My Lifelong Quest to Make my Expensive Rig Sound as Good as $500 Headphones

First, I think your post helps to underscore that different people have vastly different values. There is an element of fine detail that you really enjoy and drives your choices. While details can be good on headphones, most folks find them tremendously compromising… even at levels much higher than yours. Nothing wrong with them or your appreciation. We all have our likes.

I have my main system and headphone system at the opposite ends of adjoining rooms. My main system I referred to as a reference system… a very good one for the $60K and decades it took me to put it together. A few years ago I decided that I wanted to have a high end headphone amplifier using 300B… to really appreciate what the attraction was to so many people.

So I did (you can see it under my ID). My headphones include some of the best… Focal Utopia, Sennheiser HD800… etc. with the addition of the amp and top quality 300B tubes the system went from sterile and highly detailed, to glorious and musical, lush…. with all the details and incredible bass. I realized what I had been missing… nothing to do with details. For the previous ten years I had season tickets to the symphony… so it became obvious how much closer this system was to the real sound of music.

For the first time ever, I sat down to my main system and was disappointed. It sounded mechanical, with the details of the venue stuck in my face and the music taking a back seat. That experience spurred me into a two year upgrade cycle where I changed all components but my Audio Research REF3 Phonostage and ARC REF preamp to tubed components. The change in sound quality was striking… and my main system again gained superiority… except that the character of both systems was now almost identical again.

Anyway, that was my most recent journey. Very expensive… but the result has been two really musical systems.

I have about a dozen headphones including the likes of Audeze LCD-4, Sony MDR-Z1R, Sennheiser HD 800 and the like with a great Simaudio 430HA headphone amp and a couple of Sony TA-ZH1ES headphone amps.  I rarely listen to headphones anymore as they just aren't as realistic as any of my systems.  I'd much rather have the soundstage and imaging of speakers and not have to wear anything on my head to listen to music. 

There's something about noise-cancelling headphones though.  I have some older Sennheiser wireless noise-cancelling headphones that I wear when I mow the lawn and listening to Spotify using bluetooth, they are beguiling.  I know it's a very artificial sound, but they do some weird sorcery that really brings out a lot of detail.  I've had a number of "I never heard that before" moments with them, but they are not "better" in any way, other than that they are the only headphones I own that I could wear while mowing the lawn.

As professor Choueri explains in the generally fascinating Audioholics video below (around the 22 minutes mark).

"A $100 pair of well designed headphones has a far better impulse response than a $100,000 pair of speakers, it’s just a fact."

It’s just the laws of physics, and until an impossibly light and impossibly strong new loudspeaker cone material emerges (graphene?), we're stuck with this situation.

As we all know, ye cannae change the laws of physics Jim.

Great comments all. @cd318 , that is precisely what I am talking about. Maybe “detail” is the wrong word. But that professor’s description of how a $100 set of headphones had better impulse control is exactly what I am referring to. My system is very close to matching headphone performance in this area now, thanks to my speaker upgrade and my Nordost Valhalla 2 speaker cables which are known to be lighting fast.

@ghdprentice yes I know my headphones are entry level, which made the comparisons all the more frustrating, all these years. And I agree, the “detail” is better on my system than the headphones. It’s “impulse control” I should have been referring to as @cd318 noted. Blazing fast impulse control seems to improve a dimension of detail, but it’s not detail overall. I’ve not been to a live symphony lately but that would be a great comparison experience.

And yes I feel my system is far, far more realistic in reproducing music now, than my headphones ever were. As such I’ve now far exceeded my objectives that I originally had with respect to trying to recreate the performance of headphones in specific areas, by improving things immeasurably in areas I wasn’t actually focused on. I guess I was chasing “impulse control” for so long, and finally getting really close, and my rig has just far surpassed the headphone experience in so, so many other ways.

I listened to music more than most as a kid, primarily with headphones and also through this Sony ghetto blaster I had that actually sounded okay for what it was. It also had a 3 band EQ and a third bass woofer. I think when I first went to full systems as a teen, I was shocked at how bad the shrill tonality was (my first amp was a JVC receiver bought with paper route money saved up for many many months), and the system just didn’t have the speed that I was used to (I didn’t realize that was the problem at the time), which launched me on this decades long quest. Because my first system was so terrible, I quickly came to think that having an EQ was an absolutely essential feature. For me I was REALLY into music starting as a young kid, and when I got my first full scale system my connection to the music was utterly broken because my system was really, really bad. Yet I felt back then that I could still get into my music with that ghetto blaster and cheap headphones…

I tease my wife saying she can’t complain of my obsession because she know what she was getting into.  25 years ago before we were married I was dragging her around to speaker auditions and she was a great sport and weighed in on what she was hearing, even if she didn’t care!  She still weighs in, and still doesn’t actually care..

Also - for so many years, I struggled with stridency and harshness in lower end mid-if gear. And it seemed my only alternative was moving to overly warm and sluggish gear. Thankfully I now have a slightly warm leaning and meaty tonality that I adore, while at the same time having that blazing my fast detail and transparency. And unrestrained air and openness at the top end, with no trace of brightness. It’s like having my cake and eating it too. The Gryphon and it’s DAC module add a tough of “romance” to the sound to make the system “musical”, with the rest of my system focused on transparency and neutrality.  I don’t think I’d like my speakers with any other amp .

Thinking back, I don’t know if there is a full size system I truly would have been happy with when I was younger, for my budget at the time.