It sounds like the other party in the conversation is completely against subjective experiences if it doesn’t correlate with data and science. I feel bad for him.
Kudos to @Resolve for keeping calm.
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For some luxury goods and high end products, or those promoted to be such, high price is sometimes solely a function of the seller wishing to place such product in such segment, irrespective of actual costs and profits.
It could be informative to see people’s thoughts of which headphones have the most costly bill of materials.
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I think it’s more the assumption that it’s all been figured out by something like target adherence that gets to me. That doesn’t get to have a monopoly on data and science. In fact the kind of rhetoric you often see in debates like that tends to stifle the potential uses of that data in more meaningful ways.
We should be asking “what is detail”, but in a way that seeks to better understand these reported experiences and where they come from. There’s no reason the default position should be to assume it’s all sighted biases doing the work (and they can say it’s not how they approach it but it totally is). Why? Because at least we know that people do typically report experiences of different and/or qualitatively better/worse for subjective qualia. There would be a better argument if it were only a handful of outliers, but it seems to be the norm. So let’s round people up and do some blind testing!
If it turns out to in fact all be sighted biases then that’s a particularly meaningful and interesting result worth publishing. But with some of the conversations I’ve been having on this topic, it’s like being told to assume your hand in front of your face isn’t real in order to prove it exists. There’s something uniquely Cartesian about that I suppose.
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Josh Valor has a video where his family members had to guess what headphones cost based on sound and feel/aesthetics. It was interested to watch them guess.
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Yes, I really liked that video. Although I also wonder how different results would be if it were done blind, and by audiophiles haha.
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Haha, me too; I kind of wished he had at least blind folded them, as I do understand that sighted bias is real. Still a cool video, though!
Blind, level-matched tests are interesting, but they’re so difficult to accomplish properly - at least with speakers. We attempted a couple times a while back but got told we did it wrong by everyone and their mothers on AVS Forum. That’s when I decided that I no longer cared if the changes I heard were real or cognitive dissonance and that I’d leave that type of testing to the experts; now a days my happiness trumps all, even if it’s psycho acoustic haha (I’d never push my opinions around as fact though, for what it’s worth). Still, the science and philosophy behind it are intriguing.
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For some luxury goods and high end products, or those promoted to be such, high price is sometimes solely a function of the seller wishing to place such product in such segment, irrespective of actual costs and profits.
@bpcarb, I see this to some extent in the digital camera sector, e.g., Canikony’s $6K/3K/2K price brackets for camera bodies. I’m curious as to how market segmentation tiers form and are maintained in the headphones and iem sector.
But with some of the conversations I’ve been having on this topic, it’s like being told to assume your hand in front of your face isn’t real in order to prove it exists. There’s something uniquely Cartesian about that I suppose.
@Resolve, I couldn’t help but think of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty when I read that.
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I was thinking more along the lines of Berkeley’s “I refute it thus” moment, but maybe that doesn’t apply given human beings are less aurally inclined creatures than we are visually so.
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I said “based on the same principle”, meaning planar magnetic. They’re also both 60mm, and I believe they’re both mylar, so in that sense they actually are fairly similar. Obviously, their magnet structure, diaphragm thickness and trace material and structure are different, but my question is “what about those differences accounts for the overall better sound quality?”. I have a hypothesis, but no way to test it.
What is it? I have some ideas as well.
@bpcarb nailed it. Consider the notion of a veblen good:
https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/veblen-goods/
Demand for these items increases as price increases. [Economics framing] This applies to extreme luxury cars (e.g., Rolls Royce) and mechanical watches. (e.g., Patek Philippe). If headphones are priced according to build costs then more people can afford them, but if priced higher they can only be acquired by a handful of people. Exclusivity. “I can afford it but you can’t.”
Audio is a hobby, and a very mature one. As @pennstac asserts, even 1970s stereo setups sound really really really good. A measurement and blind testing focus is in part a backlash against snobbery, and it puts a check on spendy or wealthy victims of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
One thing to keep in mind is that there are huge behavioral differences [psychological framing] between those who prefer to save money versus spend money. A saver who wants good sound will be happy with something that they like and that passes a personal blind test. A social showoff or spender will be happy only in having something “nice” or “exclusive.” They get their warm and fuzzy feelings from something other than audio.
Be aware that some people are very happy having money in the bank and cheaper but satisfactory cars, headphones, and watches. Others are happy having zero money in the bank, credit card debt, and living paycheck-to-paycheck if only they have “nice” or “exclusive” goods. Natural variation and mutations result in such strategy differences [biological and evolutionary framing.]
An additional factor is that hardware builders and salespeople want to push “new” regardless of its quality or value. Some reviewers either consciously or unconsciously want new to be superior merely because it will result in a paycheck, more demo products in the future, and continue to pay their rent.
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It’s handwavy and speculative, but I think it has something to do with membrane weight and tension.
If you look at measurements from diyaudioheaven and compare the HE6 to newer hifimen, the old HE6 has a big resonance at around 4KHz but nowhere else, while the newer ones usually have several resonances higher up the spectrum. Since our ears naturally resonate at 4KHz, I think that makes the HE6 less offensive.
