[Argyris]

  an undead hedgehog.

 

 

[Argyris]

And, because I feel bad not giving attribution for the above, here's the deviantART page:
 
http://hyugathehedemon.deviantart.com/art/Sonic-Zombie-Style-245273211

 

[TwinQY]

  I'm use to sound staging that emulates a true speaker setup. Images from the front of you. Close your eyes and you can picture the band in front of you, not in your head. Where you can pick out each distinct instrument. So in terms of realism and accuracy I'm quite spoiled.

To be fair, I sort of like the diagonal blobs, rather than having it all in front. The channeled thing doesn't really make total front localization work though, and unfortunately I'm always too aware of that myself so I can't really force myself to succumb to the illusion. Honestly, half of audio reproduction is based on this sense of cognitive dillusion, where you force a change on your own perspective and preception to get into that world, that imaginary stage. Unfortunately my imagination is very fickle on certain days, so often times I just spend entire days not listening to a single song because I know that I wouldn't do them justice. 
 
That's not some weird reductionist plot to say that I think all gear is balooney. Having different gear is like having different sets of inputs - you have the opportunity to extract different sets of information, which leads to a different perspective to start off from. Really, it just makes your job of imagining much easier.
 
The ER4s, and I'm going to steal a term from Muppet although she used it for the TG334 rather than the ER4, is a relay machine. And I mean that in an slightly different way than it was intended (i.e. a metaphor to explain transparency). The presentation is almost for the sole purpose of dissecting information and relaying it to the ears as efficiently as possible. And this is an amazing prospect and experience in itself. Back when I was practicing with my band, that would be my lifeline - all I would ever need.

 

[TwinQY]

 

Blue durians - which begs the question - can durians even go bad, and if so, how on earth would it manage to taste even worse than it was while fresh? 

 

[lee730]

Well I guess the best way to describe it in your terms would be 3D. Pretty much all music is designed with speakers in mind and thus for my comments with the accuracy as how the songs were intended to be heard. I can see the appeal for having a very intimate sound. But generally I find that to get tiring very fast and annoying. I feel more like the music is being forced on me rather than me listening to the actual presentation. Now if I'm not in the mood to really listen to music maybe that would work lol .
 
But at the same time with the 1Plus2 there is so much to take in. It gives you all the detail and it's a very spacious and fast presentation. Just throws it at you. You can analyze from the left, center, right, up, down lol. In that it can get tiring as well as there is so much to take in. But that also makes it very special. The fact that you are able to do that.

 

[TwinQY]

I agree. You would think that by listening to only Mongolian yodels and traditional mountain music, that it'd counteract the size discrepancies of the presentations. Alas, it's the same input in input out in 2 channels with several subchannels for each layer. One day when I become a grizzled crouch and half of my library becomes yodeling mountain music, I hope to god that IEM manufactures will stop using single BAs and work that group delay like a champ.
 
I don't really feel the Etys are intimate. Just very seperated and clear cut. They aren't the Beat Tours where the tracks are pressed right next to your skin with the tenacity of a brick.
 
Big soundstages might even work better for non-focused listening - you're delocalized, decentralized, simply out of it, and the presentation reflects that. So you still get to catch those wisps of sound as they fly by politely, instead of having them call upon your attention.

 

[Argyris]

I accept that the headphone presentation is always going to be different from the speaker or live performance presentation, since stereo wasn't specifically designed with headphones in mind. The idea was always that the channels would overlap, which doesn't happen (even with crossfeed) with headphones. Various headphones I've heard manage to get the presentation a little more outside the head than others and manage to produce a more well-rounded sonic space (as opposed to the line through the ears presentation common to cheaper models), but that's really as good as it's ever going to get until you get into earspeakers (like the K1000) which employ natural crossfeed, or else use some sort of signal processing trickery to simulate an HRTF.
 
All this said, I enjoy the headphone presentation for what it is. Being able to listen deep into a track and to follow different musical elements separately has always been easier for me on headphones than on speakers. Detail is more apparent, too. Obviously some of the visceral impact is lost, but all the rooms in my house sound crappy and none of my speakers currently has a woofer bigger than 6.5", so I'm not missing as much as I could be. Plus, it's much easier to get linear bass extension from a headphone than from a speaker setup, so I actually hear deeper, flatter bass on my headphones than my speakers, even if the speakers give me more tactile punch.

