Also be nice, everyone. This is for funsies not fightsies.
Mine is that Prince is suuuuuper overrated and merely a meh songwriter at best.
Also be nice, everyone. This is for funsies not fightsies.
Mine is that Prince is suuuuuper overrated and merely a meh songwriter at best.
Yeah music made for headphones is more and more common. Lorde's first album "Pure Heroine", for example, is straight up meant to be listened to on headphones. A lot of the spacial effects don't sound right on speakers.
An example of this is bass panning from one ear to another, or switching from ear to ear/channel to channel. ("Buzzcut Season" off of that album does this.) Doesn't work well on speakers, bass isn't spacial, your brain can't really tell where it's coming from. Its how something like a subwoofer in the corner of a room or theatre can work. But with headphones, where each ear is fully isolated from the other (if there's no crossfeed involved) and you have an entire driver centimetres from your ear, it can produce a wonderful spacial effect.
I think the panned bass thing is a good example, yeah. Another big one is little intricacies being lost in large rooms. For example, jazz clubs traditionally being less reverberant so things like intense bebop runs were still intelligible and therefore able to be popularized whereas that stuff becomes like mush in a lot of really reflective spaces. It’s why so many bougie theaters have spent so much money on giant movable wooden panels for their walls and ceilings. I think a lot of modern metal music has a similar dynamic with headphones.
Yeah a lot of headphones can lose that sense of space or become super wide, and sound very unnatural with regards to details, with music made to be listened on speakers, because there are no reflections, at all. The drums on metal and hard rock go to mush quite often. The Harman target can help, but still.
And as you said, listening in a room full of reflections is no better either. Just another extreme. And treating rooms is expensive unless you're fine with old egg carton boxes everywhere.