He lead me over to the counter where he produced a pair of those little earbud headphones and boasted of their crispness and convenience.  He said he used the same pair with his iPod all the time (which is where he lost me) and encouraged me to do the same.  He insisted that Coby was a cheap brand and that I would be much better off going with a different pair of headphones.

I couldn’t blame him, really.  He was doing his job convincingly by both upselling and demonstrating knowledge of the product.  He just didn’t understand that I might be buying the CV-180s, no doubt cheap, because they sounded great.

Headphones, at one time, were the only means of receiving audio signals at all.  To listen to modern music on a pair is to recreate a primal listening experience that was first centered around decoding tiny, specific sounds that as yet could not be amplified.  Music created to be enjoyed in this medium tends be a feast for audio enthusiasts like myself.

Briefly, the technology behind most headphones:  A magnetic element, attached to the frame of the headphone, creates a stationary magnetic field.  Immersed in the stationary magnetic field is a lightweight diaphragm attached to a coil of wire through which audio current is passed.  When the audio current passes through the coil of wire it generates a second magnetic field within the stationary magnetic field.  This interaction causes the air to move and therefore produce sound.

My CVs are circumaural headphones, simply meaning that the ear cones fit over the entire ear, creating a small, sealed chamber for the sound to reverberate in.  Circumaural headphones tend to reproduce the most detailed feedback.  They are used heavily in recording studios to monitor and calibrate the dynamics of the recording.  For this very same reason, audiophiles like myself tend to gravitate towards them.

But not all circumaural headphones are good headphones.  Some of the higher-end studio pairs suck the life out of the music.  For example, a friend of mine extorted a pair of studio Sony MDR-7506s from his parents for an amount of money I’m not comfortable printing here.  What he would do is sit in his chair and listen to Hail to the Thief with his eyes closed and point with his finger to the different directions he perceived the sounds to be coming from.  To be sure, the headphones cleanly separated the sound sources into three dimensions, and having heard the album many times before, I was surprised to hear whole instruments I hadn’t been aware of.  Still, it was like gazing at skin and bones.  Each source was so . . . dry, I couldn’t accept that this was to be the optimal listening experience.  Where was the flesh and blood?

In the CV-180s, I discovered.  At a fraction of the cost.  Equipped with deep bass and watery reverb, the sources blend together to create a real sense of movement, all the while creating the same sense of detailed, three-dimensional space.  It’s a bit like standing in the middle of a vast rehearsal space as the band works its way through the fifth take.  Messy but vital.