Now, the treble:
But then look at the comparable midrange graphs where their lines are more bunched up together and with the exception of the Sony are nearly parallel, variances in level are attributable more to their sensitivity/efficiency than actual response balance:
Notice a pattern here? When people call a headphone "musical" what they really mean is that it can really highlight the beat of the music, be it a string instrument like a bass guitar or a bass viola or a percussion instrument like the bass drum and the toms. When people say "analytical" they mean
"details shine through," if not full-on "OMG MY EARS MY EARS OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"
My point however is that if you
really think about it, aren't there details in the bass region too, and if the response is too weak you won't hear those detailed notes, and when it's too strong, it bloats the bass and you can't hear the proper detail because everything sounds like creeping and bubbling molasses than actual bass beats (unless what you're listening to is synthetic bass normally designed to blow windows off a rapper's SUV when played through his 22inch MTX Jackhammer subwoofer). Similarly, isn't treble also vital to enjoying music? The cymbals are part of the drums and they carry the beat, and what if you're listening to an alto soprano?
Basically, "analytical" and "musical" as antithetical terms are highly misleading. The reality is that a perfectly flat sound off the speakers/headphones that is uncoloured by the listening environment (ie room modes, or equivalent factors in headphones like earpad wear, variance in clamping force, etc) makes for a truly analytical sound that shows all the details without being harsh, while also musical in the sense that you hear the "groove" of the music well. The reality however is that such a transducer does not exist yet, as there are a lot of factors involved in driver design. Even planars which can get almost perfectly flat from 10hz to 1000hz have to deal with a sharp deviation somewhere in the midrange-treble region (see below) and ultimately all headphone and speaker designs bear with them a compromise that the manufacturers' engineers are willing to live with at that price range. It would be more accurate to just refer to these as "warm" and "bright" rather than "analytical" and "musical," since that more accurately states how "well we prefer it's a bit stronger at one end than the other."
Almost perfectly flat from 10hz to 1000hz, then after that, relatively weaker between 1000hz and around 5000hz, then peaks just before 10000hz.
So again, if you look at it in terms of public human behavior, with the recording equivalent to any random social/economic/political phenomenon, a truly analytical speaker is like a technocrat presenting a well-researched, multi-faceted, collaborative research paper that involved as many social science experts as possible (ie all ranges of sound properly represented), while the treble-enhanced "analytical" speaker isn't really "analytical," but a "critical, pessimistic" perspective presented by a grandstanding politician who wants the public to focus on some part and will even add things that werent in that report if he can get some political mileage out of it.
