Discover the World of Hi-Fi Headphones
Hi-FI Headphones Buying Guide
Amplifiers, speakers, headphones, cables, music players, DACs and sound cards…
Experiencing quality music perfectly; It occurs as a result of connecting many equipments together in a chain.
Although the equipment we use today consists mostly of our phones, computers and wireless headphones, these devices are not as effective as wired headphones equipped with high potential drivers that you can pair with a quality amp / dac combination.
The goal of someone who wants to be an audiophile is usually to “Hear Music in its Purest Form” .
To truly hear music in its purest form, you need linear elements with high dynamic range, high resolution, and low Signal to Noise ratio; in short, the signal will undergo minimal distortion from the source to your ears.
The internal sound cards of our mobile devices and computers are very mediocre compared to external DAC/Amplifiers. At the end of the day, such solutions do not produce very good results for experienced listeners. There are many elements that exist to provide us with the pleasure of listening to music. The whole of these elements constitute our personal equipment chain. As we encounter everywhere in life, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
When creating your system, you should first choose your headphones/speakers, then your amplifier/DAC. When we talk specifically about headphones, two values in particular here; Impedance and Sensitivity values are the star criteria in deciding how much output power we will choose a piece of equipment.
The higher the impedance of a headphone, the more power it theoretically wants to be driven. Sensitivity is a measurement related to how much sound intensity the same headphone can reach when exposed to unit power and measured from unit distance. Here, the concept of efficiency can also be mentioned. As can be understood, equipment that can reach higher sound intensity with the same amount of power will be more efficient.
We are not people who generally listen to one type of music. We can find ourselves listening to many different types of music from moment to moment. Naturally, each type has its own requirements. For example, if the equipment you use while listening to classical music produces a lot of sub-bass, it can harm the dynamics of the genre, whereas when you switch to listening to electronic music, the exact opposite will happen.
We audiophiles start this hobby because we love listening to “music”. Then we start looking for the headphones that are chosen for the music that will be produced. As we progress here, we come across some headphones with successful technical performance and we are happy. What we usually realize at this stage is that each headphone produces the music we love in a different tone.
At this point, we ask ourselves the following question; What kind of sound do I like? In order to find the answer, we listen to many different headphones and understand the technical performance parameters a little more. As we understand them, we observe that concepts such as resolution, stage width, detail achievement , the potential of the headphone changes according to the source (Computer, Phone) it is paired with, and we start looking for a source, an amplifier that will provide high potential, and suddenly, while we used to enjoy the music itself, now the excitement of listening to music with better equipment is what makes us happy.
Until we have the perfect equipment, unfortunately, what we listen to is the equipment we use rather than the music itself.
This path is exciting, a deep and meaningful path where you can learn a lot. Like many hobbies, this hobby also has many values that it adds to the person. Art; being in art is very meaningful in itself. What we want most as audiophiles is to be able to maximize the pleasure that this magnificent sense and ability to hear gives us. The saying that ignorance is happiness is unfortunately true. For many of us, years ago, being able to completely dive into music and dance with a phone headset was blind happiness. Now, we are after real happiness. Yes, we listen to equipment and yes, when the time comes, we are ready to dive into music more intensely than anyone else.
Which Hi-Fi Headset Should I Choose?
When choosing a headset; we consider many criteria such as sound character, technical performance, price range, comfort, material quality, design, electronic features.
The vast majority of the options we choose between them are usually closed-back headphones with dynamic drivers.
So how many different types of headphones are there actually?
In essence, we can divide the headphones into 2 at first. As you can tell, these are On-Ear and In-Ear Hi-Fi headphones. On-ear Hi-Fi headphones are divided into 2; In the form of Open-Back Hi-Fi Headphones and Closed-Back Hi-Fi Headphones.