Why are Headphones over-rated?

I have met many an audiophile that believe peak audio is a good speaker setup, now you may be thinking that speakers are expensive just thinking about a single speaker priced well below £1000. However, these audiophile's, sincerely believe from the depths of their souls that it is only when you hit the £10K mark that you are only just exploring the mid-range speaker market. And one does not merely use 1 speaker unit as their audio setup - one must sacrifice at least one third of the room space to truly enjoy peak audio.

Only in the world-shaking event, that a speaker is not available or something more practical is needed, that the next best option is even considered, which are headphones (only as they are portable). I say "portable" with great hesitance, as carrying a tube amp and a DAC that looks unmistakably and unapologetically as the cousin to a brick is not my definition of "portable". But I digress.

Audiophile headphones are not cheap, anything "passable" is priced above the £500 mark and it is only when you hit the £1K mark that you get into decent sound territory such as the Focal Clear or Audeze LCD-X. But these are not true Top of The Line (TOTL) headphones, some may claim. Peak headphones are gems such as the Hifiman Susvara (subjectively) which can cost up to £5K or the Sennheiser HE-1 (which you do not even want to know the price of).

Now, understandably those price points are well above the punching zone of what the average consumer is wtp (willing to pay - my economics course haunts me), even if only to maintain their relationship status.

In today's market, where convenience is valued above all else, the most common headphones (not AirPods, they are not headphones, but if you google most popular headphones these are number 1), sold are Bluetooth Headphones - the Bose and Sony's of this world.

I coincidentally own the Sony WH1000XM5's. I also happened to own the XM3's and XM4's (which is what most people call them, not WH1000 or some weird serial number). Naming is an issue in the industry, with long words & numbers mixed in- Bose QuietComfort 35 II, Bowers & Wilkins PX7 S2, Sennheiser HD 250BT and AKG N700NC M2 Wireless to name a few. Back on topic, the XM5's are technically a downgrade from the XM4's with a smaller 30mm driver, down from the 40mm driver on the XM4's. Now although the sound quality has improved with tighter control and an improved frequency curve, the most noticeable difference is the lower weight of bass. It is still there and is quite clean but not as rumbling as on the XM4. Which the audiophiles might like but the bass heads will not be too happy about.

Other than sound, the design language changed to a more modern outlook, noise cancelling improved, audio codecs were updated, Bluetooth codec is the newer 5.2 version. Comfort is improved and the other nice to haves are a lot more rounded! Which do bump up the launch price a bit compared to the prior generation. But they are quite decent and have a decent amount of detail.

However, audio wise - the XM5's as headphones are not offering an upgrade in detail retrieval or bass, mids and treble quality over cheaper wired iem under £100, even under £50 nowadays with the collaborative iem’s with audiophiles really pushing the quality of low priced iem’s. The only key difference would be sound stage, but with the smaller 30mm driver, and the fact you can go out and buy the 7Hz x Crinacle set, Dioko with a 14.6mm Planar driver for $99 speaks volumes on how that gap is slowly being bridged.

As human beings we like to prefer gadgets that are small and portable, we went from satellite & public phones to the smartphones of today. Similarly, the general direction of tech is miniaturisation, convenience & portability. We are looking to go from smartphone to foldables and rollables to smart glasses, from 14nm processors to 5nm processors (eventually...), from giant computers with 5MB hard-drives to compact laptops with NVME SSD's holding 2TB of storage and massive processing power much superior to the largest of computer systems from the early 2000's.

The only obstacle is the lack of demand or consumer interest due to an unclear purpose1- being too early to the market is a myth, what is mostly mishandled is execution or preparation for product launch.

Integration into current systems, lack of bugs & stability and a clear direction of progress are areas usually ignored when "revolutionary" products are said to be too early to the market. What is needed is integration & cross industry collaboration, which most companies have smartened up to - say when the next PS6 comes out with next gen graphics, how do they sell it to you? Do you count the TFLOPS, if so, why not buy the more performance driven XBOX. What it comes down to is ecosystem or application - the games are what showcase the capabilities of the system.

In the audio world, the performance threshold is the actual music library. The difference lies between what audiophiles have available, CD, FLAC, DXD and even DSD files. And what the common headphone user listens to, MP3 files. To put that into perspective, the highest quality native DSD files (DSD256) store on average 160MB/minute. The highest Spotify download quality at 320kbps will store on average 2.3MB/minute. The difference in information is 70 times the information and this is not factoring in multi-channel formats which will have even larger differences. By the nature of MP3's they are cropped from better audio formats both in "dynamic/ audio range" and frequency. A better way to put is the effective refresh rate/ sampling frequency is heavily reduced, i.e., how often the signal input is changed per second is much greater on formats such as CD, Flac, DSD etc.

With the use of MP3 files, the restriction for the average user to tell the difference between Bluetooth headphones, wired headphones and wired iem is restricted to sound signature and clarity. In some cases, a cheaper item may play MP3 files better than a high end item that is picking up on the missing details and worsening the listening experience.

But the libraries are only half of the equation. The headphone industry seems to have stagnated without much innovation, which is how the more lucrative industry of iem’s/ earphones has caught up in the low - mid tier industry. Below the £500 mark, you get more bang per buck purchasing an iem/ earphone over a pair of headphones and it is only at the £1K mark that they truly equalise. However, the advent of hybrid iem's at the £500 - £700 price point has made it so these cheaper iem's are now better matched to hold up to headphones. There are more driver types and technologies emerging in this space.

To cut to the chase, it seems nowadays the next best experience after speaker systems - is the emerging iem industry, which if things continue in this manner of progress will be superseded in the next decade. So, it seems in 2022, we have arrived at an age where headphones are over-rated.