so in the video Z brought up the point of if we had these in the 70’s why are headphones not better than they are now?
I have a theory on that where I have done no research I was just thinking about it while cooking lunch and watching his video. one it’s down to how the music culture was over time as . in the 70’s and 80’s we had a lot of rock and metal started coming into fruition most people heard songs through vynil and radios and in the 90’s cassettes and CD’s. except for radio all those formats were expensive and in the70’s the most portable way to really carry your music around were boom boxes and cars which are using speakers meant to share music. then cassettes came and in the late 70’s sony came out with the walkman which never really caught on till the 80’s that to me marks where music started becoming more personal where using headphones started becoming a more popular thing. like I said I’m no expert on anything but I have always been under the impression where headphones were mainly used by studios and radio DJ’s for mixing and mastering and they were quite pricey why the akg k240 took off with it’s great value proposition at the time. so normal consumers wouldn’t buy something like a headphone unless they were more hardcore. SO when portability started coming into play in the 80’s with the headphones that shipped with the walkman that’s when we started seeing things like the porta proa cheap portable headphones. adn we started seeing copies and copies of the same headphone. I don’t qute know what to say about the 90’s aside from CDs srted becoming more popular and you have the iskman but to me the 80’s with the walkman were the biggest shift in mentality. the second biggest shift would be when the ipod came out which shipped with the classic apple eabuds this is in my theory at least where we started thinking about carrying music digitally but is a step backwards in gear. we went from porta pro style headphones down to earbuds specifically what shipped with that apple stuff. and here si the thing most people don’t like change that much if you give them the earbuds and it breaks and they already know how it sounds they will either go and grab the same ones or something cheap. so from in the 200’s most people were using cheap earbuds and the only people using “expensive” headphones, like Beyers and sends and Fostex or akg are enthusiasts or people that work in the space like producers and DJs. but another big shift was about to happen Dr. Dre came out with beats now credit where credit is due Beats put the idea in peoples heads what good audio costs I’m not saying beats is good audio but it introduced people to a new price point headphones that cost above a $100 and not your cheap skull candies or sony’s you took off the shelf but over a hundred dollar pair of headphones. but along with that shift, we started getting people like MKBHD, Linus and other techtubers that also brought the idea of No Beats are shit but here are other good headphones you should try out thus the popularity of the M50x as well as Massdrop’s headphones. as well as the shift in cellphone technology as we now have the capabilities to play lossless files out fo our cellphones which is huge, Spotify premium came out, Tidal people want to listen to music the best they can with what they can afford. we also have all the new cheap Chinese IEMs and headphones that contribute to headphone improvements. The internet is also great you can see it in forums and reddit where people are curious about audio and want to get into it looking for guidance. honestly I think we are at where we are now not because we just had a few too many steps backwards and now just catching up to where we are supposed to be at this point.
another thing I want to bring up is speaker tech was popular in the 80’s and 70’s more popular than headphones and vintage speakers still sound Great and sound Great now but you can now observe a huge cultural shift with speakers where people are less interested in 2 good speakers and ow going into sound bars that bounce audio around walls and ceilings to portray surround sound or just cheap speakers in general with stuff from razer and logitech
TL DR : I theorise on how headphone progression is not that great over time because of the consumer mentality and shift in music consumption and how we had a few step backs and are catching up now because consumers have changed perspectives on high quality audio and pricing
this is a cool perspective, I really got into audio because of Youtube and seeing other’s mention that “hey, you can get better sound than those iPhone earbuds” and at first I was like there is NO way spending $80 on headphones will be worth it but I did it and I was blown away by the difference. Grado’s man…
(earbuds were like $5-$10 a pair so spending that kind of money on cans was a bit skeptical)
The 90s and 00s were kind of a wasteland for audio as to me at least the focus was on computing and ease of use/portability. As if everyone was desperate to make cyberpunk happen lol.
I mean it’s still not great as your average consumer is still being fed bunk ease of use stuff like soundbars. But at least the market is there now.
But yeah tech does this a lot. For example we had full array local dimming in monitors as far back 2009 but it was abandoned as brands wanted cheaper crappier panels and everything regressed in quality till about 5 years ago and were now just getting back to high end fald tech
It’s tough to bash the lack of enthusiasm (and reach?) of the hifi world today since the music most consumed today does not benefit when played on a good setup. Fix the go-to recording practices and you’ll see a growing interest in HiFi IMO
a ton of pop Music are pretty damn well recorded and clean actually. and benefits pretty well. even on the hip hop end of things which usally wouldn’t benefit that well .
I started hearing about carbon fiber and graphite coated woofer cones. The voice coil and speaker surround rubber/ foam. Radio started gettting graphic displays with 7-12 band eq, people in the know actually started to car how car audio sounded.
not saying there’s no well-recorded mainstream music (FRANK OCEAN - BLONDE album !!), just that the music - if it needs to hit the mainstream - it needs to sound a certain way
It depends on the band. A ton of mainstream music sounded like ass in the 90s and 2000s. This time it was the actual big budget artists having crappy production. The loudness war was in pretty big effect
Also started seeing component sets with separate mid woofer, tweeter and crossovers from companies like Infinity and Focal. It was a great time if you could drive and liked audio.
lol had that exact album in mind. also stuff like kids see ghosts, ginger by brockhampton, Damn by Kendrick. but even a lot of mainstream music can benefit especially with a lot of pop music these days going more simple like that one song with justin beiber and ed sheeran.
Random thought, with the car audio/ spl explosion came better speaker/sub woofer design, and ez access to digital eq’s…
Maybe more important were the amps. Why is it that headphone amps that produce 6 watts cost as much as car audio amps, no matter the class, A/B or D.
There is as much tech (in many automotive) amps , they require more material, and produce literally 100 times there power but cost the same or less…
Is that because of more completion in the car audio market, the price the market is willing to pay, or was it the 90’s -00’s car audio explosion and the tech became cheaper…
Or maybe it was when the Chinese manufactures entered the market with quality products that forced the market pricing to change… If so are we at the beginning of a quality vs cost shift in HiFi audio.
The Tin T and P series along with products like the monoprice liquid spark could be just the beginning
