The V2's treble presentation changes quite a bit depending on how you're wearing the headphones on your head. The V2 should sound very precise without haze if you've got it at the sweet spot.

This is just Hifiman tanking their own used market through aggressive sales and churning out endless new variants as usual. Adorama was well-known for putting the HE6se on sale for something like 60% off on the regular. If Sennheiser did the same thing and released subtle revisions of the HD800S...

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You mainly want to pay close attention to the bass. Drums and similar percussion tend to sound limper and more fart-y on BAs, lacking that woofer-like tactile sensation of air being properly pushed, though it's more of a trend than an absolute law. The jargon you might hear used to describe it...

If you don't have the headphones themselves, you won't be able to A/B. Headphone measurements are inherently imprecise enough that trying to turn one headphone into another with DSP based on them isn't viable. I personally wouldn't recommend using AutoEQ at all, as deriving useful information...

Greatest improvement you can make to Hifiman egg-shapes' sound is to try wearing them at a different position and angle on your head. Every one I've tried (Ananda, HEXv2, HEKv2) changes significantly in treble presentation based on how it's seated and sounds like limp, plasticky, unnatural...

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So I ordered the KB8 a year ago and wrote up impressions of it here. I've moved to and have been living under a rock since then. I was not too impressed with the KB8's audio quality. Is AptX Adaptive like SBC or AAC where audio quality can vary greatly based on device configuration, or is it...

I finally got around to organizing my thoughts on the Saber into a proper review: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/11cprh1/rikubuds_saber_1_good_cheap_earbuds_pick_3/

At this point, I do wonder whether the IEM market wouldn't be better off if manufacturers stopped using ESTs. The overly soft timbre resulting from the unnaturally extended upper treble response appears to be an inherent property of the driver, and the attempts to stick a bandage over that via...

If you've ever heard a sine sweep on a good speaker system, the treble sounds highly jagged. If you've ever seen dummy head measurements of a good speaker system, the treble looks highly jagged. The idea that IEMs and headphones need to conform firmly to a smoothed target curve to sound good...

I'd suspect such a rating would just end up reflecting how well the bass boost and 3 kHz pinna gain match the reviewer's own preferences. I recall Precog measuring people's outer ears with a mic and finding that variations in upper midrange/lower treble perception are rooted in real differences...

Does the perception of increased detail only occur on tracks with high dynamic range? I feel that taking DR into account would be the most straightforward means of differentiating detail perceived simply due to a sound reaching audible thresholds from detail heard due to it not being masked away...

I'd suggest looking at Crinacle's ranking list as a filter if you're ever shopping for IEMs. It shouldn't be taken as gospel or anything, especially how much variance there is in individual IEM upper midrange preferences. Having tried a bunch of stuff on his list, though, I'd say most people...

The angle/elevation of a sound source can change the location and magnitude of the notch, so it's not much of a matter of individual variation.

The problem is less the curves themselves and more the people who've turned them into thought-stopping clichés.

While I wouldn't call what's happening phase anomalies, this kind of applies. Among other things the pinna does, pinna phase cancellation does create an FR dip in the treble, with its location depending on the angle of the originating sound source and being used for audio localization. Rtings...

If I had to pick one sentence from this video to distill into an emoji-filled post to aggressively flame others with, it would absolutely be this one: (SONGS 👏 THAT 👏 SOUND 👏GOOD 👏 ON 👏 EVERYTHING 👏 MAKE 👏 FOR 👏 AWFUL 👏 TEST 👏 TRACKS) A lot of poorly tuned headphones and IEMs wouldn't receive...

I wrote what I guess would be a review for the RikuBuds Saber 1 some time ago but never got around to rewriting it for readability. My motivation when it comes to audio stuff is shot nowadays, so I suppose I'm dumping it as is: e: So the unevenness in RG's graph of the Saber around 3 kHz seems...

If you measure how pinna activation affects perceived loudspeaker frequency response, phase cancellation creates a pretty deep upper treble notch around 10 kHz. The roll-off past the ~8 kHz resonance caused by plugging up the ear canal tends to create a similar notch in IEMs. I find the...

I'm almost impressed by how Westone somehow managed to create an IEM with not enough bass, not enough midrange, and not enough treble at the same time. Most manufacturers would only be brave enough to compromise on one or two of those.

Sounds like you've got a lot of experience with earbuds. Could you provide some info about the technicalities of some you own based on my post? I wrote it to make getting impressions that can be easily compared to each other of earbuds people here have tried as straightforward as possible. e...

Since objective measurements seem extremely unreliable when it comes to flatheads, I'd like to gather people's subjective impressions to get a better idea of how technical their earbuds sound. So my simple go-to treble detail/microdynamics test is the percussion playing at 1:14-1:26 of Night...

A&K x CA Pathfinder? More like, KZ x CA Pathfinder

Any direct comparisons/rankings available that include both midrange/high-end earbuds and IEMs? I'm looking for stuff that's at least around technically competent as a Moondrop Dusk, but having only tried budget earbuds means I lack reference points to predict how good an earbud sounds based on...