In Reply to: questions.......................... posted by thylantyr on October 18, 2002 at 23:54:45:
From a post I made on the JBL forum, on the same issueSo I am searching for more insight on the headphone issue, and I found this.........it suggests that we CAN hear low bass from headphones, which doesn't apparently mean that it is producing a 30 foot wave, or at least not with any volume...............? We are hearing the compressions and rarefecations, and not the whole wavelength at once......?
This is an excerpt from a copyrighted article by Doug Blackburn on www.soundstage.com
The entire article is at the link below and was rather interesting. I suggest that you guys may want to read it and see what you think!
"Twenty-five Hertz waves in air are twice as long as 50Hz -- 44 to 48 feet. And 20Hz, the lowest frequency we’re supposed to be able to hear, would clock in around 55 to 59 feet long. Do you need a room with at least one 60-foot dimension in it to hear a real 20Hz in the room? No. Your ears actually pick up sound in a different way, reacting to the compressions and rarefactions that happen in the air as the sound propagates though the room. Twenty Hertz creates 20 compressions and rarefactions per second and your ear will pick that up even if you are listening to headphones that respond to frequencies that low. Otherwise your ear canal would have to be 60 feet long -- we would look rather odd if our heads were 60 feet wide."
The rest of the article, dealing with bass reproduction, is here
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