Colored sound?

http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=189381

If you want to hear it the way recording people hear it, you could check out something like the Genelec or Dynaudio series of speaker monitors. These have a neutral, uncolored sound with good detail and an accurate, sober sound stage, but you will not be very impressed, because these are clinical tools of the trade rather than tools of passion and emotion.

My personal opinion: If it sound good to me, I don't care about color. If my highs are shrill to me, I consider my system colored as far as i'm concerned and try to fix it, although I don't actually know if my system is colored; it might be the recording or even my ears that are colored.

003- you'll understand once you hear the K-1000! As I understand it, they were originally developed for studio work. And while the RS-1 owns my heart, the K-1000 is in charge of all rational faculties... and still manages to border on the sublime. You'll see, well, I really mean you'll hear.

But to answer your question, you can tell the difference between coloration and reality by comparing your system to the real thing. If you play an instrument, get a cheap microphone and record yourself on the computer. Play it back. Does it sound like the real thing? You can also record people's voices, singing, your dog barking, whatever.

And coloration isn't all that bad, anyhow. I enjoy my Sennheiser HD-650s, as well. They're dark, but they're also accurate. The right way to think about this is by using sunglasses as an analogy. When you put them on, you get an accurate representation of where everything is, right? But it's darker than the naked eye. Same thing with headphones. Also think about putting on colored glasses. Blue ones will give everything a blue cast, but everything is spatially correct. And some headphones are like funhouse mirrors- they'll bend and distort the sound. Sometimes the distortion sounds good, sometimes not.