Thread: How are Headphones able to produce immense sound effects?

I wonder,while listening songs using headset,how clear and immense sound effects are this little thing produces..!!! I have a home theatre connected to my computer which gives satisfactorily good sound quality.But i am a bit more satisfied with the quality of sound produced by my headset.

Its obvious that headset is not a miniature of hometheatre.Then how it prroduces all variant sounds,using two TINY speakers,which can even outbeat those of a hometheatre?

The sound is distorted because there is too much amplification in the hometheater's speaker.... Actually this is an issue (a known issue) with electronic transistor: they are not able to amplify signal smoothly as we hope (under high amplification it doesn't produce the desired signal-to-output amplification ratio), some even revert to old vaccum tube technology to try rectrify this distortion issue (leading to bulky amplifier system and expensive devices)... But simply by using headphone you can overcome this problem P/S: there are no amplifier in headphone.

Also... the hometheater speaker housing will also vibrate along with its speaker drum: this cause additional sound distortion (the... "brrrrr" sound). Some hometheater speaker have bulky heavy metal housing to solve this problem. But for headphone this doesn't matter because the sound is soo small compared to the size of the headphone itself

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And in more expensive headphone you got noise-cancelling technology which practically 'delete' all external noise from reaching your ears. So it is really quiet in that headphone, and all you can hear is the music...

Originally Posted by 4n4nd

I wonder,while listening songs using headset,how clear and immense sound effects are this little thing produces..!!! I have a home theatre connected to my computer which gives satisfactorily good sound quality.But i am a bit more satisfied with the quality of sound produced by my headset.

Its obvious that headset is not a miniature of hometheatre.Then how it prroduces all variant sounds,using two TINY speakers,which can even outbeat those of a hometheatre?

Physics is the answer.

In addition to the amplification problems, which are partly intrinsic to the recording mediums as well, there is the matter of distance through the air - the spread and shape of the waveform.

Your eardrums are comparable in size to a headphone speaker and one ear canal's distance away - so exact fidelity, perfect sound reproduction matching the entire response range of your eardrums, is obviously possible from that speaker. You can't get any better, theoretically, than an eardrum sized speaker an ear canal away.

The answer is the same as it is for eyesight. What you perceive is made in your brain. The actual sensory input is very limited and filtered on the way to the brain. The 3D effect of sound as well vision is the brain interpreting the inputs. That's one reason why optical illusions work; sound through headphones that sound like the real world is also an illusion.

It's how we've survived for millenia.