Hello all,

I do video transcriptions from English. They are mostly TV shows so I need to hear the sentences with all the details.

But some guests have a difficult accent, some dont articulate the words properly, some talk very fast and sometimes you can't hear the words or sentences properly because of the applauding audience or the show band's thing when they do after they hear a nice joke.

Given that, I need a nice headphone to hear the human voice as much detailed and neat as I can.
Sometimes it gets hard to distinguish the sounds "m" from "n" or "p" from "b" or "g" from "k" and you misunderstand the whole word or sentence if you know what I mean. Especially when English isn't your mother tongue.

I'ven been suggested Equation Audio RP-21. I understand it's a great headphone but does it worth the money, given that I need it for only human voice detail and quailty? Or are these kinds of headphones unnecessary or too expensive for this purpose for they are produced to provide music quality?

I can find Senneheiser, AKG and some other brands where I live, but mostly these, I believe. What would you suggest, is RP-21 ok for my purpose?

Thanks in advance.

I don't know anything about those headphones. Voice reproduction is less demanding than music, and any decent pair of headphones should be acceptable. If these headphones sound about as good as other good, similarly priced, headphones (i.e. Sennheiser or AKG), you should be OK. A better headphone might make music sound somewhat better, but I don't think it will help with intelligibility.

I assume you are spending long hours doing this. If so, comfort is very important too.

It might be helpful to get an amplifier, preamplifier, or some piece of audio gear with bass & treble controls (real knobs that you can quickly-and-easily adjust). Sometimes, boosting the treble (or other adjustments) will bring-out details.

The quality of the headphone is probably not the limiting factor... It probably has more to do with the quality of the recording (including noise) and the clarity of the speaker. From what I've read, normal human "word recognition" is only about 80% accurate, and our brains "fill-in the blanks" from the context. We are not generally aware of this, because most of the time this "intrepertation" is quick and subconscious. (Most of the time, we aren't making a transcript and it's no big deal, as long as we get the correct meaning.)

P.S. On one of the (English) DVDs I have, a song is playing and the (English) subtitles say something like "unintelligible lyrics".

Actually, a great deal of the time we only hear what we want to hear when someone is speaking to us.

Thanks so much.

Are those hardware bass and treble controls better than the built in software EQ's of the media players?

Not really, no. Both will do the job.

i imagine some sort of software that would loop the problematic part with some different EQ presets (not to mention it would be nice if scrubbing could be controlled by feet, so the hands are always free for typing).

what exactly is your playback source?

Oh, that would be great.

I used to play on Media Player Classic and now Gom Player.

Can I do anything like that on these or other players?