Oh and as for the comment about living with poor music quality?? I suspect that ONLY an audiophile (music purist) would MAYBE be able to pick out imperfections IF ANY .....
I don't think that is true at all...PC speakers are a very historically recent product, released due to the need for small speakers in office type cubicle situations and small kids rooms.
The basics of loudspeaker design have been around for decades, which is why progress is very slow in the loudspeaker market. Loudspeakers have been, for the majority of history, built based on principles of physics (air movement), dispersion, onaxis and offaxis frequency response.
Computer speakers are built for a very specific need, and as a result, have to go against several audio design principles, foremost, the small size almost guarantees very poor off-axis design, and low excursion limits. Offaxis means exactly what you probably can imagine--what the speaker sounds like "in the room".
Computer speakers can be adquate, even great, if the drivers are lined up perfectly with your ears. But off axis performance--dispersion of the sound so it maintains the same sound throughout a wide area--is a huge limitation of PC speakers. This is why "more watts" is a fallacy and is just marketting jargon. When you are walking around the room, it sounds more muffled and less distinct than when in the direct listening position (this is true of all speakers of course, but good floorstanders can maintain 95% frequency response linearity even 75 degrees to either side of the drivers). Just turning it up (those 505 watts of Logitech greatness!!! Wow!) will make it more audible, it will make the "noise level" louder, but won't fix the issue, which is the sound is not "clear" (the frequency response is no longer linear offaxis; it sounds a lot different when you walk around the room, whereas good speakers should sound very linear no matter where you are in the room). The audio issue here is that it cannot be fixed by simply adding more "ammo", but actually a failure of the design (to be accurate "in the room", rather than just mostly accurate "for one person, with his head in a vise").
It doesn't take an audiophile to hear the obvious. A lot of kids have grown up in the PC era, and PC speakers seemed to go hand in hand with their PCs. But when you are growing up, you may realize for the last 60 or so years, people have been listening to music through "traditional loudspeakers" --i.e, floorstanders and bookshelves--that are designed primarily for waveform accuracy, rather than paying for some audio tradeoffs in order to fit it into a small form factor, or to design them to match the PC or flat screen monitor.
...i remember reading somewhere (i think it was on wikipedia.org, almost positive)... but that the volume difference between speakers and headphones is about 4 fold... being that, at the exact same volume setting, even when they sound at the same volume; the effect of the sound through headphones will actually be manifested 4 times greater... i think because of the distance and space from and around your hearing, no gap at all really between you and the drivers, especially when theyre 'over ear' headphones even more... so the sound is focused directly point blank at your ears, instead of 'dissipating' into the surrounding area... ...it takes some pretty loud listening at long durations to do much damage even still though... i think for instance, listening to something at about 85 decibals for at least a few hours consistantly is enough to begin damaging your hearing... ...so, yes, loud listening through headphones really isnt a smart idea...
just my 2 cents...
Yeah, even though my HD595s are comfortable as hell, it gets fatiguing when watching something for an hour or more. Good, accurate speakers, I can have them on for hours. Sound isn't coming straight into your ears but at an angle with loudspeakers, so you can take some pretty high volume levels before you start sustaining hearing loss. The folds of your ears and the shape also help dissapate sound before reaching your ears. This is why earbuds are *really* dangerous for your hearing, as you have lost most of the physical protections that the irregular shape of your ear provides.
BTW Halcyon, do you have both Senns AND Grados? Do you switch them up for different purposes, or did you simply get both for fun? =P (I personally would've spent the money on some nice bookshelves, like the AV123 X-LS...that's the best $200 deal you can get...along with SVS' SBS bookshelves and Ascend's compact monitors [which I call the holy trinity of budget speakers]).
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