That's interesting, Harmon does a lot of research and tries new things. Speakers make the room part of the sound and its always been a different sort of experience.

I know more about speakers than phones, but perfectly flat may not be ideal for phones. But the peaks and dips are from cone break up so "hammering" them flatter would improve it. It comes down to measurements and yea it could be misapplied.

I don't know how you would emulate the power response which the change in FR as you change position.

The equalization is supposed to make the room flat. So if you use that profile in a headphone you've made it less flat. Maybe you'd get lucky and like the sound.

I have speakers that I designed with a full range and woofer. I prefer soft cones, domes, small full rangers. There character of a driver can't be changed digitally. Paper will always have a certain sound vs metal. Some disagreement with this.

Listening of a recording of music played through expensive speakers. Isn't what you want. Its like recording a movie at the theaters through your iphone. Every time something is played and rerecorded it gets changed by the room. Sometimes it can pick up a live music sound. With speakers the...

double post,

There are some good thoughts in this post. A couple things to consider is that Equalizer APO contains many different filters. There are high shelf and low shelf and notch filters etc. It also has equalizers. My experience has been Its better to adjust the sound with simpler filters because this...

Trying to make the FR totally flat is a fool's errand. Most headphones are small full range cones that go into break up and so the peaks can be notched and dips can be raised a little. At least you don't have to deal with the room like with speakers.

It's like trying to flatten a dent, it will never be perfect.

This video explains how to use the program called "Equalizer APO" to improve the sound of speakers and headphones. I'm a believer in this, but part of the difficulty is using the software itself which can be confusing. The idea is to flatten the peaks and raise the dips to hammer the response...

I would consider building a speaker like the Arpeggio, but I would use series resistors to get the 6.5 ohm impedance instead of a tube amp. THen equalize it out with something like equalizer APO. Good tube amps are too expensive and high maintenance for my tastes.

I'm not going to defend the article beyond the general conclusion that the main difference of tubes is the higher output impedance, same thing that Bob Carver said and did to match the sound years ago. The changes in frequency response are an effect of this. Transistor amps make sense on a lot...

First its a matter of taste, a lot of people prefer over damped bass but some don't. Do some research on speaker qtc and speaker building. These are all well known principles. A qtc of .7 is considered ideal because the cone comes to rest faster than any other value, but it really depends on a...

No ones saying tubes are better period. You're statement is basically wrong. While not anechoic, recording studios try to reduce the amount of room reflection on the recording. Its not a typical room as your statement implies. You failed to comprehend the context, which is whether there are...

My point is not that there aren't frequency response changes and distortion in tubes. We get that. We also get that they look nice. But these factors are relatively unimportant to the tube effect, at least according to Carver. In fact a number of sources say that any distortion, even second...

The preferred quality of tube sound probably comes from their higher output impedance and therefore lower damping factor. Full range drivers in particular benefit the most from this because of the lack of a crossover and also the drivers themselves are often heavily overdamped with monster...

According to this, Bob Carver (someone who actually knows about the differences in amps) says that you get a lot of the tube sound by increasing the impedance of the amp. http://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/1-5-ohm-resistor-in-series-with-speaker.250403/ He said to place a resistor in...

This an old thread but I'll chime in. I'm considering a tube amp out of curiousity more than anything else. I just can't fathom that all of these seemingly smart people who swear that tubes sound better can all be deluding themselves. First of all, eliminating all distortion isn't the goal...

  A lot of cheapskate audiophiles do tests on their own. I think we've all done 128 vs 160 vs 192 mp3 test. This is easy to do blind, and there is definitely a difference. What got me started on this issue was trying to hook up my avr to my pc with an hdmi cable instead of my 30$ DAC. I...

Yea, maybe the OP was hoping someone would argue in favor of sighted testing, but sorry that's not going to happen. A lot of us are saying that blind testing doesn't automatically equal good science.

Blind ABX testing of audio components isn't a bad idea but its not a proper scientific test. A lot of these tests are nothing more than demonstrations.   The issue is the audibility of different kinds of distortions. At what level is something transparent? Obviously that depends on the other...

Here we go, another person using words like "logic" and "scientific" to try to sound smart.   "Originally Posted by cupofwrathcom View Post   Its very hard to remove variables when dealing with something as complex as human perception.   No it's not, it's trivially easy! You think for...

  You're asking me to trust your explanation of a test that supposedly happened the way you say and was supposedly done in a scientfic way. For example, the short term listening equipment and environment might have been much higher quality and superior to peoples home systems. How did the...

I can't find any reference to the Noussaine article online other than suggesting that it was about testing CDs sent in the mail.   I highly doubt the skeptics would accept any results from an in home experiment.   I still believe that the perception of sound is a difficult variable. Yes it...