¿What is detail retrieval?

We’re starting to do it now - you can see it in the Tungsten thread here.

To be clear, we’ve checked this stuff for a long time now, we just haven’t been posting it because there’s always a risk that people focus on the wrong things. But given how the conversation on GD has gone, where people will refer to “messy” performance there or indicating issues to do with resonances without noting the excess GD, it’s probably worth posting. And also to show that things are behaving normally in the vast majority of cases.

And this is sort of what I’m saying - you’ll find exactly this with more modal responses like with common planar magnetics. But that doesn’t mean what is heard isn’t just the FR and those modal FR features.

I think the common issue related to all of this is that people will go looking for things that explain their experiences, and they’ll note quite understandably that what they see on the FR graph doesn’t line up with what they hear, and so they start to dive into other metrics to see if that helps explain things. But when you study FR, HRTF and HpTF a bit more, and in particular try to understand how your own anatomy influences FR at the ear drum, it actually does a better job of explaining what you hear in terms of these things.

And, the reason I say this, is that the burden of proof would be strongly on the side of anyone indicating that time domain information is actually relevant in minimum phase devices (and thus not proportional to FR), or indeed that headphones shouldn’t be minimum phase, or that they’re not entirely minimum phase… etc.

I say this also in part because there’s apparently a talk on this very subject at CanJam NYC next weekend that I’m hopeful to attend to see if there’s any there there. I’m skeptical, but curious nonetheless.

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