Your Headphones Might Be Butchering Your Music (Why I do what I do)

Join Resolve as he discusses why he's into headphones and what brought him to the headphone hobby.

Want to discuss this video? Start a discussion about it on our forum by clicking Start Discussion below!

Below this point will be a transcript of the video:

Imagine for all of your life, you've only ever eaten unseasoned food, like no seasoning whatsoever, no salt, no pepper, nothing. Then one day you go to a nice restaurant and you have some wonderfully seasoned food or whatever, a really nice dish of something. It'll change your life. It'll completely change your worldview of what food can be. And that's kind of how it is with headphones and why it's something special for me. And maybe it is for you as well for similar reasons, or maybe it will be. But this is sort of my story when it comes to how I got into this and why I continue to love it. So let's get going. 

Okay, so this is actually a topic that I've started on our forum. I'll leave a link to that in the description. And it's basically to ask the question of what makes headphones special to you. And so that's kind of what prompted this video. And this is going to be kind of my answer on that topic. Of course, feel free to give your answer on the forum thread as well, and that's at forum.headphones.com. 

And speaking of headphones.com, they are what makes all of this possible. They are the ones who support and fund this channel. So if you like what we're doing here and you find it interesting or valuable, consider supporting us by checking out headphones.com for your next audio purchase. So I've told this story in a number of places, but I've never actually done like a proper video on it. So that's what we're going to do here today. 

So back in the day, I was a drummer. I wasn't a particularly good one. I'd say I'm a bit of a failed musician. But when I ended up moving to the city to go to university, I wasn't able to take my drum set with me. It would have been way too loud and disturb all the neighbors around me and everything, and so it was just something I wasn't able to set up where I lived in the city. So I had to get an electric drum set. I went down to my local music shop, and I bought an electric kit from a brand called Roland. And as part of the deal, they had some bundle where they threw in a pair of drumming headphones. And this was from a brand called Apex. 

And then for whatever reason, I thought to myself, okay, I'm wearing headphones a lot. I'm playing drums a lot. I should look into maybe getting some better headphones. So I ended up buying the Denon D1001, which people now might know as the Creative Aurvana Live or the EMU Purpleheart. And it was a decent headphone at the time. But the big thing for me was the insane contrast between that headphone and the Apex drumming headphones that I'd been using for, you know, however long. And just how absolutely horrible those Apex headphones sounded in comparison to the Denon D1001. 

You don't realize how terrible the thing is that you use every day until you have something that's decent to compare it to. So I remember that was my first moment of being like, oh, I need to listen to all of my music again because I haven't actually been hearing my music appropriately because I've been listening to it on this shitty Apex headphone that just, it sucked. And I distinctly remember that sort of recognition that the music that I'd been listening to, there's actually just so much more to the music. There's more in the recording that I just wasn't aware of or wasn't able to pay attention to sufficiently. 

The thing that really stood out for me was that I could hear all these additional bass lines that just didn't really exist properly with the other headphones that I'd been using. Like they just sort of blended into the background and we're sort of this, this mush that was going on. Whereas with the Den and D1001s, it was like, oh my God, there's this extra entire element to this recording that creates harmonies with whatever's going on on top of it that I didn't know existed. 

And so it wasn't just like, oh, I like this headphone better, or I like the tonality of it better. It was like the experience of listening to music has been meaningfully enriched as a result of this thing that I bought. Like it was to the point where a track that I previously thought was maybe a little bit, you know, simple now had all this additional complexity and sophistication that I just didn't, I didn't realize was there in the track. I would describe it as kind of like realizing that there's all these new layers to this stuff that you thought you were familiar with to the point where you realize you actually are not familiar with it and you need to go through everything again. And ever since then, that's the dragon that I've been chasing. 

Now, I would say that throughout my journey in this hobby, there have been a number of key inflection points. One was obviously that one, getting to hear the D1001 for the first time, being like, oh my god, there's something here. The next was when I ended up getting the Hi-Fi Man HE500, and it delivered on basically everything. It lived up to what the promise of this hobby was for anybody who was aspirationally getting into it. And then of course I dipped in and out over the years, but eventually found myself getting more and more interested in the science side of things, in understanding how to evaluate headphones better, understanding, you know, how headphones can be measured, all that kind of stuff. And here we are today, much to everybody's disappointment. 

But I wanted to give you guys my sense of what makes this hobby special. And I don't think that it's just to be able to hear the music, you know, as the artist intended. I don't think this is at all about trying to tick that, you know, reference box to say, you know, that this is, you know, how it's supposed to sound or anything like that. I mean, I can understand wanting that, but that's not what it is for me. And it's also not about just having nice gear. I think, again, there's a lot of interest in this because people feel like, hey, I should have a nice thing. And these are, this is the category of nice headphones, so I should have one of them. 

To me, it's much more about the value you place on the experience of listening to music. And it's having had that experience of going from really bad headphones to some decent headphones that really demonstrated to me this is something that can really enrich the experience. Good headphones can enrich your experience with the music that you love in ways that most people can't even begin to understand. 

So they don't even know what their music contains. If you think about it, most people have no idea this world exists. They from whatever you know crappy earbuds they might have they've never actually had the occasion to engage with the full range of what the music can potentially deliver like the the kind of experience that the music you know that they're already listening to can potentially deliver. 

Imagine for all of your life you've only ever eaten unseasoned food like no seasoning whatsoever no salt no pepper nothing then one day you go to a nice restaurant and you have some wonderfully seasoned food or whatever a really nice dish of something it'll change your life it'll change your worldview of what food can be. And that's kind of how it is with headphones, and quite frankly, the relationship that you have to music. That's what it's all about, for me at least. So let me know down in the comments below what this hobby means to you. I'm always curious what other people's path or trajectory is in this space. But that does it for this video. Once again, if you'd like to connect with me or other like-minded people, you can do so in our Discord, also linked below. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye for now.