One thing I find annoying reading through this thread is some of the arguments/justifications/excuses that have been made I rarely find in other dedicated headphone threads, since the advent of the APM it now feels like many people are saying that we can't judge headphones objectively anymore, now it's just about personal preference and sound signature/tuning, classic budget/mid/high-end/flagship categories have now came to an end, the APM exists outside the realm of traditional objective classification (?), I can't help feel that 'some' people on here with obvious biases are trying to move the goal posts in terms of the current process of reviewing and judging headphones, fitting their narrative that APM is possibility the best headphone in the world, with the H1 chips and DSP processing the APM can be any headphone it wants to be, it just comes down to tuning and preference now.
Pre APM world, for the most part, I think many headfiers accepted a 'general' classification of particular headphones, meaning kind of where about said headphone fitted on the ladder, or headphone wall of fame (rarr!), you would find courteous statements like, "I actually prefer headphone X than Y even though it's only a mid tier headphone because I prefer the mid range presentation, or bass emphasis etc, headphones like HD600 vs HD800 are a classic example, HD800 is arguably of the best hi-fi headphone in the world, in the true since of the meaning of hi-fi (hi-fidelity), but it's certainly not to everyone's taste, many prefer HD600/650, but we accept the HD800's position nonetheless, personally I love the HD800, I like a headphone that tests your ears to the point of cringing even, I see it similar to well done HDR on TV's that make cringe when a car headlight shine in your face, why do TV enthusiasts want that? because it mimics real life, I don't believe all music should should 'comfortable', you hear people say, "that 6k peak destroys that headphone", trying listening to a live band in a room lol, I understand preferences are important, you like what you like, but I still believe the continued search for objective classifications of headphones is very important.
While I see the advantages of measurability in the classic sense of science (you can only discuss about measurements, not about feelings), I tend to look at that from a different standpoint. I've recently read an interesting book named 'Galileos Error', which essentially states, that with reducing science to quantitative measurements while totally ignoring qualitative statements, science has introduced an inherent problem: what we can directly perceive is only qualitative, nothing else.
So while I see a very basic (in the sense of deep down) problem with pure qualitative evaluations, there are additional problems with that approach: what exactly are those quantitative measurements we could reliably use for classification? We know that we can't measure how something sounds, only facets of that are represented by FR, THD, waterfall and impulse response plots and whatnot. They give hints at potential problems, though none (not even all of them together) completely describe how something actually sounds.
Next thing: sound quality (in the sense of personal reception and feeling about) is very personal and influenced not only by physiognomy but also expectations, previous exposure and 100 other things we might not even know about.
So I think we simply lack any usable quantitative measurements that give a picture of sound. But it gets worse: headphones are increasingly complex products, that touch many more facets of life than before (audio conferences becoming commonplace, mobile audio, streaming services, you get my point). Not only that we also lack good quantitative evaluations for those new aspects, there is no globally accepted weighting between those.
I'm far from giving up on the scientific side of things, to the contrary: I think science helps us understand the world around us and it is the best thing we have to do so. Still we need to evolve not only measurements, but science itself to get a more complete picture, to be able to talk about aspects of reality (or what looks like one) that are currently out of reach. We have to strive to evolve ever better measurements to get to the core of how things work.
But on the personal front I think we have to accept that there's no one size fits all: if I'm after A headphone for work, an open model with wires just won't cut it. That weighting of different aspects cannot be normalized. But that does not have to be a bad thing, it just means that no one is "right" about this -- neither is anyone "wrong".
Got mine yesterday and loving them so far. I had a question.
There was a video posted last week about how AirPod Max's stream the songs in to the headphones so bluetooth compression is not an issue. It was the "Gamechanger" video.
That really intrigued me. The problem is, I haven't heard another reviewer or article mention that.
Has that been confirmed?
Do you have any more details on that claim? Because I don't think there's anything special about the APM in that regard. Sometimes the statement that AAC encoded songs are better for AAC Bluetooth connections pops up, but as far as I've been able to clear this up this is simply not correct: the iOS sound APIs always accept WAV only, i.e. decompressed audio, and this is decompressed for transfer via Bluetooth (incidentally using AAC again in case of iOS -> APM).
furthermore I'm sure Apple would have mentioned their new revolutionary way to stream audio to their new headphone, were there any advances in technology (they did talk about that when Airplay 2 was introduced with lower latency etc.).
APP sounds better without any correction settings and without ANC. Imo.
