Headphones are actually capable of much better sound than speakers on a performance-per-dollar basis. Why, then, don't people use headphones more for high-end listening? The answer, we believe, is that there are some fundamentally unnatural things about the way you perceive the location of the sounds you hear on headphones, and that artificiality gets in the way of having a gratifying listening experience.
Scientists and engineers have been working on the problem of fixing the sound from headphones for a long time, but there has never been a large enough economic justification to put the necessary resources into the problem. Today, that is all beginning to change: the incredible growth in portable player use; the large numbers of people using headphones with their computers; and the generally more mobile lifestyle of today's music and movie fan make headphone listening a potentially significant activity.
This has renewed commercial interest in solving some of the psychoacoustic problems of headphones, and has spurred a number of companies to develop products and technologies intended to make audio sound more natural on headphones.
The sections in this area of our web site discuss some of the more technical aspects of headphone listening. If you're a pretty scientific kind of person you'll get a kick out of it; if you don't have a thing for techno-babble, just buy one of our amps, turn the crossfeedon, and forget about it. You'll enjoy it just the same.
How We Hear
The beginning of our crossfeed explanation is learning about human hearing.
Headphone Imaging Problems
Headphone Imaging can be problematic, learn about what happens here.
Fixing Headphones Using Electronics
It's all about Ben Bauer... learn about what he did, here.
Using Computers to Fix Headphones
The beginning of the story about how computers can fix headphones.
