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Of course the sound-science forums say IEM's have no soundspace and it's all in our head, which is why we should use SRS algorithms or crossfeed, those guys all drive me crazy.
I like the term headspace instead of soundspace or soundstage, since music does present differently to me on speakers vs. headphones.
The problem being in part that there are different ways of recording stereo audio, and different ways of mixing it; these differences become a lot more pronounced on headphones than on speakers when played back.
I'm a big fan of crossfeed personally, and I'm contemplating building an LOD with a crossfeed circuit in it. I also suspect that different people are sensitive to stereo separation to different extents, and mind what they're aware of to different extents. I'm probably middling-to-sensitive, but too easily distracted by it.
Like some people love fart cannon headphones and others can't abide them, some love headphones with no middle and others are annoyed to irritation by them. And in both cases, some people don't mind or barely notice these extremes.
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Speaking of which, the leather pads that came with my SA5000 are all hard. Does anyone know how I could soften them back up?
The LCD-2 threads have discussed that a bit. I can't recall the product of choice that Audeze endorses, though it should be easy to track down.
I don't know how easily they can be softened up again if they get too hard.
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I'm always feel dubious and doubtful whenever someone plays the 'everyone hears differently' card regarding audio impressions, esp on the more hot topics e.g. cables, DACs, etc. I mean surely that would also mean i hear a guitar or trumpet this particular way unique to myself only and the next guy besides me hears it uniquely different as well?
In art school, one of the first courses you should take is color theory. There, you learn the natural phenomena of colors: the part SCIENCE! has adequately made mathematical: How a given color is firmly describable by the wavelengths of light it contains (or reflects). And then you learn how to dispense with that: A given color will look different depending on the environment it's in, the context in which it's seen, the way it's used; and our expectations influence our perceptions. If, at the end, the student can't at will make grey look like red, or green look like blue, he shouldn't pass the course.
Similarly, there are two aspects to phenomena like audio: The physical and the perceptual.
The physical aspect is the easily quantified part: What you can chart, diagram, describe in numbers, observe being altered through all the stages in your electronic equipment, dispersion in the air, and so on. All parts of this are not necessarily easy to quantify or even readily ascertained as relevant, but with sufficient time, effort and technology, the phenomena can be parameterized and made predictable and repeatable through the methods of SCIENCE!
By that part of it, yes, a trumpet will sound exactly the same to everybody who partakes of exactly the same listening situation (with a caveat).
The perceptual can be elusive to describe, because it is not the physical aspect, it's the consequence of it; it's the process going on in your head in real-time once your inner ears have sent the signals to your brain. And it changes based on what you are paying attention to this time, what else is going on, your mood, what you'd just listened to before... The mental aspect is, itself, the firing of neurons and subtle chemical reactions in your brain, but the parameterization of
that is currently too inadequate; soft sciences have been able to provide us high-level answers that many of us perceive certain things in common, and that we can generally be fooled by the same things in the same ways, but without the reductive granularity that, say, physics has used to quantify acoustic vibrations.
So about that caveat: We are shaped differently, and our outer and inner ears are shaped differently; we each perceive the sound spectrum and loudness differently (this much can be parameterized in a common hearing test); arguably how we perceive sound and space are affected by this. But to what extent can a given ear shape can be predictably said to emphasize different tones? I don't know. And how would you separate that from the psychological aspect of perceiving that tone?
