by Gerard Rejskind
(Reprinted from issue 56 of UHF Magazine. To purchase the issue, click here. Or click here to subscribe to UHF)
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But if you own a Walkman, or its ubiquitous successor the Discman, you may wonder about that. Remember the first time you slipped on a pair of Walkman headphones, and the music exploded all around you? You know that a Discman (or its numerous imitators) doesn't have a transport or a converter that can satisfy even the most elementary hi-fi standards, and you can confirm that by playing one through a hi-fi system. It's harsh and thin. So why does it sound so spectacular through headphones? Doesn't it mean the source is secondary, and that, perhaps, even a high end amplifier and speakers are outperformed by $10 headphones?
The answer is no, but I admit it's a good question. Why do portables sound so impressive?
One aspect has nothing to do with the gear itself, but with your room acoustics. Unless you have extraordinary acoustical treatment (as we do in one of our reference rooms, though not in both), the room is doing ugly things to the sound. It is grossly distorting frequency response, it is blurring or even wiping out the stereo image, and it is storing and re-releasing energy all over the band. By contrast, the headphones bypass the acoustical surroundings and drop the sound right into your ear. Insofar as you can "hear" an acoustical milieu at all, it is that of the original hall or studio. The presentation is not truly natural, of course, but for reasons I've outlined in the past the presentation made by a pair of loudspeakers cannot be natural either. And this is true regardless of the quality of the actual gear used.
Another aspect of the "superior" performance of the portable has to do with dynamics. Even if you have large speakers and a couple of monster amps, your system doesn't sound the same loud as it does soft. The woofer cones move farther and farther out of the centre of the magnetic gap, and become less linear, and the materials of both the cone and the enclosure begin to flex in ways that the designer had hoped wouldn't happen. As for the amplifier, it must push a lot of current through its transistors and tubes, which get increasingly far from their best range.
But headphones? By putting the sound directly into your ear, driving only the air in your outer ear and not your entire room, they have an easy time. So does the amplifier. It can do its job with perhaps one ten-thousandth of the power a big hi-fi amplifier has. The designer's job is easier, even if his budget and motivation are not as high as an elephant's eye.
Yes, but what about the source? It's still lousy, so why can the amplifier and "speakers" make up for it?
This is where I return to my river analogy, which may be familiar to you because it seems so apt I keep using it.
You depollute a river by cleaning up the upstream sources first, for reasons that hardly need explaining, but that isn't absolute. If an upstream town is tossing grapefruit rind and tin cans into the river, while a plant downstream is dumping PCB's and mercury, what are you going to do first? The answer is obvious.
And it's just as obvious in the case of a hi-fi system. If the source-first rule were absolute, you would keep improving your source and never upgrade your electronics or your speakers. You need to keep things in balance. You want slightly higher resolution in your source than in the rest, because otherwise there would be no point in upgrading the rest.
The Walkman and the Discman have it the "wrong" way around, of course, but the improvements in clarity are so striking that they disguise the fact that the source itself isn't that hot. Indeed, you can't tell that, because you haven't heard any other sources through such a system.
But here's an interesting detail. I own a very expensive and excellent portable, and of course I have access to the magazine's two reference systems. The portable sounds more arresting, no question about that. But guess which one gives me most pleasure.
Right.
FULL TEXT: Roksan Caspian, Totem Forest.
PARTIAL TEXT: The Video Revolution, Power & Current, SimAudio Moon I-5, Myryad MI 120, Vecteur Club 10, NVA AP10, Four Phono Stages, Five Cables.