Music is art, but, today, most of us take music for granted because it has become prevalent in all aspects of our life, especially the multimedia contents. You can easily find advertisements that combine audio and visual creative materials everywhere on the Internet. Once you get back on TV, you will also see a lot of the same thing.

However, some music enthusiasts who call themselves audiophiles are sensitive listeners who pay careful attention to their favorite’s songs’ equalizer. To them, MP3, WAV, FLAC, are all different. They also believe that not all headphones and speakers are created equal. Some are only good for treble, while the others are for bass.

Here, you will learn to understand the tips and tricks to enhance the quality of your music. Who knows that after reading this article you will become an audiophile too?

Playing Through the Cassettes

Do you know that although cassette players like Walkman, Aiwa, and Groov-e were discontinued from the market a long time ago, the cassettes are still in production? As a matter of fact, more and more people today have realized the collectibility value of cassettes. Although the collectors do not necessarily listen to the music from cassettes, those who do claim to have a distinct listening experience when they hear the music from old cassette players.

They feel like digital music does not sound organic at all to their ears. First, there is a background noise of cassettes that digital formats do not have. Second, when the sound of digital formats is transformed to frequency graphs, they lack the dynamic range if compared to the ones from cassettes.

Moreover, there was a story of Elbow, a tech project to bring back the trend of enjoying music from a cassette player, that stole everyone’s attention in 2017. The device was a biaxial compartment with USB compatibility and had a visually artistic design. However, it seemed like the project was more of an Internet hype than a real device ready to be mass-produced. Nevertheless, from that story, you can sense how some audiophiles do pursue the unique listening experience of playing music through cassettes.

Upgrading Your Headphones

We are going to discuss two levels of headphones here. The first one is for those who want to enhance the audio stats (treble, bass, and loudness) regardless of the music style and musicians. In other words, these headphones are engineered to boost the music quality with the sacrifice of each band/performer’s sound signature. Headphones for this purpose is quite affordable, and you can find a pair of headphones for $100 or less with a simple search on Amazon. Here is a list from us:

• V-MODA Crossfade LP2
• SONY Mdr-XB950/B Extra Bass
• Monster Inspiration ANC
• Sennheiser HD 201
• Philips Rich Bass SHS5200/28

The second type of headphones is the one used by audio mixing-mastering engineers. If you have ever tried one, you might have been surprised by the default sound from those headphones. Even if it sounds like a useless feature, the truth is that sophisticated tech is applied to those headphones to bring the most organic sound to the wearer’s ears. The aim is not to fabricate and manipulate the music but to display and exaggerate the audio signatures by different musicians.

For this purpose, we only recommend three brands: AKG K 701, Shure SRH 1540, and Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro. They are the most famous brands among sound engineers.

Meddling with Music Formats

If you have ever bought CDs and tried to rip them from your computer, you will notice that the default format of the audio files is WAV. It is the biggest digital data form that can give you uncompressed music. MP3 is the simplest and space-efficient format, yet it might not grant you a satisfying listening experience. FLAC, on the other hand, is the hybrid of MP3 and WAV. FLAC can deliver music without too much compression while maintaining storage efficiency at its best.

If your music player can afford big storage, then always keeping your songs in WAV is your best way to achieve the flawless listening experience. In other cases, put FLAC as your second option, and MP3 as your last.…