Assumed Good Hearing. No one checks if reviewers' hearing is OK!

The HEADPHONE Community
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Moderators, kindly reassign of you think I’ve posted this in the wrong section of the forum. Thanks.

Was watching a Youtube video, review of an IEM, with stock eartips, which I own, and the reviewer was seeking more high end, when I’m perfectly satisfied with the upper frequencies and have made cuts in the upper mids and highs, using EQ.

Then it dawned on me - are we hearing the same thing. Social media, falsely leads us to assume that anyone with a keyboard or a camera and a microphone is authentic. Why?

When we were young, not anyone could just publish anything, or put something on TV. It had to go through editors, reviewers, committees, fact checkers, to avoid violating the rules of governing bodies of the publishing organisation, as well as regulatory bodies who had oversight of what publishers could say, or NOT say.

So our brains are wired to believe what we see and read.

Who checks that a reviewer has decent hearing? We just assume. Sad. The same thing goes for reviewers of highy respected print - audio gear magazines. Does anyone actually check, that these reviewers hear well enough. We just assume. And we live on every word they say.

Some professions have periodic checks. To make sure they are fit for purpose. Pilots have health checks, at various stages in their career. But no one checks audio gear reviewers. It just hit me out of the blue. How much of the advice and opinion, that I have taken as gospel, with respect to audio gear on the professional and audiophile world, is actually valid, especially the subjective opinions.

And that is where clearly we need Measurements as an unbiased assessor. To guard against the potential of reviewers with poor hearing thrusting their opinions on us. Those who measure the gear, have they measured their own hearing? Interesting, they measure everything, except their own hearing. That would be interesting - publishing the results of their own hearing tests… We could be in for a surprise!!

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I’m not a reviewer but I explicitly state in my bio that I have tin ears. Look for disclaimers.

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Is that because you suffer from tin-itus? … I’ll see myself out.

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No. What we need is more brick and mortar stores so we can all spend time auditioning products in pursuit of our personal frisson-inducing sound signatures rather than wasting time reading a bunch of someone else’s opinions and trying to analyze graphs that were produced based on unstandardized methodologies and uncontrolled environments.

But we all know how that goes. People come up with excuses not to do so because their office chairs are too comfortable.
I don’t understand why the Lissimores can’t open a part of their office in Vancouver for even scheduled appointment-based product auditioning.
Heck if they need a helping hand, I’ll be more than happy to help out if it were to open up more opportunities for in-person physical interactions with products.

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Damn right, I’m going back to Tokyo to do just that. E-earphones and Yodobashi are amazing for this. Better than Canjam even, it’s a bit too loud at Canjam Socal for testing open backs really. I’m shocked there’s no listening booths with minimal soundproofing at Canjams.

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Some kind of hearing test for reviewers would probably be good. I’m not sure that would guarantee they could give a good review though! :slight_smile:

Every person also has their own unique transfer function that they’re used to hearing when listening to speakers in a room or other sounds around them, that shapes the sound in a certain way before it reaches their eardrums. So how do you tune a pair of IEMs to sound like good speakers in a room if most of that transfer function is missing between the transducer and your eardrum?.. The answer is that it’s not so easy. So opinions on the sound quality and frequency response of a given IEM are more likely to vary from one person to the next, even if they have good hearing.

It’s a little bit easier (but still somewhat hard) to get that tuning a bit closer to the mark with an over-ear headphone, because at least it’s interacting with most of the outer ear and the whole ear canal. Over-ear headphones are still missing the parts of your personal transfer function that are outside of that though, that would also normally effect the sound of a speaker or other stimulus before it reaches your ears, including the effects of your head, neck, shoulders, and torso. So the best you can do is make an educated guess at those.

I’m sure IEM mfrs also play this guessing game though, and try to guess how not only an average head, but also how an average pinna, and ear canal will effect the sound. That’s alot of guessin though to try to get the same sound of that speaker in a room right, before it reaches your particular eardrums! It’s kind of amazing they can even do it at all, when you think about it.

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I swear. The increasing push for “objective measurement” is raising the bar that much higher for the next generation of those wanting to start the hobby. It’s high enough due to the unnecessary stigma it’s got, but now the objectivist advocates are adding the “you are now required to read graphs and understand jargon” into the equation.
Seriously. Why do people have to make things so complicated?

Oh yea. If you’re heading to Japan,don’t forget Fujiya Avic, Audio Mijinko for customized accessories, and AVAC Yokohama where they’ve legit perfected your ideal product auditioning environment.

Also, I don’t understand why Precogvision doesn’t feature all these beautiful stores on his Youtube channel, go to seasonal Portable Audio Festivals and Headphone Festivals, or mingle with audiophiles when he lives there for goodness sake…

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Your post exemplifies the argument from authority logical fallacy. If we went back to the old days, we’d have fuzzy McIntosh and mid-heavy Bose setting the standards for everyone. Note that Bose filed a lawsuit and lost against Consumer Reports over a poor review of the Bose 901 back in 1970.

