Well i hear people talk about slow and fast earphones and iem's, but how do you really tell? Does it sound like the music is lagging?

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Usually, if notes trail too long, as if the bass is overly exaggerated, sound tends to be slow. As if it takes a while for the notes to end, bleeding into the next bunch of notes unintentionally. Fast means that the notes end quickly and the next batch is upon you in a flash. Sometimes this is unnaturally fast, like the attack and transient is timed well but the note decay is cut far too short presenting and unrealistic sound.

IEM's without proper decay = abnormally fast. Might be fun, might float one's boat, but it ain't natural.

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I've never heard anything I consider unnaturally fast, after all it can't go any faster than the source and surely the speed of the original source would be the reference point. I'm not saying people can't like the decay but I can't see how it would make things more realistic.

Get an equalizer, and raise and lower the upper-mids while listening to music with reasonable but not ridiculous pace. What happens to the character of the music?

Just got ER4s and they border on unnaturally fast (but then again, I'm used to RS-1s so who knows) it just seems that the notes decay really quickly, almost dissapearing. That gives it a really fast sound (which I like =p) but they're really different from my K501s, which seems slow and i can hear the notes actually die down (which might be unrealistic too)

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I don't buy this at all. It is impossible to make the decay shorter than it is in the recording itself. The transducer can't stop vibrating before the signal representing the instrument has stopped. On the other hand, a headphone with a very slow decay will continue to vibrate even after the signal has stopped. This means that a headphone with a very fast decay will follow the actual recorded material much more closely than a headphone with an extended decay. Certainly this is more accurate. Perhaps if the recording was done exceptionally poorly the entire decay of X intrsument will not have been recorded, but it isn't the headphone's job to "fix" this.

My you-know-whats are exceptionally fast, and listening to them with many different types of music, I have never felt that the decay was too fast or unrealistic when compared with my experiences with actual live music, which includes too many classical music concerts to count, (I've been going to see the Atlanta symphony orchestra since I was a little kid) setting up for and photographing several christian music concerts, and setting up for and mixing for my church's small praise band almost every sunday for nearly a year now.

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I was thinking that too but I don't see how it's possible to make a recording like you described short of making some kind of filter that could detect the attack of a sound and then remove the decay. Such a filter would of course be intentional. I certainly don't buy the idea of it being done to all the music out there.

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Just use an oscilloscope and compare the response characteristics of various drivers.

Is it that noticable? We're talking like a fraction of a fraction of a microsecond here...

Unaturally fast?

*points to the SA5000*

That's one isn't it?

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Yep. That's the worst offender.

I agree about the ER4 though. That's really its main hinderance... the decay is kind of unnatural.

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Unfortunately don't have one of those around here at work. Are you suggesting that something like damping could be reducing the decay time beyond that in the recorded source?

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Okay, so that's one headphone off the list of searching and loaning

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Agreed.

Okay. I just listened to the orchestated version of "One Winged Angel". Listening closely to it using my ER4s, (please forgive me for mentioning them so much here, I am not trying to turn this into an Etymotic is great thread, but they are the only truly fast headphone I own; even my SR-60s aren't quite as fast) the decay of the instruments and cymbals does not sound too terribly different than when I heard the exact same version of the song played live last year at the Final Fantasy Dear Friends concert in Atlanta. Obviously there are differences, as they were played in different venues under different conditions, but there is nothing about the playback of the recorded version that I would call too fast or unnatural or lacking in decay.

Honestly, I think that people who feel certain headphones are too fast either have a preference for slow decay, (perfectly acceptable) or just don't know how real instruments actually sound. (Not intended as a put down.)