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Differnt HRTF, perceptions, and hearing damage aside I think people need to remember that Hi-Fi stands for high fidelity. High fidelity means highly faithful to the source. So anything that sounds great, but is not neutral is not, by definition, hi-fi. Sure, it sounds good, but it is not hi-fi, and not detailed, at least in ultimate terms. Neutral might be dependent upon our personal ears, but there is surely a statistical FR that is "One FR fits most" The LCD-2 took headphones to a new level. They put highs in their place, gave epic impulse response and square waves... and some people really don't like this, because it goes against their love for the sound of their other headphones. Loving a particular sound signature is fine, but people should be mature enough to acknowledge their tastes personal tastes on reality
LOL. Are you insinuating that people who dislike the headphone have hearing damage?
The LCD-2, although it reproduces very accurate bass, actually is not very faithful to the source at all because of the HUGE colouration to the treble (virtually -10dB and MORE relative to the rest of the spectrum past 1khz to the human ear).
Now, I'll simplify this for you by using Tyll's compensated average. Note: The results aren't actually WHAT is occurring, instead it reflects what you ACTUALLY hear.
Let's assume you listen so 100hz on the graph is 100dB loud (just to make it simple).
This means that 2khz will be 90dB to your ears.
100dB is 0.01 w/m^2
90dB is 0.001 w/m^2
That is, there is 10 times less energy (sound intensity) in the treble (note that ~3dB is roughly double).
100dB creates a pressure of 2 Pascals.
By contrast, 90dB only creates 0.632455532 Pascals.
100dB creates three (3.16) times the pressure.
Note that this isn't actually what is happening - it is what you hear. The treble of the LCD-2 is actually making more sound pressure at 3kz than the lower end of the spectrum. The reduction in audibility comes from functions of the ear (including how effective the cochlear is at "conducting" the sound, as well as other things to do with pinna etc, but I won't go into that).
The impulse response is inferior to the HD800.
Faded out is LCD2.
It's also inferior to the CD3k, to some extent (although the levels are roughly the same).
The CSD is impressive. But, just to demonstrate how it relates to sound quality. Here's a CSD of the PortaPro.
I have no complaints about the square wave responses. The bass production of the LCD-2 is fantastic. I will note of course that the responses only give a very limited picture. As you go an octave further (as an example, a Bosendorfer 9' 6" Concert Grand has 8 octaves) you double the speed at which the diaphragm must move. As such, it becomes much more complicated to produce a perfect square wave (a square wave is used because it is technically impossible to produce AFAIK (save some funky physics), because the derivative of a perfect square wave's point of change (i.e. where 1 swaps to -1; or the moment it goes from "up" to "down" (on the oscilloscope-type readout of amplitude) tends to infinity (or, more strictly undefined/1/0) - which you see in the graphs. In a perfect world, that is (in the real world, speakers struggle by design with low frequencies because they need to move more air, which means they also have to move more), but anyway.A square wave is composed of an infinite number of odd multiples of sine waves (iirc), which means in the 50hz measurement you see, 50, 150, 250, 350, 450, and so on. I actually believe that Tyll hasn't compensated his square wave responses- although I'm not sure there are algorithms that allow this (perhaps inverted fourier shiz) (and I'm unsure whether or not this applies to his actual setup). In the square wave response (50hz) of both the HD800 and LCD-2 we see, for example, evidence of overemphasis of treble frequencies (which is established for both headphones in the RAW data, but not those compensated for the human ear).
Note that an impulse response is essentially the same as doing the first half of a square wave response. Using Fourier transforms, etc you can reproduce the frequency response of the system. They have very little to do with "Detail", although they can tell you other things, like if a particular driver is out of phase (which is probably hard to do with the LCD-2 because the square waves used are low-pitch (which allows a longer test time), and the LCD-2 has very good phase response for the lower half). But anyway, suffice it to say that the LCD-2 has an inferior sense of "timing" to the HD800, for example. It's hard to say which has faster acceleration, as the graphs don't match up exactly. You can fairly safely say, IMO that the CD3000 has faster acceleration in that case.
However, keep in mind that this all has less to do with "Detail" than you think it does. In fact, it has more to do with phase (which I guess can be associated with "PRaT" because a speaker being out of phase has to do with delay in the speaker (due to various issues such as resonance etc), and frequency response.
I've probably explained this all extremely badly, it's very early in the morning (6:30 am and I haven't been to bed).
You may find it interesting to know, now, that the "slope" many speakers produce in square wave outputs actually shows that they (in their RAW data, not compensated) are boosting treble frequncies by a significant amount. Note that this isn't the case for the LCD-2, because it's actually not boosting them a lot (although it still does), but to the EAR it's very dark.
Hope this has been a little informative to some (I'm not sure many here know how to read square wave responses).
