'Private' Listening!

'Private' Listening!

By private, I mean stereo headphones. Listening via headphones is in my experience a rather different sonic experience. Increasingly, those with an ear for 'quality' will not just plug stereo headphones into a headphone socket on an amplifier. Dedicated stereo headphone amplifiers seem to be the flavour of the month. Actually there are very good reasons with using such a device. It is quite easy to DIY a top notch stereo headphone amplifier, as I have done. I have built two of the recent design brought out by the Australian 'Silicon Chip' magazine. I bought mine as kits and assembled them. They are a very nice design using a high performance dual op amp (OPA2134) driving a BD138/ BD139 transistor pair output stage.

A very low noise and distortion stereo headphone amplifier. I use one with my personal CD player and the other on my 'spare room' vinyl playing system. I have to admit that my preference to listen is via loudspeakers wherever possible, but there are times when stereo headphone listening is more desirable. As I commented earlier, listening via stereo headphones is a somewhat unique listening experience as one is essentially 'isolated' from room acoustics, something that can be both a good and bad thing in a sense. Having experienced rather poor room acoustics I appreciate this kind of acoustic isolation, however there are drawbacks too! Personally I've always felt that the kind of stereo image provided by stereo headphones is a little unnatural, especially when the level drops appreciably in one channel. There are possible ways around this such as 'crossfeed' which is an attempt to mimic the sound of speaker listening. Some people like using 'crossfeed' and others don't. I've never used 'crossfeed' personally, so I can't really comment on this although as an aside it appears that the deliberate use of exaggerated 'stereo effect effect' seems to have moderated in more recent years although I do have a few early stereo records with (very) exaggerated stereo effect that actually sounds terrible, but I guess in the early days of 'stereo' it was a bit of a novelty and deliberately exaggerated for that reason!

Readers of the forums will know that I've been impressed by the OOPS configuration with speaker listening. For some time I had considered using the OOPS configuration with stereo headphones, but thought it was impractical as it was impossible to reverse phase on one channel headphone as is required when using speakers which is easily done in the case of speakers, but not stereo headphones, for possibly obvious reasons! However a while back whilst thinking about it, I realized that there was an easy solution, a simple phase reversing adaptor! I simply wired a 6.5 mm stereo plug into another 6.5 mm stereo socket with one channel (the OOPS channel) 'reversed'. That works perfectly with the OOPS configuration.

The 'sound' of stereo headphone listening is possibly not what one might expect. Given that with speakers, as an extension of high quality playback electronics practice, a flat, linear and wide frequency response is generally desired, however according to my ears, I suspect high quality stereo headphones have a somewhat more 'shaped' frequency response. Whilst stereo headphones are great for 'picking' out little details in the music, it has been my personal observation the record scratch is not as apparent and disconcerting as one might expect when listening with speakers which suggests a slightly rolled off high frequency response and 'shaped' in other ways as well. Interesting. Mmmmmm. I'll have to think about that one! In the end, stereo headphone listening has its place, sometimes to shut out the music and sometimes to shut out external unwanted noise! More to come! Felix.