Headphone Refinement?

For me personally, it's something that sounds a little more effortless. And that goes hand in hand with the things you said, like being more balanced/quicker etc etc.

You can almost hear a headphone 'trying' to reproduce sounds, and for me, that's the opposite of refinement.

Well, sound is what the driver does

you can't alter the driver, all you can do is help it

So then you refine everything in a way

A better cable with gold plugs add clarity

A better backing and some mods add different sound

But more refined is like saying "a better car"

You can search everywhere for the best headphones, but then I would rather listen to my SR80i because they are fun

I find as you move up in the headphone market, they become more refined but also boring. 

I still don't quite know what "refined" means in terms sound.

Could anyone explain it? 

In a lot of ways, I think it's often used as a catch-all.  If I were to be cynical, I might call it a vague and illusory term based on expectation bias.   I'm sure that does play a role to some degree, since someone listening to a vastly more expensive headphone than they're used to will subconsciously convince themselves that it surely must be more..."refined."

However, I think it's heavily used as a catch-all for real phenomena that the listener cannot accurately or reliably pinpoint.  For instance:

• You might have two headphones that are balanced overall (considering bass, mids, and treble), but one might have more/steeper smaller peaks and valleys within some region of the frequency response spectrum.  A headphone with fewer/shallower troughs may sound more coherent on the whole, and a headphone with fewer/smaller peaks may sound smoother and less harsh.  A listener might be able to tell one is better than the other without being able to articulate exactly why, so these kind of differences might fall under "refinement."
• One headphone's impulse response (at some frequency) might be much faster or smoother than another, allowing for better low-level detail in the former case and/or less ringing and harshness in the latter case.  Similarly, one headphone might have more or less phase shift, harmonic or intermodular distortion, noise, etc. than another.  These differences might be described in terms of refinement.
• One headphone might express tones more clearly than another which has more "bleeding" between frequencies.  I don't know if this artifact can be directly measured as a basic form of distortion, or if it's a complex interaction of other characteristics, like imaging and soundstage are.  Speaking of soundstage, some headphones have taller/wider/deeper soundstages than others, and others have blind spots, and some are better at spatial imaging than others.  All of these differences may also be described in terms of refinement.
• Electrostatic headphones seem to have a character all their own which people refer to as "effortless."  I haven't heard any, and I doubt I'd be able to characterize it more specifically if I had...which means I'd be liable to refer to this quality in terms of refinement if I heard it.

Basically, if you hear a technical improvement from one headphone to another (real or imagined), but you can't put your finger on it...that's "refinement."  That's my take on it, at least.

Haha, OK.  Interesting...

I was wondering why it wasn't in the "sound glossary" here.  Maybe it's because people can't sum it up in a sentence.

IMHO, this isn't that difficult a term.  Refined means a lack of obvious flaws.  IOW, the design has been around long enough to have small improvements made over time, so that all the obvious (and less obvious) flaws have been addressed.

So something is refined only until you hear something better, than that becomes refined and the other gears becomes unrefined in comparison...

Quote:

Originally Posted by chicolom 

So something is refined only until you hear something better, than that becomes refined and the other gears becomes unrefined in comparison...

No, no - think of a car.  A more refined automobile has been thought out better - seats fit better, no controls that you can't reach on the dashboard, doors and windows work without any difficulty, plenty of glove compartment room, change pockets for tolls and drive-throughs, place to put sunglasses, etc.  This can be applied to maintenance - oil filter easy to reach without jacking the car up, air filter easy to open up, dip-stick within reach, etc.  Performance refinement might be no obvious lugging in acceleration, less of a tendency to over-steer or under-steer, gas mileage that doesn't fall apart in city driving, etc.

Headphones are similar - more refined can be applied to the appearance, the fit, and the performance.  Is the bass outrageous, is the mid-range gone, are there obvious peaks in the response?  If these have been addressed, then it's been refined ... made better, improved, had corrections made over time, etc.  That doesn't mean it performs better than another headphone that may be faster, have better bass, etc. - just that most of the potential complaints have been addressed.

I'm not used to explaining words on Head-Fi, but maybe that helps ...
 

Many sound terms are related, if not interchangeable. Refinement sounds to me very much like overall smoothness.

Refinement refers to grain of the product after you put your headphones into a Blendtec Total Blender.

Although I think most people use the term "refinement" as a catch-all in comparisons, I think tomb is more accurate regarding what refinement actually means in reality.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tomb 


I'm not used to explaining words on Head-Fi, but maybe that helps ...

 

 

Thanks, that helps.

I just always see people comparing two pieces of gear and they'll say "Gear A has slightly more refined treble than Gear B" and I'm like "....OK?..."

I guess I see it has being a little more coherent and polished within itself, and less rough/jagged around the edges. 

Just seems a little weird to use a term that means small incremental improvements as a binary adjective.