HEADPHONES

Different headphones; different delights — Stephen Dawson goes hunting head-fi.

Different headphones, different delights — from $299 planar magnetics to ear-stroking electrostatics, we hunt throug the levels of head-fi to discover how much sound you can get for your money.

Designing high quality headphones must be one of the hardest tasks demanded of the hi-fi- manufacturer. With just about everything else, the ‘target’ is clear: a flat frequency response. The whole chain of reproduction depends on an implicit agreement that each piece of equipment does its best to keep the balance even.

Headphones? Not so much. They inject their sound directly into the ears of the listener. There’s almost no intervening air, no shaping of the tone by the listener’s head and ears, no change in angle by which the sound enters the listener’s ears. Headphones with a flat frequency response sound pretty terrible. What we want are headphones that deliver a realistic sound, but into our own private worlds without bothering outsiders too much.

So headphone makers have to tune the sound, but every potential customer is different. With the endless flood of hi-fi headphones and audiophile headphones, these days it’s about finding something that makes the magic happen for you. And that means that while we can give

some guidance, you simply must listen yourself before making a final decision.

It’s also worth checking what magic can be heard at higher prices — listen a rung or two above your preferred price bracket, but also to some true exotica, either at a specialist with such stuff permanently on demonstration, or better still at a hi-fi show, where the widest possible range will be available to hear, glowing valve headphone amps and all. ‘Everyone should drive a sports car once’, a wise dealer once said, because if you’ve never driven one, how do you know if you might want one? Even if you don’t, it provides a reference level against which to judge others.

We did put a lid on this test in price terms, but we’ve covered quite the range, from $299 to $1299. We thought we’d end up with a mix of traditional wired and Bluetooth models. In the event, almost all the models are wired (which largely eliminated differences to do with codecs). And the one Bluetooth model is utterly different to any other set of headphones on the market... SD