Do Objective Headphone Measurements Correlate to the Audiophile's Subjective Experience? - Page 7

I'm going to call you on a few points you have made.  First would be have you ever actually built a headphone from scratch?  Do you have any idea how hard it is to put everything together and come out with a win? Its not easy to tune headphones to tailor a specific sound.  Hold the manufacturers accountable?  I am not sure any headphone designer wants you to be overly analytical with your experience.  Ask Val from Vmoda if he created his company so you can listen to sweep tones and over analyze his headphones.  He made his gear so you can enjoy music.  The LCD2 didn't plot immensely well yet it sound very nice, the Fidelio L1 didn't plot well in the upper regions, yet it sounds nice.  Does that mean we bash them for this?  Hell no.  They all put immensely hard work into it, it took Sennheiser nearly 5 years to produce the HD800 and you want to bash them for some faults that are hardly even audible when you are trying to enjoy music?  What you are basically saying is the video game equivalent to creating a program that measures the texture geometry on the walls, the more perfect the angle the better the graph will look, yet the game can still look like pure crap.  You want to rely on a machine to tell you the textures are perfectly formed, yet they look like absolute crap. Go look at Star Wars Battlefront II for the pc, those textures on the walls are all nicely formed angles, yet the game looks like pure crap.

I fully endorse my favorite headphones failures.  They do not bother me.  My DX1000 isn't sublime, nor is my Fidelio L1 yet they sound highly musical and the failures shown on a chart are not even audibly present the majority of the time.  So no, you are absolutely wrong in your assumption.  There is nothing wrong with using graphs to further your tech knowledge, I never said anything to the contrary.  I said it was one part of the puzzle, you made it seem like I said it was THE DEVIL or some demon you need to avoid at all costs when I clearly said the opposite, twice.  You saying that the graph will help you decide what YOU like is a rehash of what I said twice before on this very page, so yes I agree.

Your idea what what journey is worth taking is purely subjective.  Many of us enjoy the experience and The Hunt.  Experiencing many products instead of just one.  Why on earth would I wan to celebrate measurements over the experience itself?  I am one of very few reviewers who almost never speaks of charts and plots because I feel them to be pointless and useless TO ME.  You are analytical, I am musical.  I prefer MUSICALITY over Perfect graphs.  I could care less if they looked like the Rocky Mountains so long as the end result sounds incredible.  

@ Jerg,

So what you are implying is that you got into headphones because you started off listening in a critical way?  LOL ok...

Well said. I'll add one more point to this since it's something I've noticed about this site since I've been here: There are posters here who seem to take quite a bit of enjoyment when a headphone doesn't measure well or when there are aspects to the measurements that they find problematic. I feel that's a large part of why these headphone wars begin and become out of control, and when you really think about what people are attacking each other over it's completely asinine. When it becomes enjoyable to be critical of someone else's headphone purchase decisions because you have a graph that shows something imperfect about them, it's time to find another hobby where you can be a bit more mature. 

 Of course it's immature to discredit someone for their purchase by flailing around a plot, but who the hell does that?

Of course it's immature to discredit someone for their purchase by flailing around a plot, but who the hell does that?

thanks purrin.

i have to disagree with anyone who says that the participants in this poll were inherently biased due to their association to a certain forum.  i think there are a variety preferences, tastes and priorities among the participants, and would consider them to have a fair amount of experience with headphone reproduction in general.  the biggest difference is that more tempered opinions prevail without hype, engendering constructive criticism that i personally feel is more educational.  just because you spend $1K on a headphone (or amp, DAC) doesn't make it perfect.  i mean there are members there that have to fix the problems of $1-1.5K headphones with toilet paper and craft store foam to suit their needs.  i could care less what someone else prefers, and would consider myself more tolerant of peaky high-mids and highs than most, but i have never owned a headphone that i could rate "1" and doubt there will ever be one.  i'm OK with that and don't feel i need my choices validated with hype to make me believe i have "the best".

$1K is a lot to spend on a pair of headphones.  there are some of us that feel that manufacturers are conducting "market segmentation" to the detriment of headphone culture.  we want more "better", not just more "different" with a higher price tag. 

