I noticed this a few years ago, and have discussed it with friends before, but now a wider audience.
When listening to music on headphones, not particularly loudly, I can feel the vibrations. Like how you would feel the beat on a table that a speaker is sitting on. It goes as far as when kick drums or something kick in, it makes me blink.
When I used to work in an office, sometimes I would get embarrassed and have to double-check that no one else can hear what I can hear, because I can literally feel the desk vibrating. Even when it’s a delicate track, I can feel things like the xylophone beater just tap at my arm.
Totally psychological and probably batshit, anyone else have this?
Probably psychological… If it’s from my iPad’s speakers, then that’s going to be a given since your example is fairly bass-heavy, but even then it’ll be pretty light considering it’s just the iPad instead of say, my JBL Flip 5 that actually has pretty decent bass response.
I’ve tried it on both my Sennheiser M2 AEBT and Momentum TrueWireless 2 from a whisper all the way to cranking it to 11, and didn’t feel the phenomena you’re describing. I also don’t even recall experiencing it with any other headphones in the past. Not to brag/boast, but Senns are pretty high-grade and accurate, and often used by professional musicians so it’s not because of a lack of ability to reproduce certain sounds/frequencies; everything I’ve thrown at it is so accurate, I can’t even listen to low bitrate songs in my MP3 collection anymore (yes, I still have some since I used to work in rural areas) since it actually highlights the muddy/compressed notes.
I don’t mean to sound accusatory or trying to diagnose it, but maybe you might have some sort of synesthesia (more specifically auditory–tactile synesthesia or similar)?
