On the subject of limits of EQ and distortion, there is definitely a limit to the amount of low bass that can be added. On many bass light headphones I find that this limit is heard as the filter having little or no effect. I point this out as people may not label this as distortion (although technically it is). And so when I hear experts say something like the only limit to how much EQ you can effectively apply is until the headphone starts to distort, I wince a bit.
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Axel Grell is certainly keen on low impedance designs (IE openest-open housings) being key to the best sound. Another quality I’ve heard he favors is large driver surface area. IIRC that’s so that it can interact more with the pinnae.
This design approach, and the good bass response for an electrostatic, is what prompted me to try the Hifiman Mini Shangri-La. It seemed a good candidate for a poor man’s HE-1. I have no regrets. After EQ it is still bass-light but nothing else sounds as spacious or has those ethereal highs. What’s really surprising is that it also has pretty good slam, something usually attributed to planars. I’m curious if I could get a good planar to have similar characteristics in the treble, but so far not curious enough to find out.
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To give due consideration to existing potential answers to my challenge: Metal571 did say in his L700 review that it had the same detail as the LCD-4. So if I was setting up some experiment with an unlimited budget to EQ, compare and try to find something non-electrostatic that maybe reproduces the same godlike resolution as estats, I’d probably start from an LCD-4 / 4z / 5.
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Try the Dan Clark E3. You may be surprised.
I probably don’t have a good enough read on estats to comment on their tonality. You can compare the response on many of them here though, on Oratory1990’s GRAS(?) measurements page…
This includes the Senn HE-1 and Orpheus, HFM Shangri-La, many Stax models, Warwick Audio, Koss EP950 and 95X, and Audeze CRBN. (There may be a few others I’m forgettin.) Most are fairly rolled off in the bass. And you can certainly find open dynamic drivers like that as well, if that’s what you want. 
The HE-1 looks like one of the most neutral estats. I think the bass boost on that comes from their amplifier though, and not the headphones. Some of the Warwicks also have good bass extension though.
Not that I could afford any of them, but estats seem like they might be more trouble than they’re worth. Especially for someone who doesn’t take such good care of their gear. Maybe my opinion would change though if I heard one. I don’t think I’d use most of them as targets for EQ either, other than the HE-1. Might be an interesting experiment just to see what kind of tonality they produce though.
This is goin back a little before my time, but I think estats have always been popular with audiophiles who had the bux to afford them. And I could be wrong, but don’t think it’s just about the generally bass-light FR. But perhaps that’s a part of it?
More pinna generally = good in my book. Though it can make the wearing of the headphone a bit more cumbersome.
Interesting. Is this the same as Shangri-La Jr?
Resolve seems pretty high on the Moondrop Para/Para 2, with its 100mm FDT (full drive technology) planar drivers. I wonder if that might be a good candidate for somethin a bit more estat-ish in a planar headphone?
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It’s strange though, just how different it is from all the other ones: no sub-bass going missing, barely any 1k shout (comparatively), all it has in common is the 10k dip followed by the violent upslope over the 11k-20k region.
*checks more reviews *
Aahhh, big monkey wrench in my “anti-FR theory”: Resolve says in the “We measured the Sennheiser HE-1” video that the HE-1 is not actually crazy-detailed like Stax (first time I’ve ever heard anyone actually compare this aspect explicitly and place the HE-1 as the loser 
), so this once again points to those FR features being - if nothing else - necessary for the detail to shine through.
OK, but what about Metal571’s comment on the darker Audeze putting out the same detail then?
*checks graphs *
Damn.
Once you get to LCD-4 / 4z / 5 levels, you no longer get the traditional(?) flat-bass, warm Audeze response, but yet again it’s the “Stax recipe” of dying sub-bass, 1k shout, deep cut at 9.5-10k, violent rise past 11k all the way to 20k (or sometimes it’s just a huge peak centered on 13-ish k).
Well damn.
Now I need to try this in all my headphones. 
I guess I’d just never actually looked at multiple graphs to see how stubbornly these features show up in the models most famous for “crazy detail”, not all of them estats. Also never heard anyone say out loud that the HE-1 is not one of those headphones despite being a stratospherically expensive estat.
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Nope. It looks to be more of an upgraded Jade II.
