I said that it blurred lines, and I stand by that. Nice gear collection. I'm only moderately surprised that you don't have a more developed ear by now. That's how it goes in this hobby, starting wrong mental models and continuing to build from there is common and why so many forum acolytes are bass-shy or think that the APP is more "neutral" than the APM.
In your E4000 example, I assume you're using a wire. Are you comparing to the APM with a wire on ANC=off? If not, that's not a true comparison and just noisy bad data.
I think most of the readers here would do well to learn more about Computational Photography and then consider how Apple is deploying its Computational Audio tech in these headphones as well as their Homepods. Here's a good primer:
What's not mentioned in the above video is Apple's uniquely skilled Mechanical Engineers. There are not many companies with the kind of Mechanical Product Design culture which Apple has. My company has it. Tesla has it. Pixel, not so much. But the Pixel EE & Comput-photo teams are very legit. One of the unique aspects of the iPhone camera is that it has a mechanical optical image stabilization system on top of computational photography. Those teams over there really sweat the details on their product design. I imagine that the custom driver hits some very exacting targets, which is part of why we see the measurements from Jude performing in such an "most interesting" manner. I don't think many other manufacturers have the kind of acoustic chamber built into their earpads which these have. Just look at the horn-like shape of the structure. Nor do other players have the same kind of end to end control on the signal processing chain for a computational audio product.
Here are some things which we
know about these: We know that everything was designed from the bottom up by the largest team of some of best engineers on the planet. Bar none. I can back that up due to my day to day work in the valley where I assemble teams of similar scope/nature. I know the teams at the various headphone firms, their structure and their makeup. Nobody but Bose, Sennheiser, Harman, B&W, B&O are anywhere near as accomplished and it's usually less density of talent with a few gems at the top. Bose actually has some of the best of the bunch, which would come as a surprise to this forum but I digress.
We know that they are actually analyzing all incoming audio to classify the best way to represent the sound on the other side. My guess is that this an Acoustic Modeling system that classifies certain acoustic "events" like drums, cymbals, voices etc and determines how to best represent the sound on the output side. From there, they could apply techniques similar to compu-photo which might include denoise, remixing, resolution enhancement and beyond. We also know that each H1 chip contains 10 Apple-designed audio cores for real-time processing and I'd put money on that team having spent some late nights discussing real-time vs near-real-time for various performance characteristics of these puppies.
When it comes to speaker drivers and materials, I'm obviously a fan of the breakthroughs happening at ORA and would love to see that tech incorporated into products like this but if they can master their materials there in the same way that SpaceX & Tesla have special steel or Apple has a way to make Aluminium achieve certain performance properties which other Aluminium drivers couldn't achieve, does it matter which material they use? All that matters is the performance. And that's where this next-generation of computationally driven products really begin to stand out and blur lines in a way which the previous generations of phones, point and shoots and wireless headphones did not or could not.
Again, look at how these techniques allow phones to significantly outperform their spec sheet and look at the way these puppies measure.
Apple is retaining exceptionally tight control of an end to end performance here that allows mobile audio to blur the lines between mobile audio and TOTL rigs in the same way that the iPhone cameras are disrupting camera technologies. It's computational. And it's the future.
The other aspect about these is that beyond their incredible performance within their class, these are exceptionally useful products for day to day life. Each of us have only so much time and money to allocate to various passions. As mentioned, there's really no contest between these and other ANC headsets. These are a push, at the least, with Panda/Mobious/ORA and thus are decidedly tackling mid-fi and wireless markets concurrently with product design far beyond what's available in either.
I'm selling just about every other headphone these compete with in my collection. I'll be keeping my iSine, ORA, JBL Club One (For DJing), and AKG K371. I have a $6k speaker setup and no reason to invest in an Open-Back/Brick-Stack rig at this time. I tend to prefer headphones that are multi-use and are tools for my life. These things knocked me off my feet.
One last note on tuning: If we consider the deviations from Harman, we actually have something similar to what the ORA team did with their tuning, but with slightly less pronounced deviations in presence and bass. Here are the notes behind the tuning which the Apple design here seems to echo:
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...rst-graphene-headphones/posts/2481284?lang=fr
So yes, these are wizardry.
