An audio engineer's quest for reference headphones... Pt. 1

Marketing is something everybody should be way more aware of.

While HD600/650 may not be marketed as “studio” headphones, they are considered as one of the most neutral and “flat” headphones every produced. If you visit Ollo, you can see that they used the HD600 as a reference (no pun intended) for their S4X.

I tried to find the answer to the question of how do I actually prove that this marketing “reference-grade” is true? And, the answer I found was: there is no way. All of our ears differ, so it doesn’t exist. You would need to take huge measurements from everybody’s ears, then make an average and do a sh*t ton of expensive measurements and research.

To my question (on another forum), this individual said:
“headphones work on a different acoustic principle from loudspeakers (and live sound) our brains cannot use their exquisite mechanism that compensates for individual ear variations. So each person gets a different frequency response called the head-related transfer function (HRTF). This is not a subtle thing. Somewhere on YouTube there is a video that plays back the wildly different things different people are hearing when they listen to exactly the same source sound”, that video is:

This is just about ear canal difference, it doesn’t include the pinna or concha variations - conclusion: impossible to find a general reference that works for everybody.

Apparently this doesn’t apply to loudspeakers (I still don’t fully understand why), I’m assuming that this means that there is a thing such as “reference loudspeaker” - which essentially studio monitors are, reference speakers.

Business is business. Of course manufacturer’s job is to make as many sales as possible, this will be done with the help of several (well studied) marketing techniques. Naming is just one of them - the simplest form of marketing manipulation is visual content: photography/videography. Have you ever seen a McDonald’s commercial? Yup, that’s the same technique that can be applied to audio gear (though I haven’t seen as much of it for headphones) - at the end of the day, (majority) companies who make audio products do it to make money and as much profit as possible… you can’t stop it. It’s our job to be aware of it and know that it is just marketing.

Hah, I didn’t find it there either - I just reverse engineered it - hide details is a feature that allows you to hide something behind that little triangle. What did I want to do? Hide my pictures so they don’t suffocate the thread, so pop 'em behind the “hide details” feature, and bam. Done.
There aren’t many limitations to the text edit tools, there are many ways to use them as you can see :smiley:

btw - that video seems to be quite interesting (I still didn’t find the time or will to watch it), so I recommend that you watch it. Many found it quite interesting and educative. I must say, this guy (from forum) does seems to be quite a bit passionate about sound, seems like an older gentleman.

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