 

[lee730]

  I don't really feel the Etys are intimate. Just very seperated and clear cut. They aren't the Beat Tours where the tracks are pressed right next to your skin with the tenacity of a brick.
 
Big soundstages might even work better for non-focused listening - you're delocalized, decentralized, simply out of it, and the presentation reflects that. So you still get to catch those wisps of sound as they fly by politely, instead of having them call upon your attention.

 
Well it really depends on what you've heard and compared it to.
 
Even with big sound staging there's more to it than just that aspect. You can have a large sound stage and a mess with everything flying around and no actual placement or accuracy. That's what I gather when you mention fly by politely lol. With superb sound staging and imaging capabilities even a large sound stage will demand your attention. In a sense I see it as hearing more and having room so you can make out those nuances to the sound instead of everything being mushed and compressed together.

 

[TwinQY]

I thought you were an pious pirate/booty lover? Didn't you catch the thread over yonder? Apparently HRTF is all bull according to the new gospel. Long live the Roman Walkingtheplankfreefield Church. 
 
I always associated depth with tactility in some sense.

 

[TwinQY]

  Well it really depends on what you've heard and compared it to.
 
Even with big sound staging there's more to it than just that aspect. You can have a large sound stage and a mess with everything flying around and no actual placement or accuracy. That's what I gather when you mention fly by politely lol. With superb sound staging and imaging capabilities even a large sound stage will demand your attention.

The RE262 for me is slightly more intimate in the traditional sense (covering a smaller area as a blob, where it's not as forward but it's all localized to one area so there's less breathing space in the abstract sense), as an example. The A161p is a little bit more diffused with the leading edge, almost like leaving behind this sort of ghostly residue, but the overall size is smaller and it is more forward. Just to give some examples within a similar realm of choices.
 
I've had it for 5 years so I've pretty used it as a comparison benchmark to anything and everything coming through the house. It's just a poorly misinterpreted creature in my eyes
 
Well, that steps into the realm where one would have to discern from lateral size of the staging and imaging, and the sheer presentation, the clear-cuttedness of the notes (my made-up world of the day) and spacing in between. But neither are always mutual exclusive to themselves, or to one another. That's my approach to it, although I guess people do have other means for judging the qualities and influencings of staging.

 

[lee730]

  The RE262 is slightly more intimate in the traditional sense, as an example. The A161p is a little bit more diffused with the leading edge, almost like leaving behind this sort of ghostly residue, but the overall size is smaller and it is more forward. Just to give some examples within a similar realm of choices.
 
I've had it for 5 years so I've pretty used it as a comparison benchmark to anything and everything coming through the house. It's just a poorly misinterpreted creature.
 
Well, that steps into the realm where one would have to discern from lateral size of the staging and imaging, and the sheer presentation, the clear-cuttedness of the notes (my made-up world of the day) and spacing in between. But neither are always mutual exclusive to themselves, or to one another. That's my approach to it, although I guess people do have their own means for judging the qualities and influencings of staging,

 
I had the RE262 for a short time. I ended up returning them to Head Direct (I think that's who I bought them from at least).... I wasn't impressed with the sound at all. At least compared to what I had at the time. Compared to the IE80s with the tape mod and pure silver cable (as well as the MDR-7550) left me very underwhelmed.... I really set my expectations too high on that purchase but based on what I read I figured it would be very good. I read the entire thread and was very excited to get them thinking it would be the pairing I needed for the Studio V. Boy was I wrong.... That pretty much was the last straw with me making blind purchases (in general). While the 262 had decent mids. The treble was unrefined and on the harsh side. Bass was lacking in quantity. It's quality was ok I guess. Nothing to right home about. The sound staging was on the small side but acceptable for a dynamic IEM. I think anyone looking for this signature but a noticeably better IEM overall would have been set with the Sennheiser IE7. At one point you could have gotten these IEMs refurb for $92.00. I think even the MDR-7550 would be a very good choice and even better than the IE7.
 
