Katun
Headphoneus Supremus
Quote:
Well, I certainly do appreciate that you are are explaining in an effective, yet civil manor...
I haven't spoken with RD in detail about this headphone, but we are probably referring to the same thing. There is some driver resonance or ringing in the upper midrange or lower treble at where I think is around 6.5kHz. This is the effect that made my jump out of my chair. It's very serious IMO. I (and RD) tend to live day to day with very well behaved cans with no appreciable resonances and ringing, so it's likely we are more sensitive to this effect. I believe that RD was trying to work on stuffing the earcups in hopes that any damping material will dampen this ringing effect.
I don't think anyone has taken measurements of these headphones so far, but the proof should in the CSD plots (which are really good at showing stored energy in the drivers) once get my hands on these headphones.
As far the the HD650s slowish muddy undefined bass, it's because they have high second and third order non-linear distortion in the bass. This effect too can be measured and plotted. It's a simply matter of presenting and visualizing the data properly. It's actually very possible to correlate what we hear with meaningful sets (as opposed to a bunch of non-meaningful) of measurements.
In the end, the measurements don't really matter. Measurements are only a tool to communicate certain aspects of a headphone's sound to people who understand them and have seen many of them in relation to what they have heard. There is no guarantee that bad measurements will mean that a headphone will sound bad to most people. However, there is a stronger correlation with good measurements to good sound.
Well, I certainly do appreciate that you are are explaining in an effective, yet civil manor...