I could not care less about goofy Consumer Reports-style rating criteria, nor do I care about any Bose product. Nor do I care one whit about what Amir at ASR says about anything, as he reports listening loud enough that his “earlobes shake.” Measurements yes, but also largely deaf?

Regarding hearing tests for reviewers, humans naturally vary in sensory characteristics and performance. There NEVER is a true authority because preferences vary, and your personal hearing (e.g., young vs. old, damaged from loud noises or not, limited by poor health or sinus congestion, the presence of earwax, etc.) is the only thing that matters to YOU.

Finally, measurements reflect human’s desire to jump between their perceptions and whatever “is out there” in the universe. We can only measure what we perceive, and we are limited by our tools and technology. Some fans of measurements claim that certain characteristics are always superior, but they deny the primacy of individual perception. Amps with terrible measurements (e.g., Bottlehead Crack) often sound far better to my ears than amps with superior measurements.

YMMV. There is no way to shortcut the demo process. Listen for yourself. See @Delsonta’s comments.

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Very well said.

I come from the hobby and now professional side of the audio/music industry. Musician/Vocalist/Audio Engineer. Once upon a time, as I lived in or visited the UK, we had a truly famous store in London, Turnkey, and a few others of lesser pedigree, where one could audition the latest kit.

Very few of these places exist. Online taken over most of the sales. In person demos somewhat replaced, for minor to mid level expense items, by listening to Youtube demos, and reviews, reading online reviews, and reading through spec sheets (which once upon a time, one would request to be mailed, so I could get a printed copy!). Of course if its a megabuck item, that would need a proper audition, and an investment in travel to a store that had the item on demo.

Not sure how the bricks and mortar shops compete with the online stores. Worse still, after auditioning the gear in one store, you can go online and find who has it for the least price. So they put in the hard slog, and others are benefitting, from their hard work.

But guess it depends on what you are into. For speakers, amps, preamps, with significant cost, definitely some will prefer to hear and compare, @ a demo room, before they buy. But when travel to the showroom, costs more than the item you wish to buy, in the case of some budget IEM’s, might as well buy and audition in the comfort of your home. And for these kinds of items, good quality reviews add a lot of value, if one can read between the lines, and find the common elements from diverse reviews/reviewers, on which most of them agree.

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What I wanted to get at is something I mentioned in my second comment: lowering the bar so that normie consumers can get a chance to experience products with as close to zero friction as possible.
I’ve been a long fan of e-earphone (Japan) for this reason. I’ve been their customer since December of 2008 and I’ve seen how they’ve transitioned over the years. When I first stepped foot in their store, I’ve seen their business practices akin to the current Headphones. com, catering only to an EXTREMELY SMALL niche of nerds and audiophiles. (Not to mention that I witnessed one of their staff members back then refusing to sell to a customer who came in asking for the most expensive thing in their store lol.) Same goes with their Youtube channel. They were only talking about niche within a niche sort of products and experiments that, although attracted the attention of hardcore audio fanatics, went nowhere from a business perspective.
But something changed over the years. They stopped catering to the ultra-nerds and started marketing products that went in line with values of the normies but at the same time introduced brands that were novel and a little more higher end than your average products you could buy at your local electronics store. They were the ones that popularized Shure’s IEM-style “wearing the cable around the ear” in Japan years before chi-fi was even a thing.
Where are they at now? They are at the forefront of everything headphones, earphones, and lifestyle audio products in the country. They get picked up by mass media every time when there’s a viral product on the market. When TWS started becoming popular amongst the general public, there were lingering problems of people constantly dropping them on train tracks that caused unnecessary delays, so many news outlets consulted e-earphone for advice indicating many may not be wearing it properly. Was a thing with Sony’s WF1000XM3 where people were wearing them like Airpods pointing down when it was supposed to be worn horizontally for instance (thanks Apple…). They also touched on how to choose the correct size of eartips to ensure a tight fit so they don’t fall, and also to come in to their store (of course lol) so people can check whether products actually fit their ears in the first place. Kinda reminded me of my brother when I took him to e-earphone. Instead of your average audiophile auditioning earphones, he put one on after another without listening at all. What he said was a damn eye-opener. “There’s no point in something sounding good if it doesn’t fit properly.”

Many celebrities consult e-earphone to make custom IEMs too and leave autographs there so their fans can get a glimpse of it raking in more customers as a result.
Some musicians go as far as designing their own signature models working really close with local manufacturers. And no it’s more than “here’s my EQ and my logo. Slap a decal on it and call it mine” sort of products, Search up Pierre Nakano’s lineups for instance.

In essence, the business scheme has to change if we all want audio to thrive for the coming future.
Businesses shouldn’t conform to the nerd community but rather open up to the larger population. It’s really ironic how the situation is right now. The community is completely against the idea of audio being poisoned with elitist mentalities while they are the ones accelerating it by endorsing “strictly online sales” pushing for “objective measurements.”
Their arguments indicating “For transparency” is invalid imho.
The best practice of transparency? Increased opportunities for consumers to experience the products in question first hand.