Case in point even my former IE80 and MDR-7550 could not compare to the gear I have now. I was always chasing after gear to improve upon what I had and I'm at that point where it's not really possible anymore lol.... Anyways it would be interesting to hear your impressions on the 1Plus2 if you ever get a chance. Would probably shed some light on exactly what I'm talking about .
 
It's been quite a journey here. I remember first starting off with the Bose IE2 thinking they were the ****. Started of with the older version of the Sansa e280 and under RMA they sent me a new prototype e280 v2. Which was using the same chip the Sansa Fuze would later use. I immediately noticed that improvement and it got me wondering if things could improve further. That brought me here to headfi and I started off with the IE8s. I remember first listening to them and was not very impressed. Was thinking did I just waste $260 on these IEMs? But within 20 minutes I started to hear the difference. Started noticing how refined they were and how spacious they were. Within hours the bose sounded horrible lol. Funny how much an upgrade can make gear that you previously found very good to sound flawed suddenly...

 

[Argyris]

  I thought you were an pious pirate/booty lover? Didn't you catch the thread over yonder? Apparently HRTF is all bull according to the new gospel. Long live the Roman Walkingtheplankfreefield Church. 

 
This stuff always does my head in when I try to understand it. Bear with me a bit, since I confuse myself whenever I even try to articulate this stuff. From what I've seen, the DF curve features a peak between 9-10 kHz. Now, I hear this peak a little lower, at around 7.6 kHz, in every single headphone I've ever tried. Yet the FF curve doesn't have this peak, and when I tested with my speakers, I heard what might have been a stunted peak (since the speakers weren't in a completely anechoic space and thus were reverberating somewhat off the walls) but nothing on the same order of magnitude as what I hear with headphones. So I hear a DF-like curve with headphones and a FF-like curve with speakers. That makes sense so far.
 
Here's where it gets confusing. The peak I hear in the mid-treble on headphones is lower than it appears on any of the measurements, so it's clearly not designed into the headphone itself, or else I would hear it in the same place as the dummy did. So it's something about the interface between the ear and the headphone that causes this peak. The only conclusion I can make is that there is something inherently DF-like about stopping the ears up with a pair of headphones.
 
If this is the case, then in order to make a pair of headphones sound like a set of speakers in a room, you'd need to minimize that mid-treble peak somehow. The trouble is that, as my experience demonstrates, it doesn't fall in the same place for each person, so you couldn't just engineer a dip into the headphone design at a precise frequency in order to compensate. The way I've been doing it is with a parametric EQ. In my experience it does make things sound more natural with this peak (and a few others intrinsic to the headphone itself) compensated for.
 
How crazy does all of this sound? Now you know why I have trouble wrapping my head around this stuff. There's got to be a simpler explanation I'm missing, or else some of my assumptions or understanding of the fundamental concepts involved might be wrong.

 

[Achmedisdead]

   
 Started of with the older version of the Sansa e280 and under RMA they sent me a new prototype e280 v2. Which was using the same chip the Sansa Fuze would later use. I immediately noticed that improvement and it got me wondering if things could improve further. 

 
I've got one of the old-school e280 here on my desk, and even with Rockbox tweaks, it doesn't sound good at all....we've come a long way since then....lol. I used it as a source for the work stereo in the kitchen for a while, but it's been replaced in that duty by a rockboxed Fuze+ (which sounds pretty good but could never be a primary DAP due to the touchpad controls).  

 

[Makiah S]

   
I like coconut and soy milk (both organic). I don't drink it that often though. Maybe once ever couple months. I mostly drink water to be honest. Soda is a rarity for me.

 
I find soda to be disusting, and I to prefer water. I like milk for my ceral though [or coco nut milk] 

 

[wink]

 Blue durians - which begs the question - can durians even go bad, and if so, how on earth would it manage to taste even worse than it was while fresh? 

They taste infinitely better when totally bad/rotten/diseased/corrupted/spoilt/corrupted/compromised/congealed/coagulated/toxic/inedible/putrefied/off/nutritionally challenged/gross/etc. etc.
 
Not as good as a good pineapple, though.