by Rafe Arnott
Why did headphone culture hive-off from mainstream high fidelity? As a child growing up in the ’70s when headphone technology came of age, I can honestly say that I didn’t differentiate between listening to music through my father’s stereo in our living room, or listening to it through a pair of cans while lying on the rug between the speakers in that same space. It was just listening to music.
So what happened to headphones? Did the gulf dividing high fidelity and headphone fidelity just appear organically? Was it a conscience decision by people to identify more with the solace, and insulation that headphones seem to provide over two-channel listening? Or was it just marketing companies siloing-off another aspect of music reproduction for brand-identification, and profit? Was it the advent of portable music devices like the little pocket radio my grandfather used to listen to baseball games on in the afternoon quiet of the veranda?
The ability to take your music out of the traditional listening space and with you wherever you wanted certainly signalled a paradigm shift of how we viewed music’s place in our lives, and it’s social influence. You could argue that car stereos allowed us that freedom to leave our homes and take the music with us, but with that comes the tether of the automobile. No, headphones were different.
Same goes for portable stereos or boomboxes. Portable, yes, but free for all to hear, not something that is exclusively one’s own to experience, so again a very different context socially. The popularity of headphones paired with a portable music player boomed through the ’70s, ’80s, and ‘90s as did the popularity of the cassette tape. No coincidence to be sure. Cassettes are small, could be bought cheaply, and not only played in your home or car but in portable cassette recorders/players made ubiquitous by Sony and their Walkman. Ditto the Discman, and the continuation of the personal audio revolution via digital technology with the compact disc, and to a much smaller degree the DAT (Digital Audio Tape). Soon everyone was listening to music in the privacy of their own headspace while riding their bicycles, rollerskating, jogging, commuting on public transit, etc.
The advent of digital music formats like AIFF, WAV, FLAC…and the heavy hitter of portable formats, the Mp3 – particularly when coupled with the Napster online file-sharing craze of 1999 ~ 2001 – ushered in a new age of personal music portability that Apple almost exclusively capitalized on with their iPod to the tune of billions of dollars in profits. Thousands of songs in your pocket wasn’t just savvy marketing, it was the crystalization that what was once the domain of a two-channel home set-up, was now truly something you could take with you anywhere. Again, headphones seem to be about separation. Untethering. Perhaps even being antisocial to a degree. Which is funny, because some of my friends who are deeply committed to headphones, and headphone culture are the most fun individuals to spend time with.
I think it was the iPod turning point in tech that emboldened engineers, music artists, and manufacturers to push the envelope of what headphones were capable of reproducing, and along with it a tribe was born. As digital music technology, and formats advanced, so did headphone technology, and those who were their acolytes. Did anyone in their wildest dreams 10 years ago imagine planar-magnetic ear buds?
Now in 2017 we have portable Digital Audio Players (DAPs) that can handle studio-resolution file formats up to 32bit/384kHZ PCM, and DSD 512 (as well as MQA). To me, this signals the end of any perceived quality-playback gap between what traditionally would have to be handled by a separate digital source, DAC, amplification, cabling, and loudspeakers in a home system. So after all these years, and all these leaps in technology the headphone-set have two-channel, reference-audio quality that they can take with them anywhere. Is this the “why?” that headphone culture has sought to insulate itself from mainstream two-channel high fidelity?
For years they weren’t able to sonically match what those with freestanding transducers were experiencing, but that’s no longer the case. Just like the holy grail of two-channel playback is about time travelling to the moment a recording was made, so too is the world of personal audio focused on that same principle of ultimate transparency to source. The biggest difference to me seems that those seeking that ticket to ride back in time with loudspeakers can be social about it. Those looking to have their ticket punched with headphones are riding solo. Perhaps it’s just the nature of the experience. I guess in a world of rapidly-shrinking personal space, a great DAP/headphone rig lets people take their living room with them wherever they go. And that’s a pursuit worthy of unique acknowledgement in my books. It’s also a pursuit that has become it’s own multi-billion dollar industry.
Headphones, and headphone culture is big business. Just ask Beats, and Apple, Bang & Olufsen, Focal, Grado or Sennheiser (to name only a few). The headphone world today is no longer the realm of my grandfather, and his little portable radio, and clear, sun-yellowed ear plugs. It’s $4,000 beryllium-driver headphones paired with similarly-priced Digital Audio Players, and portable amplifiers/streamers. Headphones have come much farther in many technical respects than traditional two-channel systems, and as much as they offer sound-wise in comparison to a traditional stereo rig, I still find myself wanting to share the music I listen to with those in my life: Socially, while we’re together, not separated by the insular condition that is the inherent nature of headphones. Maybe that’s why I’m still trying to come to terms with what happened to headphone culture (and why). To me both high fidelity and headphone fidelity are parts of a whole. I guess I’m still just that kid on the rug between the speakers.