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I followed the link. Back about ummm 1975 or so, I’d sometimes go to Zeno’s, a bar just across from campus in State College. They had 4 901 speakers positioned throughout the place, maybe 1400 sq feet or so. The 901s were stuck to or hung from the ceilings, in a sort of L shaped place.

It wasn’t the beer – or any other substance, but the instruments would wander somewhat randomly throughout the bar, smear along the walls, and be generally disconcerting. Much better after a pitcher or two with friends. Food was always better at the Skeller down the street, and music always better at the Phyrst on the next block.

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That was a definitely a thing with 901s. I used to visit a music store when records and CDs were common. This rectangular cinder block room had them hanging from the ceiling near the walls, and they played rock music too loud. The sound bounced off the cinder blocks as intended, but it echoed, smeared, and glared quite badly.

Bose was Beats before Beats was.

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it’s a bit too loud at Canjam Socal for testing open backs really. I’m shocked there’s no listening booths with minimal soundproofing at Canjams.

This reminds me.
The distributor of Shure, Meze, Warwick, Audeze, etc. in Japan (Kanjitsu Denki) propped up sound dampening panels at their booth in Headphone Festival a couple years ago

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That hardly goes far enough. I think we need interviews with their audiologists. Actually, just for the sake of transparency, they should offer us, their readers, access to their complete electronic medical record. Maybe they have high blood pressure, or suffer from frequent indigestion. That could affect the reviews, and we have a right to know!

In all seriousness, you don’t need to know how any reviewer does on his hearing test. All the guys who review for headphones.com are young guys. Their hearing is fine. Listen for yourself to something they’ve praised or panned and see if you like that. That’s the best way to find out whether a reviewer is reliable.

By the way, most of the guys making the music we love would have audiograms a lot uglier than any 28-year-old reviewer’s. Anyone who has been in the pop or rock music business for 30-40 years is going to have some hearing loss.

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True.

Over time, I have identified the listening preferences of the small set of reviewers I follow, and based on my listening to a few of their recommended IEM’s, now I have a good idea of where their hearing leans towards, compared to mine.

Typically it’s differences in tolerance for brightness, and same for bass. And some are pretty much identical to mine, their comments match 100% with my perception of an IEM.

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I think that’s the best test. And I’d be surprised if there were any significant correlation to hearing-test results (which have some variability as well), aside from profound hearing loss, which would make a big difference.

For example, I have fairly typical (for my age and exposure) mild, noise-induced hearing loss between 2-4 kHz. But I can still detect 8 kHz at 0 dB! Neat! (I am proud of that, LOL – gotta cling to something!) So you might expect that I’d prefer headphones with more ear gain and perhaps a bit rolled off from 8-12 kHz. But I don’t have such a preference. In fact my favorite might be the Audeze LCD-3.

A related point IMO worth remembering: The kind of differences that are meaningful on an audiogram may not be meaningful at usual listening volumes. For example, the difference between 20 dB sensitivity (typically considered the lower bound of normal hearing) and 30 dB (typically considered mild hearing loss) is, subjectively, equivalent to just ~1 dB when listening in the range of 60-70 dB. In other words, it’s pretty darn close to irrelevant. Your experience and preferences are much more important.

Cheers

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As one coming from a musical background, albeit at a novice nonprofessional level, I would like to see audio products to be sold similarly to music instruments…
If you know any musician out there choosing guitars and saxophones by staring at graphs, let alone guitar picks, pickups, ligatures, reeds, mouthpieces, etc etc. with an objective lens based on whatever measurement out there, please enlighten me.

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What matters is human perception, not machine measurements. Perceptions change by ‘quanta’ or Just Notceable Differences (JNDs). There is a science of JNDs.

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Yes but you have to be careful to not misinterpret these.
1dB might be the ammount loudness has to change for you to perceive a difference in loudness, but that doesn’t mean that smaller differences can’t impact other perceptions.
You may not be able to “hear” a 20KHz sound, but that doesn’t mean all phenomena that impact perception are between 20 and 20KHz. In fact recent studies suggest there is measurable brain activity responding to MUCH higher frequencies even in people who can’t “hear” much above 12KHz.

The problem with testing perception is that you engineer tests for one aspect of it, and there is a tendency to extrapolate what the results mean.
It takes 4 photons impacting the retina to register a signal, that doesn’t mean you can see in the dark.

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Yep.

There are plenty of psychological tests that rely on “forced choices”, as lots of events aren’t structured by the brain for conscious or accurate verbal responses. The brain has semi-independent portions and we consciously access a relative fraction of this. Human data tends to form nice (fuzzy) bell curves / Gaussian distributions with many measurements. Sometimes each person and some people hear more of a signal and/or hear it differently.

I push for looking at perception as the central consideration because perceptions are what we truly access from the external world. This approach is logically accurate, and it stands in contrast to the (incomplete | fractured) audio notions of ‘subjective’ or ‘objective.’

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