BTW, resonances introduced by the headphone housing does NOT "match as much as possible the sequence of sounds that the producer records."
I don't disagree. Reverberation happens all the time with headphones. This is not resonance. Let me say that again. This is not resonance . When can you hear resonance? I haven't been able to really find a true answer.
That's all that i'm saying here. Instead of looking for resonances and only dealing with dampened headphones i was honest to my ear and found many of the '''''resonating'''' (note the inverted commas) headphones in many occasions to produce a much more natural, true to the recording, sound when compared to the heavily dampened headphones (recall the example of the spoon and the sink).
I hope this is my last word on resonance- I believe this whole resonance thingy in the light of headphones is severly under reasearched. Someone/some group would need to go deep into the mathematical physics (I could see a ton of complex versions of fourier analysis being involved) to find out what is happening. Maybe it's been done- I haven't seen it.
And you know whether or not it's the headphone or the recording because as a discerning listener, you should have some benchmark recordings that you know inside and out. And also it's a good idea to have a reference. I know in RD's case, he has a pair of Mackies as reference.
Comparing to other headphones isn't a good idea. It's not an idea. It's a duty. Without a-b tests reviews for me are limited in substance. Maybe useful in other ways, but without a-b, 'unreliant on memory' tests then a review most often is easily misleading. I actually am a bit addicted to it to tell the truth. Sometimes I pick a random track and see how it sounds out of all the headphones i've got in my room and the one holding the flag for the dampened headphones at the moment is the ed8.
Comparing all headphones at once like this, for me, is the main way I make judgements about how good a headphone is.
But if you're talking about strict at the top of the chain references- that comes from nothing electronic. Just live music. Simple.