Overall Sound
The short and sweet summary:
- Bass roll-off at around 50 Hz
- Slightly elevated mid-bass/lower-midrange response
- Peak in the upper-midrange at around 6 kHz
- Somewhat grainy treble
- Lightning-fast treble transient speed
- Somewhat slow bass transient speed
- Smallish soundstage
- Accurate imaging/instrument separation
- The sound is dependent on where your ears are relative to the drivers
The one big problem I have with the Dharma D1000 in terms of its sound is that it's very dependent on where your ears are relative to the drivers. The electret driver is towards the front of the headphone so if your ear is near that, you'll hear more upper-midrange and treble. Towards the back of the earcup, you get the opposite effect. I hear a similar effect for vertical placement of the drivers too, strangely enough. The best sound for me was right in the middle of the earcup.
Bass
The frequency response of the Dharma D1000's bass is slightly elevated from the lower-bass upwards, but rolled-off below that. It doesn't have the visceral impact feeling that planar magnetic headphones typically have, and instead takes the sound of a dynamic driver with good presence and a thumpy kind of sound. The dynamic driver, despite its large 52 mm size, unfortunately seems to sound somewhat loose and slow to me. The bass is just kind of "there" without a lot of texture and definition. That being said, its presence makes up for it and I find the bass to sound pleasing overall.
Despite what others think, I find the bass region to have the largest room for error in terms of fidelity while still being able to enjoy the music. After all, low-frequency sounds in the speaker realm are highly variable and absolute fidelity is more problematic compared to other frequencies, yet people still enjoy it regardless of this. The Dharma D1000's bass response is engaging to me and I quite enjoy it for most of my music, enough to get my toes tapping.
Midrange
The midrange of the Dharma D1000 as a whole sounds pretty dang good to me. The elevated bass response provides the lower-midrange with a nice rich tonality that sounds accurate to me in terms of timbre. Again, maybe due in part to the dynamic driver, the midrange doesn't have super-fine texture reproduction and the music just seems "there," though pleasing to listen to for music.
Treble
The upper-midrange and treble response of the Dharma D1000 is mostly dictated by the electret driver from my understanding. I can hear a very obvious peak in the frequency response at around 6 kHz, and it can get fatiguing if you listen to hotly-mastered music and/or music that has a lot of that frequency. A simple -3.0 dB EQ can fix that issue though.
In terms of the frequency response, the Dharma D1000 sounds a bit grainy to me, adding a layer of detail that seems artificial. This is a common thing I hear from headphones on the other hand, so I tend to dismiss this. I don't hear any super large peaks in the frequency response that makes the treble unlistenable on the other hand, so that's always a good thing. Often times a broad and/or large peak at 9-10 kHz will ruin the music to me, and the Dharma D1000 does not have this issue.
On a different note, the electret driver does a marvelous job at keeping up with music transients, in typical electrostatic fashion. This sounds absolutely crazy, but if you take a music track that involves a lot of drumset sounds (cymbals, snares, etc.) and you use a high-pass filter on it after 6 kHz, you can appreciate the driver's speed for higher-frequency sounds. Like my STAX SR-207 electrostatic headphone, the Dharma D1000 is able to easily keep up with every note of the drumset, while keeping them separated from one another. I find a lot of headphones unable to do this, so this really puts the electrostatic technology in the lead for higher-frequency transient speed reproduction. Also similar to the SR-207, I can turn up the volume of the high-pass filtered Dharma D1000 and the music doesn't distort nor fatigue my ears; again, being a property that I've only really found to occur with electrostatic headphone drivers.
Soundstage
Soundstage is a topic I have a hard time talking about, honestly. Most stereo recordings are made in a sound-proof studio room, mixed together with other sounds, and reverberation is added to make it sound echoey as if it were emulating a room. Soundstage is thus an artificial term as most music quite literally has no soundstage; it's just added reverb. Some recordings, particularly those of orchestral or choral works (or even binaural), tend to have a natural soundstage due to the natural reverberations that occur in the recording venue (not a sound-proof studio room). However, since you nor I were present in the venue at the time of the recording, it is literally impossible to tell someone, accurately, how big the soundstage really is. A headphone may have a "big soundstage" to someone, but how
accurate that soundstage is is a completely different topic.
Using self-recorded binaural recordings is one method to go around this, as the microphones will capture sound with timing differences specific to your setup, and you are present at the time of recording to verify the accuracy of the sound cues yourself. I tend to use such recordings as my reference for sound localization in general since I know exactly where sound sources are coming from relative to the microphones.
Back to the Dharma D1000, I find the soundstage reproduction to be fairly accurate in terms of proportions of the depth and width (height seems to be the odd one out), but the soundstage as a whole is shrunken down in size. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if you like a more intimate sound, and can work well for many regular stereo recordings.
Imaging/Instrument Separation
Although the soundstage isn't the largest, the Dharma D1000 has terrific imaging abilities and I think it's one of the best attributes of this headphone. With the binaural recordings I make, the Dharma D1000 has very convincing imaging, actually more so than my SR-207. Usually front/back imaging is difficult for me to hear, but the Dharma D1000 somehow does a better job at this, and it's very easy to appreciate this quality of imaging for music and gaming alike.
I usually don't talk about gaming audio too much since I don't have too much time to play video games these days, let alone games that feature spacial audio cues. That being said, I have been enjoying Blizzard's most recent first-person shooter: Overwatch. This is going to sound extremely cliché, but I find the Dharma D1000 to have excellent imaging for this game and I can localize where objects are in my head, more so than other headphones I've heard. Actually just in Overwatch's training mode, there are stationary robot enemies that can be used as sources for audio cues, and as I turn the in-game character in a 360˚ circle, the robot enemy's sounds are pretty well-correlated with where they appear on the screen. Again, front/back localization has traditionally been difficult for me to hear, but with the Dharma D1000, they're more readily apparent to me.