What you like to listen to is important for choosing the right pair of headphones

BETWEEN music, podcasts, gaming and the unlimited supply of online content, most people spend hours a week wearing headphones. Perhaps you are considering a new pair for the holidays, but with so many options on the market, it can be hard to know what to choose.

I am a professional musician and a professor of music technology who studies acoustics. My work investigates the intersection between the scientific, artistic and subjective human elements of sound. Choosing the right headphones involves considering all three of those aspects, so what makes for a good pair?

What is sound really?

In physics, sound is made of air vibrations consisting of a series of high and low pressure zones. These are the cycles of a sound wave.

Counting the number of cycles that occur per second determines the frequency, or pitch, of the sound.

Higher frequencies mean higher pitches. Scientists describe frequencies in hertz, so a 500Hz sound goes through 500 complete cycles of low pressure and high pressure a second.

The loudness, or amplitude, of a sound is determined by the maximum pressure of a wave. The higher the pressure, the louder the sound.

To create sound, headphones turn an electrical audio signal into the cycles of high and low pressure that our ears interpret as sound.

The human ear

Human ears are incredible sensors. The average person can hear a huge range of pitches and different levels of loudness. How does the ear work?

When sound enters your ear, your eardrum translates the air vibrations into mechanical vibrations of the tiny middle ear bones. The mechanical vibrations become fluid vibrations in your inner ear. Sensitive nerves then turn the vibrations into electrical signals that your brain interprets as sound.

Although people can hear a range of pitches roughly from 20Hz to 20 000Hz, human hearing does not respond equally well at all frequencies.

For example, if a low frequency rumble and a higher pitched bird have the same loudness, you would perceive the rumble to be quieter than the bird. Generally speaking, the human ear is more sensitive to middle frequencies than low or high pitches. Researchers think this might be due to evolutionary factors.

Most people don’t know that hearing sensitivity varies and, frankly, would never need to consider this phenomenon – it is simply how people hear. But headphone engineers need to consider how human perception differs from pure physics.

Listener preference

If all the complications of ears and speakers weren’t enough, listeners play a huge role in deciding what makes for a “good” pair of headphones. Aspects like age, experience, culture and music genre preference affect what kind of frequency distortion someone will prefer.

Headphones are as much a question of personal taste as anything else.

For example, some people prefer bass-heavy headphones for hip hop music, while classical music listeners might want less frequency distortion.

But music or recreational listening aren’t the only things to consider. Headphones for the hearing impaired may highlight frequencies from approximately 1 000Hz to 5 000Hz, as this helps to make speech more understandable.

You could play hip hop through headphones designed for the hearing impaired, but most people would agree that the results aren’t going to sound very good.

Making sure the headphones you

choose match how you are going to use them goes a long way in determining what will sound good.

Ultimately, the science of headphone design, the artistry of the content creators and the human experience all intersect to form the perception of “good” headphones.

Despite all these moving pieces, there is one foolproof way to know when headphones are good: choose a good song and put on a pair. Because when all the attributes align, a good pair of headphones can give you the opportunity to be transformed by sound. | The Conversation