Submitted by lightning696969 t3_zst5q9 in headphones
I heard many audiophile saying it is low-fi , mid-fi and hi-fi Headphones. On which criteria these rankings are given to headphone?? What things a headphone to fullfill to places into these rankings ?? Does mid-fi and low-fi means they are not good ??
Mid and low-fi are kind of ways to describe hifi. If something is low-fi, it sounds like crap and is not of any real worth. Think my-first-cassette-recorder sort of junk.
Mid-fi is more related to affordable yet still very good hi-fi. Generally, anything that is more expensive than what the layperson would buy but cheaper than what a massive audiophile would spend. For headphones, I would say anything from about £75-£300 would be mid-fi. That isn't to say that there aren't good products cheaper than that, they just don't fall under the mid-fi moniker.
Same answer: Price.
People try to separate headphones which frequently will result into calling lower end headphones worse.
KHP30i and 40 are two of the best bargains. Sennheiser 560s seem to be a great stopping point for some where the performance is good enough forever.
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Ranbling: No need to step further than, in my case Sony M1ST with Yaxi Pads and Neumann NDH30. If I go further I will never listen to music anymore because I can not decide what is the definitive sound I want to listen too.
It's really just a meme ranking. For example mid-fi or summit-fi isn't a thing. It's just brackets people set by price.
PRICE.
These people make these claims on price alone ignoring performance alltogether.
This is, quite frankly, foolish and really grinds my gears.
Many headphones labeled "Mid-Fi" trade blows with or outperform more expensive headphones EASILY :)
No set criteria. Like most terms in the community, lo-fi, mid-fi, etc. can mean vastly different things to different people.
It's just self jerking amongst audiofools to make themselves feel good about their ridiculous purchases... Me included
Basically trying to justify pricing by using that as a quality indicator
I would love to somehow blind test headphones. I'm not a dogmatic person and would love to eat crow and save some money by selling the LCD-5 and just chilling with HD660. But there's things it does that the 660 can't (at least sighted).
The downfall of headphone blind testing is that you would feel the pads. And I'd be able to know which brand is which by the pads haha (Hifiman is egg shaped, Sennheiser is oval, DCA is "D" shaped, Beyer is circular, and Audeze is rectangular with lots of cushion).
What if to make it more difficult to use pads to distinguish... You're kept blindfolded for 3 minutes tops and then you start the listening all in a vacuum of stillness... You may notice one or two but it will be more difficult to try looking out for what headphone it is
Wouldn't you still feel the pads around your ear?
That is always a possibility but it's less recognisable imo
The other issue I see is tonality. It is pretty easy to tell my LCD-5 and 6XX apart just based off of their tuning. You could try EQing both to some target to try to minimize which would be interesting with the other blind folded stuff. Just would have to make sure all headphones could take the EQ because a 6XX just can’t handle sub bass as well so definitely a roll off like the 6XX has naturally.
Those are price categories and not quality ones to begin with and they are not well defined. I'd say <200, 200-700, 700< and maybe some silly summit-fi on top. It makes sense to use them since usually people are coming with a budget in mind and even if in general price doesn't correlate with sound quality it is still true that the good options at a price level are most better than the good options in a lower level. There arr just so many bad ones in all price ranges that the correlation is broken.
No-Context5479 t1_j1ajtd9 wrote
It's just self jerking amongst audiofools to make themselves feel good about their ridiculous purchases... Me included