Any music you find difficult to listen to on Headphones (or vice versa)

Blanck Mass - extreme dynamic/loudness shifts, so you spend half of the track trying to find the right volume so that when the loud bit comes in it’s not unpleasant. Which usually means you can’t enjoy the rest of the track. Imo.

Any headphones you find it difficult to listen to on music??

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Also there’s a way of doing this loud/quiet thing ‘better’, i find with Blanck Mass there’s a real compressed/digital/overdriven quality to it which is no doubt by design but it’s irksome (imo, ymmv)

Agree with Blanck Mass, although I do think it sort of depends on the headphones. I have a huge gaming headset type of thing which makes listening to World Eater an absolute joy but on my, fairly decent £20 in ear phones the treble absolutely kills me.

See also: Ben Frost’s “AURORA” couldn’t listen to it on my portable music player.

Loads of stuff released around the time that stereo was a new concept with its hard panning

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Those Suede remasters sound horrible to me on headphones.

Some music also sets my tinnitus off when listening on my bookshelf speakers at home. Can’t remember what right now though.

METZ II on headphones at work took me out of listening to music for about a month, even at low volume.

Tying up with another current popular thread, some of Menomena’s stuff has this and it annoys me greatly when listening on headphones.

Surely depends on your headphones. Over ear or open back and you really wont have that problem. On a closed in pair of tins yeah sure

As for the other way round plenty. Unless you have a proper good hi-fi set up headphones are by far superior for picking out detail.

Absolutely. Stereo version of pipers at the gate of dawn. Oh fuck off mate!!! Always try to find the mono versions when talking about psych 60s tracks

That’s first track off their first album has this and agree that it’s annoying, but haven’t noticed it on any of their other stuff.

Anything tinny even a decent pair of bluetooth speakers sounds like nails on a chalk board to my ears. Especially laptop speakers. Laptops/phones that advertise the quality of their speakers baffle me. Its still going to sound like utter shit and you are not actually going to use them right?

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It’s all over Mines. Just put on Queen Black Acid, guitars hard right, bass hard left. Drums come in hard left.
I remember complaining about this to former DiS superstar @bamos but he didn’t know what I was talking about and told me to stop being a whining twat trying to pick holes in a brilliant album.

Low - Drums N Guns has the most extreme panning I think I’ve ever heard.

Shame really as it’s a great record.

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Sorry but no. Using over-ear headphones that cost upwards of 200 $$$…
Actually this is a common problem with a lot of ‘audiophile’ headphones (not claiming mine are the top of the line or anything) - they can actually make a lot of music sound like absolute shit. Especially, as mentioned, digital overdriven compressed noise

You can get a good pair of over ear for less then £100

I love this. though it was a weird experience the first time after having listened to it loads out loud

I also enjoy listening to Blanck Mass on headphones.

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I guess it suited it in a weird way in that it made the songs sound way more claustrophobic, alienating and stressful which fits with the theme of the record right?

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I may have been unclear. What i was saying is I currently use over-ears. They’re ace but blanck mass do not sound smooth on them.

yeah I’d say so.

come to think of it, I do remember trying to listen to it at university while drunk in bed and finding it nauseating