It’s a generalization and sort of a risky one on my part, but I suspect the resistance comes from a feeling that to make the acknowledgement is to put one’s foot on the top of a slippery slope, at the bottom of which is something like “You overpaid for expensive headphones!” and embarrassment and a bruised tailbone, from sliding down the slope.
Personally, I keep an open mind as to the possibility that I’ve overpaid. Check that – I’m sure I have. But not from headphones.com 
Yes – cochlear implant research. As much as it is a miracle of modern medicine, it’s my understanding that users report the experience is rather a poor shadow of hearing with a membrane, malleus, etc.
For sure, though I doubt folks will acknowledge that. Part of it is just straight up an unwillingness to engage on the topic. Like… it takes work to actually understand what frequency response does subjectively. That’s not nearly as fun as enjoying the mythology of a driver story, or whatever it might be, and just enjoying the effect it creates.
But then there’s the other side of it, where there’s a whole belief system that people get wrapped up in as a result of buying a nice thing. When you tell them “this is why that might not actually be a nice thing”, or even “this is why that nice thing is nice”, it trivializes all the stuff people built themselves up to believe in the process of researching it and eventually buying it - even if unintentionally so.
I think there’s a bit of column A, bit of column B going on. But I wish people would at the very least consider that FR is not what they’ve been led to believe. It’s not the graph you typically see with lines compared against the Harman target. That’s an extremely limited depiction of this metric. And if people could peer outside of that paradigm and consider FR in situ in good faith, they’d gain a totally different appreciation for it.
You continue to miss the point. The entire 20th century in music was all about ever better hi-fi (high fidelity) reproduction. The central importance of FR to music reproduction is very old news. The industry went through mono, stereo, the 1970s mainstream, the tube to solid state transition, and then “pristine” 1980s digital CDs.
It is indeed tautological that FR = what you hear. Audio is so well understood that musicians and engineers tweak sound wildly and simulate lots of spatial effects too. The science was seemingly mastered by the 1960s and 1970s. Listen to The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Jimi Hendrix.
The point that you miss is there are 50 ways to skin a cat and 50 ways to leave your lover and 500 ways to trap a mouse. System setup changes often serve as de facto EQ–or in my case–I kept spending more and more as long as I heard screechy artifacts in DACs and amps and headphones. My buying slowed when the hissing and ringing in my ears stopped. In terms of signal purity, my old $100 Magni 3 and FiiO DAC were relative trash. My current setup is likely overpriced but I don’t suffer when using it.
Audio technology is bog simple and very mature. The QC and materials used to build stuff do vary between products. Some people also do enjoy ‘hearing with their eyes’ and/or cannot distinguish between their belief systems and the sound (placebos). This then melds with psychoacoustic effects such as auditory masking, Shepard Tone, and other real-world music phenomena.
You and @listener express perhaps the worst possible attitudes to work in this industry. It’s a luxury hobby for many and a mystical artsy-fartsy thing for others. I’m kind of shocked that @andrew and @taronlissimore keep you two around. “Buy anything. EQ. Be done.” Suck the fun out of the hobby. Move on.
A resonance is FR. A resonance and delay is not. The ear is very sensitive to timing.
FR cannot entirely account for perception of two sized locations simultaneously.
We’re not telling you that a person needs to EQ stuff to enjoy it, just that if someone is after genuinely improving their experiences, the ability to do that isn’t locked behind the luxury aspects of this hobby, nor does it require getting into “mystical artsy-fartsy” stuff. Sure, it may shatter some illusions people have about this stuff, but that’s bound to happen where so much of this space is obscured by mythology. In trying to steward good experiences with music, that’s going to happen.
What I hear from you is that because we’re providing ways for anyone to improve their experiences for free, and telling them they don’t need to get into the spendier sides of this hobby to have better experiences with their music, this is somehow a bad thing. I see this as gatekeeping, and audio has far far too much of that already in my opinion.
How do you know what you’re hearing is a resonance and a delay though? I’m not intending to be obtuse here, genuinely that could just be a particular coloration highlighting a different part of the spectrum. With that said, I’d be curious to see some of the data on that headphone. We can find out rather quickly if there’s anything to be worried about in the time domain. It’s unlikely, but not impossible. I’ll see if I can dig that out.
EDIT:
From the unit that I measured, this is what the excess group delay looks like
This indicates that it’s mostly behaving the way we’d expect a minimum phase device to behave. Keep in mind, it’s not the unit you heard, so there’s always still a possibility something was up with that. But at least for this unit, I don’t see anything out of the ordinary where I’d want to care about time-based views.
I see this as gross ignorance of my posting history. And the fact that I kept around budget reference systems for years.
I think I can speak for Resolve and I both when I say we do understand there are many ways to skin a cat (enjoy audio). But I think we’d also agree that you probably would’ve suffered less & spent less over a shorter period of time if someone had explained to you earlier on that you could fix the issues you were having without having to buy a bunch of stuff.
So why wouldn’t we do the merciful thing and try to save other people from having to go through the same slog of trying in vain to fix their sonic discomfort with things that are going to make the smallest magnitude of difference (amps/DACs), when they could instead devote time to things that are basically guaranteed to make way bigger differences/have a higher likelihood of fixing the issue?
