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John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

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Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#31

Post by jeffbee »

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote: post #23
dandare wrote: post #19

Tangential: is it just me or speakers made a huge leap forward over the last 20 years? I mean for given price range. Laptop speakers, headphone speakers, car speakers, any minisystem/potrable stereo speakers. Was there some prominent techonolgical improvement or just a miriad of small improvements? Also RIP to mister Koss.

Hadn't noticed before but speakers haven't suffered the same fate as other tech where additions and improvements of tangential aspects haven't affected the core performance. A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. Your new printer might have Wi-Fi and bluetooth, but jams and leaks too often and probably has increasingly restrictive cartridge DRM. A typical…

> A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power.

I don't know if I can agree with that. An M1 MacBook Air costs less than a thousand bucks and has more CPU power than anything that was on the market, mobile or not, before 2020.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#32

Post by buescher »

dandare wrote: post #19

Tangential: is it just me or speakers made a huge leap forward over the last 20 years? I mean for given price range. Laptop speakers, headphone speakers, car speakers, any minisystem/potrable stereo speakers. Was there some prominent techonolgical improvement or just a miriad of small improvements? Also RIP to mister Koss.

Yes. It's not just fancy magnets, but that helps. The industry got much better at modeling and designing dynamic speakers about 20 years ago. Low cost IC amplifiers also got a lot better in the last twenty years, and anything decent that's fully integrated (i.e. name brand connected speaker devices, airpods, the speaker in your phone, etc) is going to have shockingly good DSP equalization by the standards of even 2005-2010.

I don't know about headphones per headphones, though. All the audiophile-approved headphones I have around here sound much better than my airpods and my Bose noise canceling things for travel, and they're all 20+ year old designs. That includes the Koss Porta Pro (back on topic!), by the way, which I like a lot better than anything I've listened to that cost less than an approximate order of magnitude more. There certainly seems to be a market for headphones that cost more than a pair of Sennheiser 650s these days though.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#33

Post by buescher »

rdtwo wrote: post #26

What are the best headphones in the under 1000 range? Has there been a lot of improvement since I got my akg 701s

Doubtful. You're probably into the range of diminishing returns with those. Switching will get you something different, and possibly more to your tastes, or more comfortable, not necessarily objectively better.

I personally love the sound of electrostatic speakers and would try an affordable pair of electrostatic headphones as a step up from that class of open-back dynamic headphones if I were in the market today, but I don't listen to headphones as much as I used to.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#34

Post by andrewmg »

rdtwo wrote: post #26

What are the best headphones in the under 1000 range? Has there been a lot of improvement since I got my akg 701s

What’s “best” is, of course, quite subjective. That said, I tried a bunch around that price-point, and the Focal Clear was my favorite. I had the AKG k702s, and the Clear was a substantial step up.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#35

Post by rdtwo »

buescher wrote: post #33
rdtwo wrote: post #26

What are the best headphones in the under 1000 range? Has there been a lot of improvement since I got my akg 701s

Doubtful. You're probably into the range of diminishing returns with those. Switching will get you something different, and possibly more to your tastes, or more comfortable, not necessarily objectively better. I personally love the sound of electrostatic speakers and would try an affordable pair of electrostatic headphones as a step up from that class of open-back dynamic headphones if I were in the market today, bu…

Yeah definitely, I had heard that hd650s paired with a nice amp were about as good as you could get for under 3-4K wasn’t sure if anything made it to market that’s been really revolutionary. Really my problem is music discovery. Spotify doesn’t really do it for me, it just finds more of the same and never invites me to branch out.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#36

Post by BrS96bVxXBLzf5B »

jeffbee wrote: post #31
BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn't noticed before but speakers haven't suffered the same fate as other tech where additions and improvements of tangential aspects haven't affected the core performance. A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. Your new printer might have Wi-Fi and bluetooth, but jams and leaks too often and probably has increasingly restrictive cartridge DRM. A typical…

> A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. I don't know if I can agree with that. An M1 MacBook Air costs less than a thousand bucks and has more CPU power than anything that was on the market, mobile or not, before 2020.

I bought a $400 laptop in 2011. Trying to upgrade it in the years after for something at the same price point was an exercise in frustration - when almost every new mobile Intel CPU ended with a "U" and had the computation reduction that came with that.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#38

Post by snvzz »

rdtwo wrote: post #26

What are the best headphones in the under 1000 range? Has there been a lot of improvement since I got my akg 701s

Objectively, Sennheiser HD600 (closest to harman FR, low distortion, distortion is shaped to avoid midrange).

Subjectively, depends on the person. A majority prefers HD600, while some swear by the HD650, a colored (less neutral, warmer) version of it; I do prefer HD600 myself, while I've heard both extensively.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#39

Post by jeffbee »

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote: post #36
jeffbee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. I don't know if I can agree with that. An M1 MacBook Air costs less than a thousand bucks and has more CPU power than anything that was on the market, mobile or not, before 2020.

I bought a $400 laptop in 2011. Trying to upgrade it in the years after for something at the same price point was an exercise in frustration - when almost every new mobile Intel CPU ended with a "U" and had the computation reduction that came with that.

I think you're fooling yourself. A characteristic 2011 mobile part would have been something like a Core i3-2350M, and a very comparable more recent part would have been the i3-8121U. They both had similar prices at launch, same core and thread count, but the later U-series processor is 2-4x faster depending on application and uses less than half the power.

Re: John Koss, headphones pioneer, has died (2021)

#40

Post by buescher »

rdtwo wrote: post #35
buescher wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubtful. You're probably into the range of diminishing returns with those. Switching will get you something different, and possibly more to your tastes, or more comfortable, not necessarily objectively better. I personally love the sound of electrostatic speakers and would try an affordable pair of electrostatic headphones as a step up from that class of open-back dynamic headphones if I were in the market today, bu…

Yeah definitely, I had heard that hd650s paired with a nice amp were about as good as you could get for under 3-4K wasn’t sure if anything made it to market that’s been really revolutionary. Really my problem is music discovery. Spotify doesn’t really do it for me, it just finds more of the same and never invites me to branch out.

I built the nwavguy O2 kit from jdslabs and like it. It does perk up the Sennheisers and would probably work well for your headphones.

I don't hear a lot of difference between the Apple headphone adapter and jdslabs' "Objective DAC". The $10 Apple adapter might even be better than the ODAC, but it only works with my phone.

I haven't used Spotify in years; I think I never reinstalled it when my old laptop died in 2018. I could never get past the audio quality of their free tier, and never tried the paid tier. Maybe it's better now. Their recommendations back then for me were really odd; I can understand why some people would complain. I am about the only person that likes Amazon's streaming service but their recommendations are just bland-to-bad. I've noticed Pandora channels have become much more repetitive. Maybe the whole industry has been pushed by their metrics to some horrible least-common-denominator point.

There's an argument that discovery is an unsolved problem that doesn't pay. There was a discussion a while back on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29474762

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