Sound and Hearing

Sound and Hearing Brief Intro

The H5’s are what I refer to as standard 20-20 headphones, being your normal 20 Hz to 20 kHz frequency response range. That’s generally fine, some (usually expensive, but not always) headphones have a wider range, but it’s questionable whether most people can hear the difference. The human range of hearing is generally acknowledged to be 20-20 although this varies from person to person. Additionally, the range tends to start wider and reduce as we age.

In ideal conditions, the range can increase, but being reasonable, very rarely will most of us use our headphones in what could be considered “ideal conditions” (think commercial recording studios, sound testing labs etc.).

Many of the “high definition audio” headphones which you’ll see advertised with ranges from single digit Hz to 40+ kHz (100 kHz for the $55,000 priced Sennheiser Orpheus headphones!) are good headphones, but generally you’ll find most companies tend to at a minimum split their focus from providing higher range headphones to increasing the quality of the range that most people can hear.

Couple all of this with the fact that I still know a lot of people who listen to mp3’s on their phone rather than any of the lossless audio formats and you may be wondering what the point of these high range headphones are.

On the off chance that you’re not aware of how much you lose in the conversion to MP3, I encourage you to go and check out this website where you can hear a recording of the sound lost from the original test control song in the development of the mp3 standard. Hint, you lose a surprising amount of sound.

Back to the headphones.

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