Are Headphones Timely?

The headphone fulfills a favorable condition for time-correct listening: It contains a full-range driver with a single diaphragm for the entire frequency spectrum, be it an electrodynamic transducer, electrostat, magnetostat, or other. All headphones that have a single diaphragm are one-way systems that, by principle, do not provide a chopped step response. They are inherently minimum phase systems and thus theoretically "time correct". As a rule, headphones clearly convert better than the mass of the speaker cabinets. Practically, this does not necessarily make them time / signal correct, however, since linearity depends on the user. It is not easy to create a measurement setup that corresponds to the natural acoustic environment (people's ears). Every ear is different and there is also the question of where to position the microphone. Headphone developers have at least as many problems with the "room acoustics ear" as developers of loudspeaker boxes. With minimal phase systems, it is many times easier to draw conclusions about the sound from step responses and other direct signal responses. The correct basic shapes of the sound responses even make it possible to recognize the frequency response. With minimum phase systems, the frequency response can be clearly read off from the course of the graph! Although frequency response measurements without information about the time response do not tell us much about the sound of a loudspeaker, in the case of minimum phase systems, such as microphones, dynamically time-aligned loudspeakers or headphones, a great many sonic characteristics can be identified from frequency response measurements. The transmission bandwidth is of great importance. The high and low pass with their respective slope (dB / octave) also provide information about the time response. A very flat course with a wide transmission range promises a very good time response. But loudspeakers as minimum phase systems are often even more linear than headphones - at least without room influences. But even with a diaphragm there are timing errors in the frequency ranges where different acoustic centers form on the diaphragm. This leads to different travel times in the direction of the auditory canal and is measurably detectable in the form of an irregular frequency response due to interference. Basically, headphones and "time-corrected" loudspeaker cabinets have a similar band-pass characteristic with corresponding phase rotations (high-pass / low-pass).

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