Why Do Ear Buds Sound So Good?

Telegram Sam

Telegram Sam

New member
I've got some Skull Candy 'Buds, and last night on my smart phone I listened to Donald Fagen's "Morph the Cat."
Those things were downright thumpy, the bass was "all there."
Wassup with that? :confused:
How do those teeny little speakers deliver such great bass?
I mean, 4-5" speakers sound like crap.
It doesn't seem logical!
 
It's because they're pressed hard against the entrance to your ear canal. Sound behaves rather differently in free air (i.e. from a speaker) than it does when the source is physically touching the destination.

For the details, be prepared to read many pages of university level research papers!

However, the reasons they sound good to you are exactly the same reasons that mixing with headphones or earbuds can yield results that sound horrible on other systems.
 
I love those skull candy earbuds! For a while, that's all I would buy because they were rather cheap and the sound was fantastic. I've moved on though because the cheap price also seemed to mean cheap quality in the long run. I would use em for about 6 months and then the plug would start to short every time.
 
The sound you get from buds differs because you have your ear canals plugged by them, which means the sound vibrations from the speaker surfaces have a push pull effect on your ear drum which more closely follows the driver than other configurations. Headphones which have their speakers positioned in the usual way are having to use the sound energy to excite a larger volume of air which allow more energy to dissipate into the surfaces which surround that air. A piston moving back and forwards in an open space cannot develop compression as it does in a cylinder closed at one end, if the closed end could move without breaking the seal it would follow the piston movements, withdraw the piston from the cylinder only a small distance and its not going to have the same effect.

Tim
 
^^that's excellent^^

It would stand to reason that if you were consistent you actually **could** use them for mixing,
as you are, in effect, eliminating a large number of difficult to control variables found in the typical open air room space.
 
Telegram Sam said:
^^that's excellent^^

It would stand to reason that if you were consistent you actually **could** use them for mixing,
as you are, in effect, eliminating a large number of difficult to control variables found in the typical open air room space.
Click to expand...

Eliminating some difficult to control variables, and creating a buttload of others. I don't think anyone would ever exclusively mix on headphones, unless there was a financial or location issue.

Can it be done successfully? Well, of course. I wouldn't tho. My ears get fatigued in about 3 minutes with cans. Then, I can't even seem to hear right after I take them off. Just messes with my brain, as isolation should. But, I may just be human....
 
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