Also, as you established, the HE6 and its brethren have an absurdly low primary resonance in the bass, which helps them sound balanced and extended regardless of seal.
I know very little about manufacturing planar drivers, but intuitively, two things that could lower resonant frequency are a heavier diaphragm and/or looser tension. The looser tension could explain why the HE6SEs have a habit of getting their diaphragms stuck against their magnets.
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Yes, That’s all that should matter. We as individuals are so darn different especially with headphones one really has to decide based on their budget and their own ability to hear, which is based on what we can STILL hear, and our personal taste in the music we chose to listen to. Nobody else can hear for us. Even with blind testing a person is locked in a quiet vacant room and you listen to music coming though a cable. I might like it and another person might not, so there is NO wrong if one of us likes what we hear. And like you noted, That’s all that should matter.
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HNY!
New to this hobby. At 81 I’m partially deaf in one ear. Having watched and listened to the Susvara, lcd5, utopia, and meze elite, i decided to purchase the Elite. Best aesthetics, build quality and comfort. Best tuning and wonderful musicality. Too much detail and imaging makes about 60% of my listening just awful.
I’d much rather sit in the 5th row of the orchestra than 5 inches from first violin.
I use the rme adi2 fs so I can balance and eq each channel separately. Fortunately my hearing loss is sensiaural so an increase in volume compensates well.
Hearing perception and music enjoyment is highly subjective. But you know that well
Continued health in 22…
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On this point, Resolve, I was wondering if you could help me understand a numerical figure that I’ve seen in a few similar debates. I believe it’s one that you’ve used as well–or at least something similar.
This is passage I snagged from the ASR thread on the Dan Clark Audio Stealth. It’s a post from Amir, the self-professed, as he implied just a bit earlier in the thread, ‘voice of science,’ since, apparently, “Science doesn’t have its own voice to defend itself when its [sic] being trumped upon with dirty shoes. It is up to us, certainly me, to stand up for it.” (As if “science” exists beyond humanity? What a weirdo.) Anyway. My question is with the figure he mentions here: that 90% of a headphone’s “spatial qualities” is frequency response and that the leftover 10% is a mystery, potentially psycho-acoustic, potentially the build.
If memory serves, I believe you also had mentioned in a live-stream that perhaps 90% of a headphone’s sonic character can be identified in a frequency response, while giving the caveat that this figure is conjecture, of course.
Admittedly, my training is not in the sciences but rather literary criticism, and thus, I may just be a bit too ignorant here. But, I just don’t follow. How can we surmise the influence of unknown qualities? If admitting that a portion of the source of a headphone’s sonic characteristic, spatial or otherwise, is unknown, doesn’t that therefore suggest that it is also unknown in extent? In other words, if we reserve 10% for the realm of "unknown’’ then, after all, why couldn’t the mystery ingredients make up closer to 25%, 30% etc.? Frequency response is measurable, and therefore, it allows us to gain a particular understanding of the headphone—but if we assume that other aspects of a transducer will eventually be measurable, either to be decoded in the data we can already glean or via a new method, then how could anyone with any real certainty assume that the parameters of the equation (90% FR + 10% Mystery = “Spatial Qualities”) are already solved? Right? That presumes an end point, of which we cannot be certain? Or, am I missing something, which is a great possibility?
Granted, perhaps it’s just a rhetorically helpful numerical figure and nothing more than that. I will then be guilty of close-reading just a bit too closely.
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Yeah I don’t know about a specific quantification but I’d agree that there’s a significant FR element to it. I’d even go narrower than the bounds he indicated - I think it’s related to features between 1 - 3khz, or maybe in conjunction with certain other qualities between 5 - 9khz so that when the right combination is achieved it creates a certain widening effect. HD 800 S comes to mind. But there are also enough counterexamples that show it’s not merely an FR thing, and that something else has to also be responsible.
Moreover, if you EQ something like an HD 800 S and ‘fix’ those FR features, it’s not like it sounds narrow or anything, even though I do find you maybe lost a bit of the width. Point being, you could have narrow sounding headphones that achieve the desired target but also wider more open sounding ones that achieve it as well. And I agree it could be a psychoacoustic effect or coupling effect. I almost think the physical distance of the driver from the ear might have some influence as well, so again related to the coupling. As Blaine has reminded us on the live stream, sound from a headphone creates a system with the entire ear structure, and this is also why we measure at the drum reference point - but in my view that also emphasizes the importance of that coupling…
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FWIW, Rtings has a methodology for calculating passive soundstage. Eyeballing their results, it seems to correlate pretty well with my own impressions and conventional wisdom on popular models.
I like this kind of stuff but I can still think of counterexamples haha. But this passage in particular is interesting:
“The depth of the “10kHz notch” of the headphone’s PRTF, which is caused by phase cancellations at the concha. This quality is monaural and can be perceived even with one ear. This test does not apply to in-ears and earbuds, due to the lack of pinna interaction.”
There are a lot of assumptions going on with this type of thing but I like it - I like that they’re trying to figure it out in a manner that isn’t just related to “because FR can fake it”.
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I’m curious, what are some counterexamples?