Surround Headphones – Should I Get Them?
As anyone who has ever worn a set of headphones can tell you, the consequences of listening to sound allegedly coming from the middle of your head isn’t just about as good as listening to music coming from 2 prime quality loudspeakers. The fact that the left and right ears are so effectively separated from each other makes for a very artificial a very artificial sound stage. The sense of depth you get from a good pair of speakers is totally absent.
Built into the headphones are amplifiers and sound processors. These sound processors recreate the missing cues that give the ears a sense of space. Also if you like seeing films but do not want to bug your neighbors at 3:00AM or your serious other, then surround headphones are for you. Movies sound pretty incredible as you can hear things coming at you from all directions. With the right picture, you will be hopping all about the place, in a good way.
You might wonder how much these things cost? There are cheap units that work pretty well. You can also go mad and spend tons of greenbacks. The more costly units come with outboard Dolby decoder boxes and coaxial/digital inputs. These decoders will do an admirable job of decoding the Dolby surround and mixing it into 2 channels for the headset that comes with the decoder. The cheaper units have everything built into the headphones. A few of you may not like the extra weight that these headphones carry because of the electronics on board. Extended sessions can become quite uncomfortable if you are sensitive to that kind of thing. Again, as I stated before, try them out at a shop before committing to a purchase. At any rate, whichever surround headphones you get, you’ll be shocked at the difference between them and standard headphones.
