Ng chee soon, president and managing director, sennheiser electronic.
Ng chee soon, president and managing director, sennheiser electronic.
AFirst off, congratulations to Sennheiser for reaching its 70th Anniversary! That’s a great achievement for any company, much less one that’s family-owned and operated. What are some of the biggest things Sennheiser has learnt over the years?
You know it’s funny, because we were also just reflecting on how amazing it is to not just last for 70 years, but to thrive. I think one of those things was that we stayed a privately held, family business, and that has allowed us certain elements of sustainability built-in. A company like ours, because we’re family-run and directed, we can often go beyond three-month directives.
For example, the Digital 9000 took 12 years in the making before we finally launched it. If we weren’t a privately held company, I wonder if that wouldn’t have been abandoned halfway through the development cycle!
I think the other thing is our passion for excellence. Our tagline: “In the pursuit of perfect sound” is wonderful, because “perfect sound” is a great vision to work towards. But you can never attain it; even with great products like the Orpheus. So, 24 years down the road, we came up with something else – the HE 1060/ HEV 1060, with lots of improvement over what was considered the “Pinnacle of Sound”. So there’s that passion to move things along and to push the envelope.
A lot of times there’s also temptation to go into other adjacent avenues, but we’ve stayed focused on our core competency – audio – and on creating products that don’t sell out the philosophy. That takes a lot of discipline!
Indeed. On that note, how do you see audio changing next?
Well, the revival of vinyl suggests that it’s not always about sound getting finer, but also the experience.
If you put vinyl next to High Res Audio (HRA), you could argue that vinyl is noisier and lower resolution, and yet there’s a revival because there’s that whole chain of the experience.
But, you can’t reverse the trend of embedding more and more technology, and different companies are going to invest in putting more in to get maybe even more resolution out of music: more details, more everything.
However, all these trends ignore something extremely important – the source! In the end when you experience music, you need that translation from the audio source to an analog signal that the human ear can hear. Unfortunately nobody has made the human ear hear digital pulses directly yet, so we’re still living in an analog world, and that’s where we come in. And we believe that no matter what you do to the source, if you don’t pay attention to how you listen to music, you’ll miss half the equation.
Ok. So what are the basic things you need to have a really good listening experience then?
That can have many answers, depending on your application and personal preferences.
Of course, the basic thing is to have a good source. If you have MP3 at the lowest bit rate and the highest compression then you can’t expect much. But, a good pair of headphones can still make the listening experience much better compared to the typical earbuds that come with your mobile phones.
Let’s say you want to listen to nice music in a quiet, controlled environment. That’s a different story altogether. You want to have preferably open headphones, because they tend to give you a wider soundstage and more natural reproduction. Also, you won’t have to worry about disturbing others so you can use large headphones with bigger diaphragms that have a better chance of less distortion.
Of course your music genres will also influence this so you will want to match your headphones to the type of music you listen to, because different headphones have different sound profiles.
Here’s a fun one to end with then. Speakers or headphones?
Well, let me first say: different people have different preferences, and maybe I’m a little biased already. *laughs*
But first off, I think it’s clear we like what we’re used to. So people who grow up listening to speakers often find they go back to what they’re used to. You could give them the best headphones in the world, but they’d still say they prefer speakers.
That said; I believe that if you’re looking for the best reproduction of a recording you can’t come close to the experience of headphones. Firstly, with speakers the sound interacts with your environment, so how good the sound is also depends on the acoustics of the room. Headphones cut that all out because the audio is projected directly into your ears.
Secondly, because the sound is sent through the air, it gets adulterated in certain ways. Because the diaphragm for headphones is so close to the ears, you get a lot less disturbance before it enters your ear drums.
Thirdly, in order for us to perceive sound from speakers, you need a lot more vibration from the diaphragms, so therefore a lot more movement, which means a higher chance of inaccuracy or distortion.
That’s very measurable, so I’m convinced headphones give you the highest chance of the closest reproduction of sound, but of course there’s nothing like watching a performance live. You can’t ever replace that!
