Glossary of Headphone Terms

In-Ear Earphones

In-Ear-Canal Earphones - Individual earphones without a headband and push into the ear-canal. Properly seated in the ear-canal, these use the ear-canal as a sealed acoustic bass chamber, kinda like encapsulating your own mini rock band in your head.

Earbuds - Individual earphones without a headband and rest against the outside of, but do not insert into the ear-canal, now you know there actually is a difference between earbuds and in-ear-canal earphones.

Head-band Headphones

On-Ear Headphones - Over-the-head headband headphones with ear-cups that rest on the earlobes (ear-cups not intended to store liquid).

Over-Ear Headphones - Over-the-head headband headphones with ear-cups that rest around the ear. These may have larger transducers and produce better sound-quality including better bass. With your ears being totally enclosed you can rest assured you’ll hear every nuance.

Behind-The-Head Headphones - The band that connects the ear-cups rests behind the head rather than going over the head for when you wanna look totally badass.

Closed-Cup Headphones - Headphones with a completely sealed ear-cup so you can seal in that embarrassing music you’ve been hiding from your friends.

Open-Air Headphones - Headphones with an ear-cup that is open, not sealed. As the name suggests, this design method can produce a more natural, open, airy, free sound to the music. Though they can sound very good, those around the listener will hear the music as well – you’ll have the people around you tapping their toes to your beats in no time.

Semi-Open-Air Headphones - Combines some of each of the sonic properties of the two previous designs, for when you want the best of both worlds.

Sound-quality related/Audiophile Terms

Noise-Isolating/Passive Noise Cancelling - Headphones/earphones that seal the ear enough to keep out some unwanted external noise by virtue of the acoustic seal – because who want to hear the train go by when you’re blasting the new hit song from Train?

Active Noise Cancelling - Headphones/earphones that employ a microphone and amplifier that reads unwanted external noise, for instance an airplane engine, inverts the phase of that airplane engine sound, and sends the now out-of-phase airplane engine through the headphone along with the music. The result is that the amplifier’s reproduction of the now out-of-phase airplane engine is almost complete silence; an absence of the airplane engine. These headphones require batteries to power the amplifier. This quality is perfect for zoning out to your music – but just because you can’t hear the world around you doesn’t mean they can’t hear you singing off-pitch to show tunes.

Detail/Definition -Perception of the fine detail of the texture and nuance of sound reproduced. The characteristics of different instruments such as what they’re made of, the various sounds of the microphones used to record them or the space that the instrument was recorded in. Just because we’re telling you sound can have texture doesn’t mean you can go out and touch Steven Tyler’s voice.

Coloration - As with fine loudspeakers, all headphones reproduce sound with different harmonic (tonal) balance. They are all somewhat different in the balance and the quality of the harmonic (tonal) spectrum. Is the treble crisp, transparent and sparkly or bright and harsh? Is the mid-range sweet, warm and rich or thin and raspy like a woman who’s spent her life smoking Winstons? Is the bass fast, deep and articulate or slow, tubby and boomy?

Listening Fatigue - Headphones with seriously better sound quality not only means richer, sweeter, warmer and deeper harmonics and sense of spatial focus and localization of the instruments, it also means significantly more hours of enjoyable listening time because of reduced or no listener fatigue. The more the headphone sounds bland, harsh, bright, tinny or boomy, the faster you’ll get a headache and turn off the music. Eventually, you might even become reluctant to turn your music on at all. The more you invest in headphones of superior sound quality, the longer you’ll listen and the more you’ll discover inner detail and things about the music you listen to that you may never even have heard in recordings you’ve owned for years.

Noise-Isolating/Passive Noise Cancelling - Headphones/earphones that seal the ear enough to keep out some unwanted external noise by virtue of the acoustic seal – because who want to hear the train go by when you’re blasting the new hit song from Train?

Sound-Stage/Spatial Representation – All stereophonic recordings contain more information that just bass, midrange, treble and squawk. Part of the art of the recording engineer is to use placement of the instruments and the microphones in the room in which they are recording, as well as the pan-pots on the mixing console during the remix process to paint an image of the instruments floating in space between the speakers, next to and behind each other. Remember, this is stereo; it predates and has nothing to do with surround-sound. We refer to this as stereo-imagine, the stereo sound-stage or the stereo-sound-field.

We’ve all listened to recordings and heard the bass player standing to the left of the drums or the lead-guitar that appears more to the left of center. We’ve heard the drummer fill across the tom-toms and as he progresses across from the higher to each lower tom, the sound appears to begin in one speaker and cross first to center and then to the other side. The bass-drum may appear below the snare-drum. The high-hat cymbals may appear to the right of the snare, the tom-toms above the snare and finally the crash-cymbals may appear above them all and appear to have specific positions from left to right.

This is not simply a left-to-right experience; there is spatial depth as well. The engineer may be able to place some instruments or vocals behind others, deeper in the sound-field.

All of the instruments in the recording, as well as the effects (reverb, echo, flanging, etc.) that the engineer applies to individual instruments will be placed someplace in the stereo-sound-field by the engineer. This is very much a part of the thrill of the stereophonic listening experience.

Various headphones will reproduce this information with a variety of focus and detail. Some will appear to have more focus and detail and others with a more out-of-focus placement. This spatial information in the recordings you own may be part of your evaluation process in selecting headphones.