.
I think that my defective pair of K371-BT (defective as in : one pad was completely crumbled out of the box, and they even forgot to stick the acoustic felt in front of the driver on the right ear cup !) still sounded better than nearly all of the "high-end" ANC BT over-ears headphones I've tried this year so it isn't much competition IMO. And they even added the luxury of having a decent BT implementation that I couldn't make fail simply by playing single tones through them at higher frequencies (something I was able to do with several of the pairs I tried this year like the M3, Bose 700, A50, etc... all of which coincidentally use the same or a similar chip from Qualcomm, so...).
At €630 I would have really liked to see Apple implementing their capacitance sensors patents to enable a rough imaging of the user's ear to at least make them left / right agnostic and more interesting to me start to provide for "baby" auto HRTF customisation but alas that might have to wait for the next version (2022 ?). Interestingly the ear cup design remains 100% compatible with Apple's latest patents on the matter :
I really hope that we'll see that happening in the next version as headphones that automatically adapt to the listener's ear are the only way forward to see a big generational leap in headphones design.
They remind of me the Parrot wireless headphones - remember those?
. So they'll always sound off to some degree (besides problems related to lack of crossover). This is also the reason why surround sound simulation with headphones is never truly convincing for most users with only general HRTF profiles (by convincing I mean being able to pass tests where the listener is tasked with pointing their finger in a 3D space at the origin of the sound and accurately locating it within x degrees)..
It's just that headphones will remain inherently limited as long as they don't tailor very precisely the frequency response curve they output so that they can reach at a particular listener's eardrum a very specific FR target tailored to that one user's own head-related transfer function. This beyond the usual individual variations that have been well documented in Harman's research (and probably others).
If you put person A and B in the exact same room listening to the exact same pair of speakers in the same position and measure at their eardrum the frequency response they hear, it will be different because their varying anatomy influence the FR curve they receive at their eardrum. Headphones putting the drivers much closer in a very different acoustic space mess with that and produce yet again different FR curves, but differently different if you see what I mean
Currently the best we can do without directly measuring a user's HRTF is gather anatomical data on a user and compare that anatomical data thanks to various algorithms (such as neural networks) to a known database of anatomical data vs. measured HRTFs to come up with an individualised HRTF profile for that user. But that requires gathering anatomical data on a user's head / torso / ear in the first place. Apple is uniquely placed here thanks the technology they developed with Face ID which can work very well for mapping an ear in 3D. Problem being that optical sensors need some distance from the object to work well in that case which would result in very large an unwieldy earcups, and I bet that such sensors are quite expensive. I don't know if the sort of long range (ie not just "touch", they work a few mm (cm ?) away from the surface) capacitance sensors Apple mentioned in their patents was able of that to a good enough degree, but apparently it was good enough to form a low res image of a user's ear to detect left from right ear and orientation of the headphones.
This is all why passive headphones from boutique companies, as good as may be sometimes, kind of bore me to death. That being said as you said coincidence is that most headphones I've really enjoyed lately are all passive and all in the $100-$300 range
As long as the drivers are low-distortion and flat down to 20 Hz, like most Audeze headphones, I'm fine with EQing to taste. There is only one headphone I've heard that sounds good without DSP - the Shure SE846.This is all why passive headphones from boutique companies, as good as may be sometimes, kind of bore me to death. That being said as you said coincidence is that most headphones I've really enjoyed lately are all passive and all in the $100-$300 range
You know they will be limited to AAC. $549 is rediculous for ANC wireless headphone, and the design took inspiration from a watch? lol They want you to match the watch and headphone look as well? Haha You get this eco of apple square lookin with corner rounded aluminum shelled devices all around you.
