Dan Clark himself says there is no agreed upon methodology to measure dynamics. Both reviews (note that one is merely impressions while the other is a full-fledged review) mention dynamics. Neither can be wrong and for that individual to try and discredit someone over something that they themselves cannot prove, is wrong and not based in science. It’s inflammatory for the purpose of driving clicks to the website.
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This is such an instance where I do not wholeheartedly agree with the way he handled things. 
I have come across instances the other way around. Although not as obvious, they do exist.
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How are you going to create an experiment to test the existence of a subjective observation of one individual, and more importantly, how will you reproduce such an experiment when the sensory observation you’re trying to disprove is an event that happened in the past? How will you retrieve data from a past event to even be able to fulfil your experiment? Did he who shall not be named invent time travel?!? 
Refusing to change your mind until convincing evidence is presented is simple. Just remind your opposition that scientific conjectures are fundamentally falsifiable and therefore the provided evidence will never reach the point of absolution.
Or in more common language, we call that phenomenon “moving the goalposts”. Not very professional to present logical fallacies as arguments in a scientifically oriented debate. 
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I just wanted to note something here because this is an important point. While I’ve used the term, and other reviewers often do as well, these are not at all the first instances of these terms. So it’s not something I made up or anything, it’s merely a common way of describing a particular quality. You can trace the origin of these terms way back to things that were perhaps more related to speakers than to headphones. But they’ve since been co-opted by audiophiles, I imagine partially influenced by the SBAF crowd here.
Leaving these terms undefined in an evaluation is an extremely valid criticism and one I take to heart - we shouldn’t expect people who don’t have a history with these terms, or who wouldn’t have seen anything from the ‘audiophile lexicon’ to have much sense of what these descriptions indicate. Moreover, I’m generally not a fan of using these terms in particular because they’re too close sounding to other uses like ‘dynamic range’, which is a different thing (I’ve been trying to switch to calling it ‘macro contrast’ for example, because that better captures it in my opinion).
So I should definitely do a better job there. Sometimes in the effort to get first impressions out there it’s easy to forget that not everyone has come along for the ride up to this point to understand my framing and categories.
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Glad to see we agree. Internet bickering is not useful for anyone outside of those that intentionally try to stir the pot.
As I said on Head-fi, it’s the first flagship headphone release since COVID started so people are looking for the tiniest flakes of information to either affirm their hype is warranted or to talk smack about headphones they were never intending to buy in the first place.
All of this is moot anyways since the first units have shipped from DCA and actual consumers will have them in their hands soon enough. Their takes will of course be subjective, but they are also the ones buying the headphones.
I will say that blaming Resolve for 3 people on our forum who said they would not purchase the Stealth vs the 15 pages trying to discredit his subjective opinions is something else though.
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Just out of curiosity, how would you define detail retrieval? It’s quite obvious when listening to extreme ends of the headphone spectrum that one headphone presents more detail than the other but how would we quantify or describe the difference? Is it a yes or no difference? Is there ways to describe these in an objective manner?
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I figured it would come to this with a DCA release, his headphones are unfortunately very polarizing. I say unfortunately because DCA presents a flavor and because some “influencers” in the community don’t like that flavor, there’s a whole legion of people online champing at the bit to pile on. That people have made a decision about this particular headphone already when reviews are so limited seems like jumping the gun, and I would agree with your other point that many of these statements likely come from people that weren’t ever planning to get a DCA headphone in the first place.
As for me, I would love another contender in the TOTL/summit-fi closed back space, because competition and innovation is good for all of us. I like my Ether 2 quite a bit despite how different it is from the Rad-0 slam and presentation wise, and embrace that not everything needs to sound the same or provide the same experience when listening to music. If the Stealth can be on par or better than the Ether 2 as a closed back planar, I’m intrigued.
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I’m not sure about an objective manner - I think if I were able to do that… many squabbles would have been avoided haha. Certainly it’s something I’m working on getting the answer to.
But I think there are a number of ways to describe it subjectively, Crin’s recent article on the tonal-technical dichotomy is one way of doing it. I think it would probably make sense to my version of that, because it certainly helps to be able to reference something for how evaluations are done every time this stuff comes up.
But, generally speaking, I see it in a similar vein to the way Crin has characterized it there.
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“If the Stealth can be on par or better than the Ether 2 as a closed back planar, I’m intrigued.”
The Stealth costs twice as much as the Ether 2. If it’s only on par with it, then that would be a monumental fail.
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I’ll spend time with this comparison specifically tomorrow since we’ve got one in right now as well. My initial take is that the Stealth is a lot better, but I have to pad swap on the E2 I think.
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I only meant to say that prior to the Stealth, the E2 was their TOTL - I would hope it’s at least as good for sure, given the goal is to meet and surpass its predecessor surely. I of course agree that not surpassing it would be disappointing to say the least, given the price point.
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E2 is a great headphone, but in many ways blah. It’s like driving a Camry. Very reliable, but kind of boring,
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I’ve had the Ether 2s for a couple of months, and my experience has been that the effects of pad swapping on their overall character and individual qualia are greater than might be assumed from the frequency response charts. Will be very interested to hear your impressions if you do have access to all three.
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I don’t know, I think the E2 are begging for the right pairing - I’m very impressed with them on the FORGE personally, I find myself reaching for them over the Rad-0 running KT-88s and the 6SL7. I have some NOS tubes coming (some RCA 6L6GTs and an RCA red base 6L6GT), will be curious to see if that impression persists - all that to say it might be a case of pairing the Stealth with the right amplification to bring the best out in them given this macrodynamics conversation ongoing in this thread.
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Does anyone have any perspective or thoughts on the Acoustic Metamaterial Tuning System (AMTS)? The statement on their website claims “All headphones are subject to high-frequency standing waves which can make treble sound harsh, fatiguing, or synthetic.” Several minutes in the Head-Fi were devoted to discussing what the component did. All of it sounds reasonable to me, but as someone who is not deep in audio science (I’m an engineer, but most definitely not a mechanical one…), I have no real talent to assess the claims.
How do we know (e.g., measure?) these standing waves are a problem in headphones, and is there any way to see that the AMTS is actually doing something novel?
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Check out this podcast with KEF’s R&D. It has a good explanation of meta material technology for audio (Darko.Audio podcast: Jack Oclee-Brown discusses KEF LS50 Meta & LS50 Wireless II development on Apple Podcasts).
Meta materials are a real technology that has been around for awhile. The stealth bomber, for example, uses meta materials to diffract radio waves. Which now that I think about, is probably were the name came from.
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Note to self: Don’t post such statements without time to think about what you’re actually saying. (during work)
I’ll be going live here shortly with the Stealth - if anyone has questions about it feel free to drop by and ask. I’ll do my best to answer all that I can.
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I have gotten ears on the DCA Stealth and listened to them on a couple chains. Wavelight → Bakoon/Stellaris. Some initial impressions.
- This headphone has is lacking in resolution compared to other cans in a similar price range ($4k+).
- This headphone FR matches what I hear and it is a pleasant listen. Nothing in the FR sticks out as being unnatural or “bad”.
- There has been discussion of macrodynamics. This has limp dick dynamics. Is that bad? Up to you, but this has some of the least amount of “slam”, “macrodynamics”, or “impact” (however you wanna say it) of almost all headphones I have tried. This is very DCA in their macrodynamics.
- Soundstage seemed larger than most other closed backs (Looking at you Stellia).
Overall I don’t think this is the next greatest headphone, I think its a decent/good headphone that is overpriced. I think at the $2k range this would be more competitive. At $4k, I think it can’t compete.
But hey what do I know. I’m just a stranger on the internet.
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