Polygonhell
100+ Head-Fier
I think that's a valid point, which is why I didn't say one is better than the other.Headphones strong point is providing an immersive stereo experience, not recreating a narrow front triangle of 2 channel speakers. The stereo possibilities are wasted, and the true mix panning is altered when you try to do that. The silly reverse situation would be like putting your speakers at 180 degrees facing each ear to emulate headphones (probably some phase processing needed).
Some of this is probably the material being listened to as well, electronic music isn't trying to recreate a real space for example.
And there are a lot of older recordings, that simply weren't mixed for headphones, and sound overly constrained (though it's less of an issue these days).
The DSD recording of Sunday at the Village Vangard - Bill Evans trio for example is an actually excellent recording, but the mix is so simple, it feels artificially boxed in on headphones without adding XFeed (which I do very rarely). It just doesn't come across that way on speakers, because you get natural XFeed.
In the end I listen to headphones probably 90+% of the time, the realities of having a Wife with different musical tastes, and limited living space requires that.
But I can certainly see growing up with Headphones changing preferences.