One of my friends has a cat, Crumbcake the Destroyer that was fascinated with headphone wires and pad. She destroyed (funny how she got that name) a pair of Sennheiser PX-100s.
Eventually, I figured out that headphones are safe if you have some Yeowww Stinkies’ Catnip Sardines to hand out. (I’m not associated with the link below, but it shows the product well)
Notice duly taken 
My cat’s name is Murgatroyd, he was named after a character in one of my ex-wife’s favourite novels. He’s 18 years old but still prone to mischief despite severe arthritis. He’s asleep about 20 hours a day though, so easy to keep an eye on him. 
Great thread! I have 4 headphones in rotation, on my desktop setup. I like to switch things up so things stay fresh and exciting. However, I like to keep my headphones all within a similar but slightly different flavor. This way, I am not completely confused and it does not take too long to adjust to the differences. I used to have some other headphones that sounded completely different than the other, and the differences were so huge, it made both headphones sound off, when I switched from one to the other. Not sure if this makes since, but even my iems have similar “warm sound sigs”, so when switching back and forth, I can hear a difference and it is fresh and exciting again, but it does not sound off, and take me days to adjust. For instance, I own an Ori and Alpha Prime, that have the same driver and similar sound, but they are different enough that one is better at certain genres, and I can switch back and forth between the 2, without either one sounding way off. That is just how I do it, because I really have a preferred sound sig, as in warm, wide, and thick, with great resolve. All my headphones, have these qualities, but excel in different areas within those qualities. I love this hobby!
Happy Saturday!
I’m with you on this. I like a neutral/warm headphone so that’s where I keep my range. Looking for differences in presentation, soundstage, transient response, etc. are what I’m looking for now.
But if I really like the way something sounds, then that trumps any prerequisites I may have. That’s what matters most, is the enjoyment.
We really seem to be on the same page! Those differences you listed, are spot on with what I have going on in my collection. As far as an outlier that sounds amazing for pure enjoyment, my Noble K10U are quite a bit brighter up top than I normally like, but they are so transparent and lifelike sounding, they are addicting to listen to.
Nice. 
Absolutely lovely post and thread. I have 4 different headphones for 4 different purposes and 1 pair of IEMS to enforce and involve myself with Andrew’s point.
I’m also not very big into EQ’ing, so it makes me appreciate the original sound sig from the headphone manufacturer a whole lot more. This is a great thread and if anyone has any suggestions to add difference and diversity to my headphone collection feel free.
Thanks all and here is my list.
Blue MOFI from Blue Microphones.
Sony MDR Z7’s
Sennheiser HD 800 (classic model)
Audeze LCD XC
Campfire ATLAS’s
Concur, I’m also not into EQ all that much, but will hard mod on occasion.
Same here.
I’ll mod real hard. 
@Resolve Man, this is amazing. I think that this is a bit of parallel thinking because over the past year or so I’ve mustered up this concept that “your brain just get’s used to it”. And while you have said it with far more detail and knowledge, I find it amazing that someone who makes this a living had the same thought as I did. I don’t listen to a large variety of music but I’ve owned about 30 or so headphones and when you narrow it to a selection of acceptable headphones, they each do something different. I even briefly pondered something like soundstage as being excluded from this phenomenon so thank you very much for confirming and properly stating this. In my mind, when only considering tonality, I would be happy as a pig in shirt to have only a pair of Kph30ci’s with some grado pad’s and an aux extension, given my budget was $50usd or so. Because I know that I adore the tonality of these headphones and I know that my brain will make them normal.
Man I’m getting a kick out of running across this thread years before the thought even crossed my mind. Thank you for having an educated and well spoken expression of a thought my brain strained to come up with. This is epic.
Perhaps somewhat ironically I no longer hold many of the views expressed in this post, nor do I hold either of those headphones in as high esteem. I do think broadly what I said about getting used to it and the basic need for a headphone to agree with some human ear-like response is still true. But the bit about technical performance isn’t correct.
I once held the view that there was something else not captured by the graphs, and that’s technically still true, but the mistake is thinking this is something other than FR.
Having since gone down the rabbit hole of in-situ response, it’s clarified a lot of my thinking on that stuff, and led me away from the concept of “technical performance” as a whole. In light of that revelation it stopped making sense to me.
You’ll find @generic says this too and he’s a specialist on the brain/physiology experiential side.
Blind testing is all I ask. Believe whatever you will, but if you fail a blind test it’s all for naught.
Humans are organic animals who either directly perceive the universe, or who come up with rational ways to interpret it. Blind failures confirm that one’s thoughts were at odds with their raw perceptions.
Well, there is distortion characteristics at a given frequency, the amount of resolution provided by the DAC, and how the amp interacts with the headphone (Inductance and Capacitance). The base FR graphs does not adequately capture those variables.
I have found that some headphones sound better with specific genres of music, whilst other genres they are either too bright or not balanced. Finding closed back headphones that sound good has been a challenge.
Let’s go through these, because I think a lot of folks may think similarly:
All of which is to say…
Things that rarely if ever matter: DACs, amps, harmonic distortion, time domain views.
What is the context for this?
Other than impedance mismatch the measured headphone frequency response is the same no matter what dac and amp is used?
A headphone sounds the same playing music no mater what dac and amp is used?
All amps and dacs sound the same?
Sorry if I’m being dense here.
I read back through the thread and can’t determine what context the post applies to. It seems like flat out “amps and dacs don’t matter ever for anything and every review ever is misleading” is not what you meant, but the one sentence without conext seems to say that.
Thanks for the feedback. Largely agree with your observations.
Having said that, have noticed that the Topping D900/A900 combination does seem to sound different (more detailed, slightly quieter background) from other DAC/AMP combinations I’ve auditioned. This is especially noticeable (to me) with high res files played through PGGB. According to many, we should not hear any difference, but if that was the case, I would have sold off the new gear and kept the equipment I sold off.
Would really like to conduct a controlled test with PGGB vs CD, using different price points of DAC/AMP combinations.
Easier said than done.
So to be clear, defective or poorly designed products do exist. I’m not saying this is necessarily the case with those ones, just that there may be reasons why one is giving you a worse sound quality that isn’t just down to “the sound of the DAC/Amp”. And as always, there’s a lot more to measured performance than just the typical sinad scores people may be familiar with.
99% of the time, yes.
Not necessarily, as said earlier, output impedance is a factor. So is harmonic distortion, but more importantly, harmonic distortion profiles can be rather complex. The question is, at what point is that actually audible? With tube amps it certainly is, with solid state equipment, far less so.
Not necessarily, for the reasons above. It’s not a binary question of “do they sound the same or don’t they”, it’s a matter of “are the measurable differences they do exhibit audible”. This depends on the masking window vs the order of the harmonic products in question, and it also depends on things like distortion vs frequency, but if you’re telling me “I can hear harmonic distortion products at -100db”, I’m going to ask you to prove it.
So… to me it’s not the typical line you get from certain corners of the internet of “there’s no difference between amps and dacs, they all sound the same”. It’s rather, “the differences that do exist between amps and DACs don’t matter, they mostly sound the same”.
Let’s take another dive into this. Don’t see how one can state that a DAC that can’t support any sample rate over 192 KHZ is going to sound the same as one that supports 768KHZ. My experience is that the newer DAC’s that support the 705/768 KHz files from PGGB do produce a different sonic signature than the DAC that cannot support the higher sample frequency rate.
I wish someone would conduct a ABX test comparing playing a CD file with a legacy DAC and compare the playback to a current hi-res DAC using PGGB or PGGB-RT.