We’re all looking for ways to improve our work-from-home setups. For some of us, that centers around music. How can I listen to higher-resolution audio while working from home? Your music files, your amplifier, and your headphones are the three crucial factors for delivering music to your ears, and which one you should upgrade first depends on what you already have.
The most important link in that chain is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the headphones. “A quality headphone or earbud can produce better sound quality from even the most basic music playback device such as a smartphone [or laptop],” explained Owen Kwon, the president at Astell&Kern.
But it’s not a nailed-on guarantee that more you more spend on headphones, the better sound — but it’s generally the case. A pair of $300 headphones like the Grado SR325e ($295) is going to sound better than a $30 headphones like the Monoprice Premium Hi-Fi ($30). This is the more expensive models have better, more powerful drivers that a can more accurately able to separate frequencies (low, high and midrange) so the sound has depth. Instead of sounding muddled or scratchy.
Next up is the headphone amp. It’s capable of upscaling the audio file so that your headphones make the music sound way better than it should. According to Kwon, this “will really show listeners what they have been missing all these years listening to the same songs with subpar equipment.”
Your laptop or computer already has a built-in amp (otherwise it wouldn’t be able to play music), but its sound is often flat and grainy — a far cry from the detailed and expansive audio you want. This is due to the space and cost constraints of the computer manufacturer. An external headphone amp, like AudioQuest’s Dragonfly Red ($200) or Schiit Audio’s Magni ($99), comes with a superior integrated digital-to-analog converter (DAC), both of which will help the audio be more accurate and less harsh. A headphone amp can also upsample compressed music files, essentially helping your low-quality audio sound more hi-fi.
