For me it is ridiculous that there are people that believe otherwise, that think they know something above it all. Nothing different from believing in conspiracy theories. It is a borderline religious attitude we have here on HeadFi. Because billions of people believe that the mighty God created bla bla and then took a rest, or some guy took off from the deset to the space on his camel to meet the God, because it is billions of people, you expect me to stop and say "but maybe they have a point, let's investigate that camel". Nothing different here, you want to believe in the "unknown" talent the HeadFi citizens have that can get passed the facts. In fact, in many cases the otherwise is true: Measuerment devices are much more sensitive and precise than human auditory system.
Because that is how you engineer a product. You don't go "by the ear". You don't build an amplifier without checking distortion or without calculating your circuit. Anyone that says that they are playing it by the ear, is just saying that he was not able to deal with the technical background so decided to take his chance and use marketing tools to trick the customers hiding his technical incompetence.
Because I can.
If we go by the food, reading the measurements is like checking if your packaged food has expired, or checking the ingredients if there are chemical preservatives inside, or making sure that there is nothing that causes allergic reactions to you (like many people have this with nuts, walnuts etc.). Measurements give you the fundemental ingredients. If a cook uses double, triple the amount of salt, or completely misses it, it will taste bad. Don't bring me the "but I don't check it every time to understand the taste", because they are not comparable. You don't buy amplifiers and headphones 3 times a day. Food production has been nearly there since emergance of civilazition. The engineering / cooking behind is much cheaper and much less complicated. And you are used to what to expect. You don't expect a horribly salty hamburger, because you do it often and you are used to what to expect. You don't make a hobby of buying a hamburger or a milk. You don't make it into a hobby. You don't get a collection of pizza boxes at home. You can even produce it at home.
If it has a peak or a dip in the measurements it will turn into bad sound, period.
What are you talking about. While I 100% agree with the analogy of analyzing the ingredients of food -
You are not going to DIE or hurt yourself by listening to a headphone, And you won't suffer an allergic reaction.
Why analyze the ingredients of the food when you can just taste it and see if it's good or not?
Why complicate everything and read the graph and measurements when you can listen to the headphone yourself and see if you like it or not?
You can't tell the quality of the driver and sound from a graph - Take a 500$ headphone and a 5000$ headphone and EQ them to have a very close FR response.
Which one will sound better? - Obviously the 5000$ one, But you are not able to see it through the graph.
There are so many different aspects to the sound that are not shown through the measurements such as:
Detail retrieval
Bass Impact (not amount, But physical impact)
Bass speed
Instrument separation
Soundstage Width, Depth
Imaging
Layering
ETC.....
You also don't know how the sound will come together and actually sound as a whole.
We are different than the measuring gear and our ears perceive sound differently.
It's going to be really hard to determine what you like and don't like according to a graph, You have to be very familiar with yourself and have your own FR profile and know how you hear different frequencies.
So again - Why bother yourself with all that When you can just listen to the headphones and hear if you actually like them or not? - Without missing any aspect of the sound?
And we haven't touched dacs and amplifiers who can alter the FR graph from the measurement.
Also, It's incredibly stupid to decide whether a headphone suits you or not without actually trying it first - Especially when talking about 4500$ and thousands more on equipment.
If you are serious about spending 4500$ on a headphone it's best to test it thoroughly by actually using the product. And when you have that kind of money to put on headphones you can afford to spend a few extra 100$s to fly to a different country and test them.
