ear listening examination. can you hear what i hear? :)

[lester 0]

hello.

 

i have just bought a set of audio-technica "ath-esw9" headphones last week.

 

as i use it to listen to my music for a few days, i found myself being more of an audiophile than usual. i keep hearing light crackling sounds more often than my older headphones during certain parts of a song.

 

i've listened to apple lossless, 320kbps mp3 quality and such, and could still hear them(crackling noise) from different songs. i am beginning to question myself if my headphones is defected or not, or it is just the way the song recording is.

 

if i could be so bold on my first post in this forum, let us do a listening test together and see if my headphones truly have a problem.

 

all you have to do is to listen to the same song with your headphones, catch the noise and compare my results. if you could also offer any explanation, i will appreciate it very much.

 

 

for the sake of fairness and convenience, let us all listen to a 192kbps mp3 of radiohead's "house of cards"(i hope it's okay with the forum rules. you can also pm me to get the test song.)

 

here's my simple result, can you hear the crackling at,

 

01:32 on the left, single pop.

04:42 on the left, single pop.

 

these are the two obvious distortion i've heard. i believe there are other parts which are more subtle but i'm not sure whether they are recording effects or not.

 

is my headphone defect? or bad quality sound file?

 

let me know what your conclusion is.

 

this test has a score. highest score gets a cookie.

 

thank you for your time.

 

 

08_House_Of_Cards.mp3

[wwenze 0]

A good source encoded to even 128 or 96kbps on a good system wun go pop.

 

No mentioned problem wif my MS-1 or speakers. But is this song supposed to sound so mushy and full of artifects?

Edited March 28, 2009 by wwenze

[lester 0]

thank you for your effort and reply.

 

yes, i believe radiohead meant for this song for sound like that.

 

i've just listened to the same song using my headphones through my ipod, and it actually sounded better than from my laptop. that could be the problem.

 

thank you for your input.

 

hope you like the song.