| Sound leakage is an inevitable consequence of good sound quality. Put simply, those excess soundwaves ultimately have to go somewhere, and it's a choice between jettisoning them into the environment and annoying people, trying to absorb them in the body of the headphone and losing quality, or trying to produce less of them in the first place, also losing quality. Very cheap headphones leak sound because they are very cheap and their designers and users don't care either way. Expensive, $500+ headphones leak sound because they are meant to be used in a music production context as a substitute for a $1000+ set of speakers, where one doesn't care about leakage. If you are walking around campus, sitting on a train or generally doing anything except sitting in a chair with your eyes closed then it is pointless buying a very very expensive set of headphones because your physical movement and the input from your other senses will influence your perception of the music to an extent greater than the noise floor of the less expensive headphones you could've bought. To be honest, headphones schmedphones. High quality monitor speakers are more exciting. There's a limit to what you can achieve with those tiny drivers. Far better to covet things such as this: http://www.genelec.com/products/main-monitors/1036a/ Flat response from 19-22000hz at 136db. Oh dear. If £20,000 is a bit much for you, consider something like this: http://www.adam-audio.com/en/pro-audio/products/a8x/descript... |
The point of the article was to say that with the current capabilities of smartphones, and televisions, etc, if we could wire it all up to a piece of equipment similar to a hearing aid, it would improve our lives. Sound quality really is a secondary characteristic to this for the purpose of the article.