To be clear, neither of us have any issue with people buying external/unnecessary gear to get either the smallest magnitude of difference or solely a visual difference, if they know that’s what they want. Truly, no problem at all with that.
(If people want to use vinyl, they should do so… But I think its reasonable to assume they might want to know how inconvenient, expensive, and potentially bad sounding it is before they invest any money in it. It is a running joke at this point that I have wanted a WA7 Fireflies for years for no other reason than because it looks cool as fuck; I do not care about how badly it performs, I just think it looks dope. But this is not a rubric of worth judgment I’d recommend to new people in the hobby who are still trying to figure out what matters to them.)
What I do have issue with, is people drawing equivalence between such a practice and EQ—the latter of which makes a magnitude of difference most competent sources will basically never touch. Calling source rolling “De facto” EQ as if it is actually producing a result that is a) similarly replicable or b) even able to be understood or articulated by the person experiencing it is… very generous.
Re: attitude, I am quite well-known for being pleasant with most online, usually especially with people I disagree with; I have many friends that engage solely with the luxury side of the hobby, and others that play around in the mystical artsy-fartsy side too—with some overlap between them, naturally.
The difference is that these friends of mine don’t act like I’m somehow being a jerk for trying to lead people in public spaces to the most efficient, time-saving, money-saving method for maximizing enjoyment with personal audio, while yes, also leading them away from the less efficient methods. They understand their dalliance with the luxury/mystical isn’t about efficiency, and thus shouldn’t be the first (or second, or maybe even the third) recommendation to someone a bit less experienced who’s trying to optimize their listening.
If there is a mode of engagement that could be called maximally-efficient (because it is supported by evidence), its personalization through EQ. Even though many of my friends will absolutely never EQ, they’re still content to let their less-efficient mode of engagement not be the thing that is universally-agreed to be best practice or recommended as the first place to optimize, because—to them—it’s not about intellectual authority or being/feeling right.
Only need a DT1990 or HD800 off a simple MacBook with EQ. Done! Headphones.com can carry a couple items and sell EQ profiles.
DT 1990 would be more challenging to fix IMO. But more importantly… why not an HD 490 Pro, or a Sony MV1? Those are both great candidates for EQ.
You guys have broke the da Vinci code and solved audio!
The arrogance is astonishing.
There’s a reason many no longer hang around here much anymore. Oof.
We can disagree and still be pleasant to one another. Let’s endeavor to do so.
Well, I know what I hear. I’m very familiar with classical guitar. And with all other decent headphones I could clearly hear the live stone church walls, in a moderately large room. ONLY with the LCD-2 did I get that doubling effect of a small shell inside a live room.
The particular LCD-2 Closed was a pair that headphones.com sent around for community reviews in the years before covid, and my tortured review is still online on the forum.
Note that @generic and I both find closed backs to be fatiguing. That review was very hard to write because it was difficult to spend significant time with the headphone. I gave up and decided to play with words and did it in faux-chaucer style.
Did you flag me for telling @listener to not waste his breath? Was that rude? I really think his long messages may cause undue anxiety.
I don’t read them…
So you’re saying I’ve wasted my money trying new things?
Why review new headphones anymore? Just EQ the D1 to whatever you like.
Not good for business. I know I know you guys have nothing to do with that. Yada yada.
No I flagged you because we both despise most closed headphones. I possibly flagged you on the original review also. The LCD-2 was the pits.
It was only after extensively trying the ZMF Verite Closed that I came to the conclusion that I do not like green eggs and ham I mean like closed backs. Except that I can tolerate ones that deliberately play electronic games like the Momentum 4.
Just because a flat line on a measurement doesn’t actually tell @pennstac anything, I want to make sure its clear what is shown here.
I’m sure you’ve heard that headphones are “minimum phase” @pennstac, but what it actually means in practice is, put simply: Headphones produce the minimum amount of phase shift that can produce the frequency response they have.
In other words, headphones are “minimum phase systems” because the phase shift they produce is essentially identical to what a computer looking at a frequency response would calculate as the minimum-possible phase shift necessary to produce the same frequency response.
Now, that brings us to Andrew’s measurement, which is of Excess Group Delay, which is distinct from Group Delay.
Group Delay is the sum total delay between the signal generated by the source (in Andrew’s case, REW on his computer) and what is generated at the output. In simpler terms, its “how long does it take for the digital signal to become sound pressure produced from the headphone.” Pretty easy to understand.
Excess Group Delay however, is a measure of how much delay remains after you’ve derived the difference between the actual acoustic measurement of the headphone’s phase response to the computer-generated minimum-phase response.
This is all to say, the measurement of an essentialy flat line Resolve posted indicates that there is no perceptible difference in timing—no extra “resonance” (delay or excess phase) between the headphone’s actual measured phase response and what a computer would generate as the minimum-possible phase response for the same frequency response.
You call it arrogance but… I’m someone who went through the technicalities landscape, the audiophile world of amps and dacs. Things like FR at the ear drum, acoustic impedance, headphone behavior variation… this is the stuff I was missing back then. And I’m rather glad to have met people who helped guide me to that information. I learned a lot from people like Blaine and Konstantin, and Grif as well. If there are things you don’t understand fully, the best way to learn is to be open minded and surround yourself with people who do understand it better.
This should be carved in stone and put on the desks of all headphones dot com office staff.
