Dave,
listening to loudspeakers really is great, I like the spatial projection of the sound into the room and the feeling of moving air on my skin which I clearly perceive even when listening with moderate volume. However, only when using headphones there’s that certain joy of discovering new and subtle details in tracks which I believed to have been knowing in depth throughout nearly my whole life.Originally Posted by dave2010
I even got used to the typical in-head location, but I clearly prefer open headphones. There’s a pair of really fine AKG K271 headphones in the shelf behind me, but these are closed-back types which give me a certain claustrophobic feeling when wearing them.
Guess I’m leaning more toward headphone listening. I very well remember a certain moment back in my youth when I heard my own field recordings with the radically open Sennheiser HD 414 for the first time. I was working freelance for the Austrian radio broadcasting, producing some kind of outdoor ambient features called “Hörbilder” (“sound images” or “soundscapes”) and “Kopfhörer” (translated literally from German the title of our radio show would be “head listener”, which is the same word used for headphones in German) with Uher Report and Nagra reel-to-reel mobile tape recorders. Once I recorded a feature with the then famous Neumann dummy head condenser microphones, which of course sounded tremendously breath taking and three dimensional with open headphones.
The details I noticed with the HD 414 headphone simply where overwhelming.
Especially for you I included two more headphone pictures in my post ;-)
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