a mid-range purchase the studio that I work in to do a lot of voiceover casting uses mid-range microphones that cost well over a thousand bucks a pop even consumer solutions can get a bit skewed when we start talking about the differences between audiophile grade components and regular consumer grade listening experiences and where those price points should fall also you kind of need to take every headphone review with a little pinch of salt the shape of my head and the shape of my ear canal is going to greatly influence what frequencies of sound I pick up on when I'm listening to my favorite styles of music I can say to you that I think these earbuds are amazing but if they don't fit your ears the same way you're going to hear something very different than what I heard so while you can absolutely get a sense of trends really the best piece of advice before you throw down real cash on a pair of headphones is to see if you can try before you buy comfort is key if you don't enjoy wearing them then you're not going to use them so it doesn't matter if I tell you that these are fantastic cans for the price if they hurt your skull and lastly circling back to one of my earlier points these things don't need to break the bank we're seeing some really cool products coming out at entry-level price points these are fifteen dollar earbuds are they going to compare to my $700 in ear monitors no but they offer a perfectly respectable listening quality for music and podcasts and phone calls so folks I hope that's helped illustrate some of the things that you might want to take a look at before throwing money down on a pair of headphones obviously we can expand this conversation tremendously and I hope we will down in the comments drop some questions maybe I'll stick around to answer them as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more reviews and tutorial videos like these and make sure you hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram is some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video you