The argument is that if a driver weren’t fast enough to capture a transient, it would show up as a roll off in the high frequencies.
But it presupposes that we only differentiate transients up to what we measure (usually 20KHz), and the measurements at those frequencies are meaningful.
For a technical upgrade with mixing, why are you shopping in this price tier? I expect it to be a sidegrade at best, but I have no experience with the Maxwell. I thought the Focal Clear took over the mainstream mixing market some time back – it’s a huge step up but still not competitive with higher tiers.
In my experience price is completely irrelevant since the HD650 has been my favorite pair of mixing headphones so far and I figured this out years ago before the whole community craze started and the 6XX launched. I also have recently returned the Audeze MM-500 which to my ears couldn’t keep up with the HD650 in terms of neutrality and sound-profile. I don’t find much quality and improvement the higher I go in price, it’s rather the opposite, the high end headphone segment is more for people who look for color and not linearity.
Look at John Hane’s, he’s working with Serban Themes and uses a PSB M4U1 for headphone referencing.
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We’re not at all on the same page about the 650 or neutrality, or quality-by-price-tier. If you are not hearing the differences, I wonder about bottlenecks with your DAC and/or amp. I personally strongly dislike the 650’s rough vocals and forced mid bass. To my ears it is quite colored and not nearly as neutral or natural as the HD600 (despite the 600’s rather thin bass).
I’m not sure which high end headphones you’ve referenced, as the HD 800 S, Focal Utopia, and Susvara sound much much much much more neutral to me than the 650. They each have a solid following, as do other high-end colored models.
The HD 600 family is not remotely as technically capable (e.g., with edges and transitions) as the Clear or HD 800 S, let alone the Utopia. The 650 is a 20 years old lower cost design and it shows. So, modern competing products sold for the same money and made from similar materials…may be quite similar…
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It nails this part of the sound which matters to me the most and most other headphones don’t, no matter how expensive.
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If rolled-off and fuzzy treble with a 3-blob soundstage floats your boat, have at it. For years Amir at ASR evaluated high-dollar equipment with his trusty 650 playing loud enough to “make his earlobes shake.” All that high dollar stuff sounded the same to him. But even he changed…after squandering his credibility…
No one ever said to evaluate gear on HD650s, for that you’re not supposed to use headphones anyways but proper linear speakers in a treated room.
But as long as it does it’s job, why should you change? The most in demand mix engineer monitors through a Digidesign 192 interface from 2004 with Studio speakers from the early 90s and his mixes sound better than anyone else’s.
And to point fingers at someone just because they aren’t using the newest headphones for thousands of dollars because they’re already happy with what they got is really immature.
Guess what, LCR is only 3 positions and the panning in between, there’s nothing more unless you listen to Dolby Atmos, for which using headphones is the worst thing you can do and instead have to get a proper room speaker setup. And in the end, headphones has always been the inferior way to listen to music compared to speakers, even in an untreated room with simple furniture for diffusion.
Instead of paying 6000 for a susvara, you can actually get a really nice Dolby Atmos setup or some really nicely calibrated passive stereo speakers with a boutique amp, including absorbers.
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Headphones have many less variables because they’re both
a) electrically rather simple and don’t have rooms (and their associated modal/reflection responses) to worry about
b) minimum phase systems wherein the frequency and phase domain are proportional
In headphones it really is just a question of getting the FR right for what you’re tryna do. Speakers are more complicated but if yr having trouble with yr headphone’s transient response, the fix is likely in FR somewhere 
Is the underlying contention here that frequencies beyond our hearing range are significant to our perception here? I’d be interested to hear you explain further.
I agree completely. I probably wouldn’t bother going further in price than HD 650 for your needs, but I would also be EQing them to account for their sub-bass deficit and any potential flaws in the treble on your head. And if EQ is an option, then other more expensive headphones can offer a significant, concrete benefit in that their pads can be both less acoustically significant and less prone to wear (whereas with HD 650 the sound will always be a moving target due to pad wear).
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I wasn’t really stating anything, other that an assumption that’s being made.
I do suspect that we are more sensitive to the leading edges of sounds than we are to constant tones, and that we can perceive impulses with higher frequency content than we can perceive constant tones, but I outside inference from some papers on the ears ability to differentiate phase (two nerves per hair) in addition to just amplitude of frequencies, and attempts to explain what I hear relative to measurements I don’t have any evidence to back it up.
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Thank you for the review @resolve. I too love the Maxwells … coming from AirPods Max (with eq uploaded via the audiogram feature) and mega5est. I like all three for different reasons and have use cases for them all. In terms of sq alone I prefer the mega5est slightly but Maxwells are the ones I listen to the most.
I have two questions though:
- what would your ideal eq look like for these using the built in eq? Just a small reduction in the 2 kHz and 4 kHz? I’ve also a found a boost in the 8kHz (5dB) region to help but I’m an old man now so could be why!
- does anyone know the q values for the built in eq? I believe Listnr was also asking the same.
I was the one asking - I never did find out.
I drop the highs a dB or two using the Audeze HQ app and am quite happy with the Maxwell. I can’t think of another wireless closed-back I’d rather own.
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I’ve seen reports online that the default tuning has been altered (and maximum volume decreased rather significantly) with the 1.60 firmware update?
Any insights on this matter, by any chance?
Ugh… That’s why I’ve always been apprehensive of such devices. You choose the product by doing a diligent research, carefully examining all the data available on certain performance characteristics only to get them altered (for the worse more often than not) arbitrarily, yet deliberately (freshly introduced bugs is yet another issue) and oftentimes “silently”, without any notice whatsoever. We’ve been having this not only with smartphones, but with “smart” TVs and wireless head/earphones.
It’s frustrating to put it mildly.
Thankfully(?), I haven’t purchased these yet, though I was entertaining the idea for quite a long time, but now I’m more hesitant than ever.
Are there any THD measurements available for these, by the way? Saw a graph on EarphonesArchive owner’s blog and I think it looks somewhat concerning… But maybe it was a faulty unit? Or one that had developed the driver “warp” on one side (that massive distortion spike between 1 and 2 kHz seems to only be present in one channel?).
