Quote:
1 ) Hey, the HOKs don't look pathetic! They're working class rugged, looking as they sound.
2 ) I trust your more experienced ear when it comes to the treble hump – or klarheit – in long-time use. (Do I sense contempt in that post towards klarheit?) I've taken a few moments to slightly tone down my own treble hump.
3 ) I looked up the response curve of the MD 421 – it looks just like the Terhardt outer ear curve. Any connection?
1 ) Har! Pathetic in the "poor little lost puppy" sense. When you open the box and see the exploded earpads, your first thought is "This headphone neeeds me!", and, well, you can't say it doesn't. I have a theory about this, which I will now dump on you.This feeling is a driving emotion which I believe partly underlies the motivation of the engineering mind. My father, a brilliant mechanical engineer, would regularly bring home pathetic appliances, radios and the like, because, I am certain, he could tell, almost by a sixth sense, that they were badly made, poor things, wasn't their fault, and we would not kick them into the gutter, but would give them a loving home. He liked dogs, too.
2 ) If it's done nothing else, teh intarnet has done two things for us as humans: One, made it far too easy for millions of people to reach into the muckpool of their lives and spew random, unfocused contempt, and two, made it far more likely that normal people will sense contempt where none exists. Given the loud ostinato omnipresence of the first group, can we blame the second group for a little oversensitivity? No. Which is a very long way of saying, no, I don't hold frequency response curves in contempt. They're either useful or educational.
3 ) Terhardt's paper (if I've got the correct one) came out about 10 years after the 421 mic and the HD 414 headphone, so it most likely was influenced by ideas flying around Germany for many years. Whether specifically Sennheiser research/ideas, I don't know. You'll see that same basic shape in a lot of microphone curves.
Oh! Almost forgot-- You should, like, get in touch with Tyll (and wouldn't that make a great morning cable-TV show? In Touch-- with Tyll ) and, like, compare notes on Headphone Measurement comma Pitfalls Of. As long as you're measuring for you, you can establish a baseline and watch the 'phones change as you work on them. Over time you'll learn ways to control ambient noise and other distractions and increase your ability to get repeatable results... and then you can become the eastern headphone measurement guru to whom everyone sends their headphones. If you want to.
Edited by wualta - 2/6/12 at 3:46pm