On a side note, I'm a little skeptical of the significance of some midrange/treble CSD anomalies (not the more egregious cases), considering the time scale and auditory masking when actual music is being played.  I mean, cleaner is probably better, but how much better?  Are there any papers on this?  I could be very wrong, and my intuition does say that it's probably more important than a lot of other things people care about, but maybe I'll just have to listen for myself with more headphones.

Maybe people that think everything sounds good and have no way of contributing critical analysis to others should avoid threads or forums that do.  I see no value in turning every thread on a forum into appreciation threads where consumers blindly chase unicorns that don't exist.  Such an attitude makes the consumer a proxy shill for companies and they don't even get paid but pay for the pleasure of hyping their product!  Also, a headphone must not sound very good if someone is more concerned about what others think about it than they do themselves.  Such people might be said to possess insecurities and it might be the mature thing to avoid a forum whose intention and purpose is to offer impressions that actually evaluate gear.  That's kind of what the founder of the site and most members who contribute and follow are actually doing here.  

The journey?  What, buying headphone after headphone because people who don't know anything write glowing reviews about how perfect they are, only to be let down by glaring problems over and over again?  I don't consider that a journey, I consider that a huge waste of time.  I've wasted 7 years doing that. 

SWBFcheater, as someone who has written a lot of very dramatic threads about how disappointed you are in the majority of headphones you should be celebrating these measurements because they hold headphone manufacturers accountable.  What these measurements show is not debatable, you can't just pay off a reviewer, or trick people with fancy packing and marketing.  Headphone companies take advantage of this subjective mentality because anything can be anything, people's opinions and experiences can be shaped by marketing.  And it allows them to keep making headphones with gross colorations and selling passing them off as perfect.  These graphs don't show the whole picture, and they don't tell you whether a headphone is bad or good.  They tell you about speed and decay.  It's up for you to decide what kind of speed and decay characteristics you like. 

The only reason to write off these measurements is if you are so insecure about your preferences that you can't stand the idea that something might be wrong with a headphone you like.  Instead of needing to claim perfection in something that is (as you have told us all over and over again) far from perfect, why not use these measurements as a way of furthering your understanding of sound.  THAT is a journey worth taking.  Use them to figure out what it is you like in a headphone, and what you don't like.  Maybe you like some resonance.  That's fine.  But we don't need to throw out facts, logic and very useful tools so that you can hold onto a silly and impossible notion of perfection and what seems to be sense of self worth that is attached to your headphones and preferences. 

There's still room for subjectivity.  You like what you like.  These shouldn't be seen as a threat to what you like.  They are tools to help you better understand what you like.  And to help you more easily find more of what you like.  Again, THAT is a journey that is worth taking. 

Very well said rhythm.

Measurements don't lie. Reviewers can say this, and marketing can say that, but measurements are always grounded in reality. Having the ability to test and measure equipment is what helps us sniff out the BS.  This doesn't mean you have to prefer a perfectly flat FR, but you should at least be aware of the colorations that you're experiencing.

Yes, except that being overly positive and appreciative of one's headphones, wanting to share their experiences with others, and even blindly chasing unicorns that don't exist isn't against the forum rules, whereas disparaging others for their comments - positive or negative - is. Thankfully it's not up to individual members as to who may or may not post on a great forum such as head-fi...it's up to Jude and his admins. 

Actually it's funny you mentioned this, cause it wasn't long ago that I was actually accused of being too positive on here. I got a kick out of that, cause it's something I never expected to hear on a consumer forum. I sometimes get sucked into the back and forth like anyone else, but the truth is that I don't like being negative when it comes to something I consider a hobby. I come across audio gear that I don't care for all the time, but I don't prefer to talk about that cause I know that there are people who own said gear and probably don't want to hear about my negative experiences with it. Besides, there are plenty of others who fill in that gap, nobody needs me piling on. On top of that, it's much more fun to talk about how much I love my headphones and how much enjoyment they bring me...makes me happy.