Headphones, or Stereo

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Which do you prefer wearing headphones while listening to music, or listening without headphones to the stereo/speakers.

To me headphones seem even more intimate than a concert. Also with stereo instead of mono you hear different instruments in different ears, voices in one headphone and instruments in another. Headphones are just better.

i prefer listening to a reference-quality 7.1/dolby IIx system, i like to be surrounded with sound. headphones give me "ear burn" after a while.

What do you mean by ear burn?

2 things- my outer ears got sore from the pressure the pads put on them, even the most comfortable cans [sennheiser hd580 precisions] get sore on my ears after a few hours constant listening; and the direct sound pressure being shoved directly into my ear canals and flapping my ear drums would make that part of my ears sore as well. this never happens when listening to high fidelity speakers at a distance.

I prefer stereo. I think it sounds better.

stereo sounds proper and plausible only if a strict set of acoustic conditions is met-

*the speakers must be phase-coherent at the listener's position-
*the speakers must be equidistant from each other and from the listener-
*the room acoustics must not play a major role in how the speakers sound at the listener's position-
*the sound recording which is playing, must be in stereo and recorded with proper interchannel phase foremost in mind, otherwise you will get either vague imaging or merely a fat wodge of sound in the middle which collapses discouragingly into the nearest speaker if the listener moves his/her head laterally.

if all these conditions are met, one will hear a mindblowing demonstration of the state of the art, IOW a proper illusion of being at the venue where the recording took place, at least in the front direction, in a 180 degree arc.

From my Aspie perspective, I much prefer listening on headphones because then I'm not infringing on anybody else's sound space, and it makes it easier for me to listen to the music and ignore (many) interruptions. It also means that nobody else is going to be listening to the music I like and making negative comments about it.

I also have a home recording studio where I record a lot of my own music, and that's pretty much all done on headphones. So I like listening to "properly mixed" music on the phones, just so that I'll know what to aim for when I'm recording and mixing.

When I do listen to music on speakers, even in the car, I tend to keep the volume very low. And it bothers me when I'm trying to concentrate on a project and somebody else's music is distracting me.

But I do understand how some Aspies may feel it's really important to hear the music in the best possible way, and prefer speakers, or to have our own preferred music on while we're doing housework, driving around, etc. Sometimes speakers are what work, but I prefer headphones.

i have never had very good luck at translating what i hear on cans into something which sounds equally good over loudspeakers in a typical room.

Headphones. They keep the music in and everything else out, which helps with not being overwhelmed by the environment. I use them a lot on public places like offices.

there are two kind of headphones- closed back and circumaural- the latter are less colored-sounding but have poor isolation from external sounds.