As of today, headphones find the greatest application in leisure. Most of the people shopping for headphones are shopping to use them in applications such as listening to music on their MP3 players, iPhones and similar applications, in similar gadgets.
Yet leisure is not the only application of headphones – as there are certain work roles where headphones are an important tool. Take the entertainment sector, for instance. DeeJaying work would be near impossible without the use of headphones. Call center work too, becomes almost impossible without the use of headphones. Communication between pilots in the cockpit environment too, is near impossible, without the use of the headphones.
Now if you find yourself shopping for headphones for use in any of these commercial applications, there are a number of things you will need to keep in mind.
For one, while you can afford to overlook wearing comfort when shopping for leisure-use headphones (which are typically only worn for short intermittent periods of time), wearing comfort becomes a very important consideration when shopping for headphones for work-related applications. Making your staff to work using uncomfortable headphones can cause them to start subconsciously ‘hating’ their work – and this can have serious impacts on their productivity. To be sure, no person in their right mind will start consciously sabotaging their boss just because they were given uncomfortable headphones to wear. What however happens is that giving them such uncomfortable headphones to work them makes them feel bad (and as if you don’t care for them) at a subconscious level, with huge implications on their productivity.
Ability to withstand pressure, also called resilience, is another thing you cannot afford to overlook when shopping for headphones to use in a work-related setting. Unlike leisure-related headphones, which are typically worn and kept in place for long periods of time, work-related headphones tend to be pulled ‘on and off’ many times in some work-related settings (like in a call center setting for instance), so that if you opt for less resilient gadgets, you would only have yourself to blame when they fall apart within just a short period of use.
Needless to mention is the fact that sound quality considerations become critical when shopping for work-related headphones. To be sure, even when shopping for leisure-use related headphones, many take to take sound quality issues seriously – since it is through its output in terms of sound quality that a headphones set can be really judged. Sound production is, after all, the purpose for which headphones are bought. However, while the penalty for going for headphones which rate poorly in terms of sound quality in the case of the leisure related application would ‘just’ be a poorer listening experience, in the case of work-related applications, the penalty for poor sound quality can be loss of business or worse.
Using a headphones set which has a lot of interference in a cockpit setting can, for instance, cause a pilot to get GPS co-ordinates from the control tower wrongly, with potential for tragic results. Similar results, albeit less tragic, can be caused by use of faulty headphones in an entertainment or call center setting – where the users ‘end up hearing their own things.’ Hence the need to take sound quality considerations extra seriously when shopping for headphones for use in work-related applications.
Tags: gadget, headphone, headphones, mp3 player, mp3 players, sound quality