Why you should be listening to vinyl through headphones

In partnership with Marshall

We all know there’s something ritualistic about playing vinyl. Browsing your collection, flicking through each record until one catches your eye. Admiring the artwork and pouring over those liner notes and lyrics. Slipping the disc from its sleeve, tenderly blowing away the dust before carefully placing it on the turntable. That slight crackle as you lower the stylus and the needle drops. It’s nothing short of heavenly. So let’s add one more to this to-do list: putting a pair of headphones around your ears. Switch off those speakers. There just is no better way to listen to your music of choice than through some quality cans…

You’re a captive audience

It sounds obvious, but when you wear headphones you’re physically connected to your vinyl. Like an umbilical cord, plugging you directly into your favourite album, it amplifies concentration. With those cans on, its lead jacked into your stereo system, there’s simply no wandering off into the kitchen to do the washing up as the music fades into background noise. You are there to listen, to concentrate and to absorb. With this in mind, music can become a powerful, potent experience.

Banish those speaker blues

However good your speakers are, finding the right set-up for a perfect listening experience isn’t as easy as you might think. Every room has different acoustics, dramatically altering your audio experience. And let’s face it, we’ve all fiddled with the “toe-in” – that process of angling your speakers inwards, rather than facing forward, to get the sound waves hitting your ears just right. A good pair of cans, like Marshall’s new Monitor III ANCs, eliminates that problem for the perfect vinyl experience.

Get more bang for your buck

When you’re buying a vinyl set-up, it can be all too easy to lash out on expensive speakers and an amp to go with your turntable. But a top-of-the-range pair of headphones can be bought for less, making this an inexpensive way to enjoy your music without sacrificing quality. And be honest, it’s less anti-social too. If you live in a flat or house share, your neighbours or roommates will thank you for keeping your latest death metal record to yourself.

The devil is in the details

Forget CDs or streaming, vinyl is the most authentic way to hear a record. To get technical for a second, the dynamic range, frequency range and compression levels all contribute to how a track sounds. And vinyl extracts more information from its grooves than any other medium can. Wearing headphones is only going to enforce that warmer, richer analogue sound that envelops you in a way digital mediums can’t, allowing you to absorb every nuance of an artist’s record. And yes, you’ll hear the bad with the good. Vinyl can be prone to static electricity pops and clicks as the needle picks up flaws in the surface of the record. But isn’t that half the fun of playing vinyl? Authenticity has never felt so good.

It’s the perfect complement to your vinyl collection

The last few years has seen a huge renaissance in vinyl sales, as new generations have come to embrace the pleasures of buying music on physical media. If your record collection can be seen as an expression of your very soul, then listening to vinyl through headphones becomes a vital part of that. Showing that you’re a discerning collector, a pair of cans reinforces the notion that you take the art of musical appreciation to a new level. Choose the right headphones and you’re making a style statement that says you’re serious about your music.

Experience music like a pro…

There are various reasons why musicians and producers use headphones. In the studio, when they’re recording, they use them to avoid recording unwanted interference, as well as listening to both the audio of other instruments and their own. On stage, for singers, headphones help them hear themselves, audio cues and instruments during a live performance. At home, listening to vinyl through headphones is a way to take in music in the way the pros intended it to be heard. Background music be gone; using cans brings it to the foreground.

Appreciate the art of the album…

Streaming platforms like Spotify mean that the art of listening to an album from the first song to the last has become increasingly lost, as consumers shuffle and randomly select their music. But musicians think carefully about the way an album moves from track to track, with vinyl the perfect physical expression of this. Would you really start playing Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ half-way through? An LP, meaning “long playing” record, is exactly that: it’s a medium that takes you on a journey. Adding comfortable headphones to the experience will only help absorb the record in the way it was intended.

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