There’s 2 reasons I’m thinking about headphones a lot at the moment:
1. I’m aware that many of our Second Life listeners are listening back on rather poor equipment, and that an acceptable budget pair of headphones is the cheapest way of getting a reasonable sound when listening to your computer.
2. Playing live on SL a lot and getting a really nice mix in my headphones, as well as using headphone monitoring a lot in the studio, has made me even more intolerant of the lousy sound so prevalent at “real life” live gigs with PA.
For tracking in the studio, and for our SL gigs, we in Pillowfish use AKG K271 closed back over ear headphones. These sound really nice. They have quite good reduction of outside noise, they don’t leak sound into the mics, and they have a very open and natural sound. They compete well for sound quality with studio monitor speakers costing 10 times as much.
However, with a street price of around £80 they are what some might consider a little on the expensive side. Also, to sound their best they need a decent headphone amp, not just an ipod or laptop soundcard, and for RL live gigs for some reason it’s just not done to wear large over the ear headphones.
So, I’ve been looking at other headphones, specifically budget sets I can recommend for our fans, and also in-ear phones that we can use live, to get the same results as we now get with the AKGs but without the phones being visible.
We recently got a couple of pairs of the ubiquitous Sennheiser CX300 ear canal headphones.
These are about the cheapest thing I could find that promised to not be utter garbage. In fact they are cheaper than a lot of garbage phones.
The CX300 are now available very cheap, we paid £12.50 per set for ours. We got them to try out the whole idea of ear canal headphones for playing live, and to see if they were good enough to recommend to our listeners.
here’s what we found so far:
* they sound really amazingly good for £12.50 – I would certainly recommend them for anyone on a very tight budget, who wants to upgrade from nasty earbuds that came with their mp3 player, but can’t afford any significant amount of money.
* they are sensitive to correct positioning in the ear, like any ear canal phone, if they are not fitted tightly you will lose bass.
* they are much less comfortable than good over ear phones, but not bad compared to other in-ear phones.
* the attenuation of outside sound is not as good as the K271
* the sound quality, while good for the price, clear and punchy, is not remotely in the same league as the K271. (I’d be alarmed if it was) The CX300 lacks a sense of stereo image and being immersed in the sound, they can be a bit harsh in the top end and fatiguing overall (though nothing like as bad as the real cheapos) and the detail in quieter sounds and background sounds is not there compared to the K271.
* the CX300 are only 16 ohms impedance. That means most headphone amps can’t actually drive them correctly without losing bass. This has probably been done in order to suck more power out of tiny ipod headphone amps to get a decent level, at the expense of sound quality. Driving them with a good low impedance headphone amp will improve the sound a little, but if you have such a headphone amp why are you messing about with £12.50 headphones? (except as an experiment as I am). Bad design decision there. That said, they still sound good for the price even on an ipod or similar, so I guess Sennheiser sort of semi got away with it.
While I’m here I’ll mention the other set of headphones I have tried recently, these are Helen’s AKG K55 over ear phones. These are AKG’s ultra budget closed phones. They cost about £15.
The K55s are in roughly the same league as the CX300, but with different strengths and weaknesses. The CX300 is cleaner and punchier with a subjectively more even frequency response, however the K55s are more comfortable, with better imaging and immersion, and perhaps a little less fatiguing, despite a somewhat zingy high end.
To be quite clear though, our studio K271s are miles better in absolutely every respect than either of the budget options. Nevertheless, either set of budget phones would be a large step up from listening to a streaming SL gig on cheap computer extension speakers, or (horrors!) laptop speakers.
As far as performing live – If I had to – I could play using the CX300s for monitoring, and if fed the right signal they’d probably even be a step up from a typical PA monitor wedge – but they are so far behind the studio phones that I’m used to, that I’m compelled to look further, as I always expected I would.
The next step would be high quality earcanal phones like the Etymotics ER4S (£150) and the next step above that would be custom moulded in ear monitors. (£600) I don’t doubt that I’ll go to the custom ones eventually, but the price is prohibitive for now, so I might look into the Etymotic products in the meantime. Watch this space.
