Here are the HiFiMAN Sundara Closed measurements done on the industry standard B&K 5128 and GRAS 43AG systems.
HpTF Variation (headphone behavior variation across heads/ears)
Raw 5128
Raw GRAS 43AG (KB5000 pinna)
Here it is with the cup taken off:
Here’s my EQ profile
After EQ:
Notes:
Ohh boy…
This is easily one of the worst sounding headphones I’ve ever heard. It’s got a massive treble spike, while still sounding totally veiled and lacking clarity due to the missing ear gain, and then it has this weird resonance feature in the bass to mid transition.
While this is entirely devoid of anything remotely resembling good sound quality to my ear, what’s worse is that the major harmonic imbalances are high Q narrowband modal resonances that seem to be due to the driver itself. And, given the type of driver being used here, they may be in slightly different spots on a unit to unit basis, making EQ profiles less predictive and ultimately less usable than on other designs where the adjustments are wider and less substantial.
Still… give it a shot and see how it sound. It might sound worse if those peaks/dips are in a different spot.
What’s interesting is that taking the cups off actually makes it worse. So they did tune this headphone as a closed-back, and made certain design decisions to accommodate this driver. With that said, it is a highly modal driver and doesn’t seem to resemble any Sundara driver that I’ve seen - it’s been a bit since I’ve taken one of those apart and revisions are always possible, but at the moment this isn’t one common to their other headphones.
IMO this is not about it not sounding at all like a Sundara, and just about it being a bad sounding headphone.
It makes me sad, and I don’t recommend it.
