I always think about all these beautiful Mcintosh or Marantz amps that go for big bucks on ebay oozing gooey tubeness and what a shame it is that people were plugging in proverbial tin cans into them 50-60 years ago. I've tried numerous vintage headphones and for the life of me I have never heard a decent one that extends beyond past the 1980s. They all sound like i'm listening in a cave or some other kind of wonkiness to them. Were they really that bad or is it just because the driver life on so many old ones is terrible and i've just never been fortune to h ave heard a good one? It's weird to me they could build such beautiful pieces of audio equipment back then yet couldn't make anything decent to listen to them on your head. It also makes me think how amazing of our classic albums turned out with what the musicians and engineers must have been hearing in their ears in the studio sessions.

Comments

Me_MeMaestro t1_ja5wwki wrote on February 27, 2023 at 2:00 AM

I mean they look nice, but they performed pretty poor, much like the headphones of that era, you can beat them in power, distortion, noise floor, and whatever else for fractions of the price in both solid state and tubes now adays

QuatreMyr t1_ja6e4uz wrote on February 27, 2023 at 4:24 AM

Who told you 60s/70s amps were good? All the best amps I know of are either 90s or modern.

blargh4 t1_ja65488 wrote on February 27, 2023 at 3:06 AM

I don't know their exact release date, but I've heard 70s Stax estats that sounded perfectly hi-fi.

Amps are fundamental to lots of electronics applications, so all of that was worked out pretty early. Hi-fi headphones are more of a niche, and I don't know how big that niche was back then - hi-fi playback at home/stereo sound/etc was all pretty nascent in the 60s. Materials/manufacturing/engineering has also come a very long way since them, especially with the rise of computers and everything that enabled.

rhalf t1_ja6b3nc wrote on February 27, 2023 at 3:56 AM

The short answer is: because headphones are not used for sound reinforcement and music is not recorded for headphones. The long answer is...

1950s: <Crickets>

1960s: Why would you want to listen to music through this strange military/medical aparatus?

1970: OK, here you go, but we have no clue how to voice this thing and our microphones don't really resemble human ear.

1980: Alright, weirdo, we now have a microphone that resembles human ear median between 1 and 3kHz and then it goes haywire, lol. Also here's a bit of theory that your headphones should have mainly midrange. Our transducers don't have enough bandwidth anyway. What is this Walkman thing again? Musicians want hearing aid? What?

1990: Hey, we figured that adding more bass and highs actually makes these things pretty nice. AKG didn't get the memo, lol. With some educated guesses, we got this tonality thing down for speech intelligibility. It works for music too. Aha and those earplugs, that musicians wanted are tuned nicely too, but only by one brand.

2000: Earbuds, earbuds everywhere! You want some earbuds? We have earbuds. AKG still didn't get the memo.

2010: Doesn't it suck that earbuds don't have bass? And laptop speakers, they don't have bass too. You know what, we have headphones that have nothing but bass and suddenly headphones are cool now. People are getting rich off them and scientists are suddenly interested in them for real. We have preference curves now and new tech. ALG finally releases a headphone with bass.

2020: Those earplug/hearing aid things are now all the rave and the technology is speeding up. Soon we'll have MEMS drivers and the price-performance will go through the roof.

Meanwhile speakers started this aorund the 30s I think and by 60s measurement tech and theory was pretty solid with HiFi and whatnot. People needed speakers for radio, TV and concerts, PA. Headphones were considered dangerous, uncomfortable, sonically inferior. Just generally meh.

Nobody really cared for headphones until 2010 when dubstep happened and high frequencies were killing your soul while bass was scarce through the PC speakers. It was all about bass.

When it comes to loudspeaker research it too went through phases and voicing is still an open question every time a new tech drops that allows for more channels etc. Just recently I watched a video by Dave Rat, where he argued that we need to use one channel per one microphone track so that engineers don't need to mix. He made a very live sounding speaker that way. Currently we're in a post-Toole world, where every loudspeaker is a slim tower with a waveguided tweeter, that sounds dead off axis, and is tuned for smooth power response rather than on axis FR. Meanwhile our most recent headphone microphone covers 20Hz-6kHz, lol. But they're catching up because of the wearable hype.

DasGutYa t1_ja6tge9 wrote on February 27, 2023 at 7:09 AM

That's.... pretty inaccurate to say the least.

Headphones were designed for vocals only in the beginning. Hence a lack of anything but midrange.

It was a quick process from late 60s to 70s in which companies saw the potential of Headphones to consumers and threw the everything at making a good sounding pair, we got electrostatics and orthodynamics because of this. Headphones would sound pretty good from this point onwards.

Now in regards to bass, we never needed big fat bloated bass until the loudness wars. It was perfectly fine to have a grado or senn with a bass response you heard rather than felt and it was deemed a better approach to messier, cheaper sets. The famed Sony mdr10 was always regarded as bloated in the bass and therefore an aquired taste, now its relatively little bass if you compare its freq response to modern headphones. Once mixing became garbage tier, throwing bass everywhere became the 'preferred' sound, since everything sounded awful on a more neutral set. It has nothing to do with nonsense like laptop speakers haha. Just consumers buying shitty mixes.

rhalf t1_ja70bad wrote on February 27, 2023 at 8:43 AM

Good points, but the 70s headphones that I know are all midcentric, not just the monitors.
I owned K370 and heard some orthos. I also have Fostex T40RP right now on my head and it's the only vocal monitor. Unfortunately I know also some less expensive headphones including the common man's Sennheiser HD414 and boy were they awful. K370 only covered the full-ish range because it was a dual driver. After that model bass in AKG really went extinct. Stax had the same issue. They were all midcentric headphones even though they were not studio workhorses. The tuning back then was just mostly mids. They were close, some were better than an average headphone today, but the general trend is quite clear. Yamaha was probably an exception, although today the age might obscure that, because they lack extension. The Soviet Echo headphones that are easier to find where I live are plain midcentric like the rest of them.

solid12345 OP t1_ja7lsc1 wrote on February 27, 2023 at 1:13 PM

On a side note I was actually surprised how well some of the Soviet orthos from the 80s I picked up sounded. For a country just coming into the fold of consumer goods they got off to a pretty good start, the only main weakness being some of them look like I’m wearing a tank driver’s HP!

ishmeister t1_ja7dgfh wrote on February 27, 2023 at 11:47 AM

Now is the golden age of headphone amps. You can buy powerful objectively transparent amps for under 200 and the market is literally flooded.

Also, I don't think mastering would have been done on headphones. That's not even the case today.

rayliam t1_ja6nh2d wrote on February 27, 2023 at 5:58 AM

I’m just curious if you’ve tried Stax headphones from those eras and if you have, what was your opinion of them?

solid12345 OP t1_ja7lc7m wrote on February 27, 2023 at 1:09 PM

Those I admit I’ve never had the privilege of hearing.