Sound Infidelity

I dislike my new headphones. I have trouble with "ear buds", frankly, and I prefer not to use them. They fall out, mainly. Either I have enormous ear canals that one could fit a squash into, or I have really tiny ear canals and the ear buds won't go in, but either way, they won't stay in.

So I normally listen to music using headphones. But the other day the right channel in my old headphones went out. Listening to music with one ear makes me constantly feel like I'm turning to the left, like some kind of 1960s NASA "nausea chair" experiment. So I got some new ones. They're bigger than the old ones. Beefier. And better at sealing out ambient noise. But man, they sound awful. The low end is gone. Just gone. The midrange is gone. All there is is treble, and a whole lot of overly bright, clashy treble at that. You know your bottom end is gone when you can't hear the double bass drum in an Amon Amarth song. And my old headphones were way loud - with everything turned up, they were loud enough to hear across the room, loud enough to probably cause me permanent loss. But these new ones are like a carpeted library - even with all the amps spun wide open and pumping out all the Joules they can, everything has a curiously hushed quality.*

It's a little like hearing the world as though it had been mixed by early primitive black metal bands. Everything sounds wiry, abraded, muddy...

So I tinkered with the various equalizer settings, hunting for something that would make the new headphones sound tolerable. Only one did: Spoken Word. Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong with that?

* Back in my youth I had a component stereo system that included, among other things, an audio power amplifier that would pump about 2KWrms. It was so ugly I kept it in a closet all by itself, and its heat sinks were so heavy they caused a measurable perturbation in the orbit of Neptune. I spun it wide open one day because I really wanted to hear the shit out of the cellos in the opening part of Saturn by Holst. I don't know what the wavelength of the fundamental tone was (I read somewhere it was 32 feet), but it seemed to cause my whole house to resonate and the air conditioning vent fell clean out of the wall, screws and all.