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I am of the mind that ‘detail’ is highly correlated to novelty rather than driver type or particular frequency response.
Most of the people I’ve seen extol the ‘impressive amount of detail’ they are hearing from E-Stats are people who do not regularly listen to E-Stats, and are trying them out in contrast to their usual gear. I currently have 5 headphones with pretty different sound signatures, and I hear different parts of the music more prominently every time I switch.
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Detail can be a difficult term to pin down. I’ve heard the HE-1 once. I’ve heard several Stax, some of them over a few weeks period. All of them sounded much less spacious than the HE-1 (or my Mini Shangri-La). I theorized at the time that the sense of detail may be directly related to this, to how intimate the Stax sound. After all if something in real life is closer to you, you can hear more detail from it. It’s just a theory but if I had to trade some detail for spaciousness, I would choose spaciousness every time. YMMV
I don’t know why I feel compelled to chime in. Not all eStats are bass-light. The Hive certainly isn’t. Nor the STAX SR-007. I don’t recall hearing from others that the 9000 is either. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard the Koss ESPs, but I don’t recall the 6 being bass light, and I don’t know about the current ones.
Yes, I use PEQ in certain cases. I NEED to use it for the Audeze LCDi4 (and i3 and iSINE20) if I’m not using the Cipher cable with built in EQ. Fortunately ROON provides the recommended PEQ.
I also use PEQ on ROON ARC in the car (not headphones) when the stars alight, Mercury is ascendant, and everything works.
But my preferred EQ, when I use it, is the Schiit Lokius in the analog domain. No fuss, no muss. I think the PINK FROG agrees, eh @generic?
I don’t disagree since this will depend on your own taste. I did not find the SR-007 or SR-007 mk2 to have sufficient bass for me. Same for the Koss ESP/95X even with EQ and Yaxi pads. It looks like the ESP/950 has different pads than the ESP/95X that are similar to the Yaxi pads so it might fair better, but I haven’t heard it.
Even my Mini Shangri-La did not have sufficient bass for me even though the reviews I saw remarked that it has excellent bass response for an electrostatic. I couldn’t get what I wanted even with EQ however I did get it to an acceptable level and even got some resulting slam.
But each to his own. If you want a bass shelf I don’t think you’ll get it from any of the above electrostatics without EQ. And even then it probably depends on the model. If you want flat bass, that can be achieved down to 80hz or maybe 60hz especially if you EQ.
Honestly tho I think the bass-light nature of most electrostatics is more from the open design than the driver type. Aside: has there ever been a closed back electrostatic?. Also the Warwick Bravura and Sennheiser HE-1 have excellent bass and slam. I’d love to try a Hive some day. I hope to try the Warwick Aperio GSE at CanJam SoCal. I would be very surprised if it needs more bass.
I don’t know about headphones, but there are “closed back” electrostatic (well, hybrid) speakers.
JansZen Valentina
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I think the STAX earbuds were closed back, but it’s been years since I tried them.
Warwick Audio uses DSP under the hood (yep, built-in EQ). This is one of the reasons why Aperio GSE is so perfectly tuned. And I wouldn’t be surprised if inside that marble box the HE-1 has a few analog filters or something. Or maybe it doesn’t need analog filters because they use carefully crafted tubes that affect the FR in the way they want to give it a bass boost. I wouldn’t say that Warwick or HE-1 can slam to the same level the slammiest planars and dynamics can slam.
In the video linked above Cameron mentions that one of the issues with e-stats is that they are usually excursion limited, which limits the low frequency amplitude and makes them feel bass-light.
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Then again if that was a universal problem you wouldn’t be able to boost the bass on the HE-1 either, not with any signal manipulation anyway. Maybe it’s just the sub $10k ones that run into this.
Slam is something else, it’s not bass quantity/amplitude (though you do of course need at least decent bass quantity for the slam property to be attached to something). As Listener explained on one of the podcast episodes (I think it was?), slam correlates to the “squareness” or corner-sharpness of the step response of the headphones, which is 1:1 the same thing as the high frequency extension of the headphones (more extended without rolloff up high → sharper corner in the step response → more of a perception of slam).
I think what you’re comparing is decent slam from the estats with good timbre vs. somewhat exaggerated slam from planars and dynamics with well extended highs but also more bass amplitude beyond neutral.
This is a misquote and not what I said. HF extension is indeed just the squareness of the step response but this is not all that is entailed in “slam”.
There is an element where, of course, sufficient extension to get the rise of the transient is necessary, but headphones typically have no issue with this at all.
It’s more an issue of the errors typical of headphone responses on people’s heads (myriad peaks and dips throughout the treble) make it an issue to analyze, because its not just about extension, its that the “squareness” of the transient impulse window is compromised by resonances throughout.
Additionally, slam is not something quantifiable through a single frequency region/band, because the bass and midrange absolutely matter for it too. This does not change the fact that for some the definitions just vary too, though.
For some, slam is as simple as just “more midbass” causing that bouncy, bulbous character to kick drums.
For others, its about colorations in the midrange highlighting the transient snap of percussive elements.
For others, its about bass, midrange, and treble being balanced enough that the transient envelope of percussive elements doesn’t sound wrong.
IMO estats lack slam because they lack bass and upper midrange/low treble, while also having too much treble. The former set of issues neuters the sense of weight and crack, while the latter issue causes thinness.
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I… didn’t use quotation marks, so technically there was no claim to be directly quoting you. 
Secondly, I said “correlates”, meaning treble extension is not necessarily an exhaustive/exclusive explanation of the slam phenomenon. So if anything you’re misquoting me, I didn’t actually say you said what you’re saying I said you said.
I just highlighted that part because it’s what stuck with me the most, being such a revelation (thanks for that btw!) because it’s counterintuitive and mostly goes unrecognized how treble can be a critical part of why the bass slams when it does. 
I mean of course they do, but we don’t have to leave the confines of the “step response explanation” to recognize this: the step response plateau (or the plateau of each period of the square wave response) is a drawing of the whole frequency response but in reverse, starting with the treble and ending with the bass, as Solderdude explains on his blog:
To my mind, anything that “messes up the drawing” of the step response, including the flatness of its plateau, can mess up the final experience of slam. Obviously wobbly mids and bass can do this too because they too show up in the plateau portion of the step response. But I’d still expect the treble to have more of an influence since it’s right at that critical place that forms the corner - or doesn’t - and then hills/valleys in the mids could also matter but less, then hills/valleys in the bass even less. (Meanwhile bass quantity remains critical in its own way as we need to hear the bass in the first place, being the thing-that-slams that we’re analyzing all of this for, else there’s nobody home to attach the slam property to. So like sub-bass slam will obviously be missing when you’ve got barely audible sub-bass in the first place.)
And then, sure, as you say, this gets additionally complicated by people having all their damn personal opinions or experiences of “slam”. 
I’m just choosing to stick to the “step response must look close to ideal” definition, aka. “all y’all who are defining slam differently are just wrong”. 
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Lol yeah I guess misquote is the wrong term 
but I essentially meant you’d mistaken what I said, and kind of did the thing that happens often in this space where, when exposed to new information, people come away remembering the parts that reinforce their existing ideas. Treble absolutely has an effect on the perceived performance of bass in headphones and IEMs, its just that treble extension is among the least important of the FR effects that matter for this phenomenon.
I am familiar but this misses a very important point:
A step response is going to look best with a flat response… but headphones do not sound best when they measure flat.
A near-perfectly square step response (and thus, a flat well-extended frequency response) measured on a HATS will be missing a ton of ear gain, likely missing bass for most people, and will likely be quite bright to people.
So it becomes a similar question we have with typical frequency response: which compensation/target response is best such that a flat result relative to the compensation is the closest to perceptually flat (or in this case, ideal for “slam”)?
And to this question we only have inklings to the answer, especially because none of the prior frequency response targets shown to be preferred in the past (DF, Harman) have been validated to have any correlation to “slam.”
We of course also know that, due to their nature, headphones and IEMs as measured on rigs are going to have complex, narrow band differences from the people interpreting the measurements. This, paired with the variation in definitions people have for this term, means that everyone (like with the broader question of “sound quality”) likely has their own ideal “slam” target, with potentially quite idiosyncratic listener-specific differences in the treble.
For that reason, its somewhat more productive to focus on the things that aren’t likely to vary as much across listeners (bass, midrange) when it comes to discussing how to understand this quality re: frequency response, instead of focusing on the treble where it becomes a lot more complicated 
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