We have years of experience measuring our headphones, we've literally done tens of thousands of measurements. We measure on a daily basis as headphones go through QC, we measure when prototyping, R&D, etc. Let's just say we know our measurements.
In the case of headphones, particularly planar designs, the speaker driver requires the side of a head in order to operate within it's design parameters. The speaker uses the head as part of it's damping, or tuning. Basically, the speaker driver acts differently at certain frequencies with varying damping or spacing from your head.
We recently did an
easy to understand video on driver dampening if interested.
Microphones used for making measurements of headphones basically measure changes in air pressure, so when a test is done where a headphone is not properly placed on the test fixture, a poor set of measurements are the result. It should be noted that a microphone does not model how the human brain actually listens. They don't call it a dummy head for nothing, the microphone can only measure one way, unlike humans, it makes no interpretation of what it measures. Measurement results are completely reliant on the care taken by whomever runs the test. In essence this adds a subjective twist, particularly in headphone measurements where the placement of the headphone to the test fixture and microphone is critical.
Putting the above together, If the interface between the headphone ear pads and a test fixture or not properly set, given both the lack of nominal driver damping and lack of proper interface to the microphone, it's a bit of double whammy in skewing results. The test results fit no norm. For all the reasons that we measure headphones, such results are useless.
In the case of ASR's measurements, we immediately knew they did not have a proper interface to the test fixture by the bass hump in the frequency response. The fact that they published these measurements (with notations on the graphs on how bad the measurements look) seems to point to some sort of biased intent. These are not objective measurements, this is how THEY made them look, subjectively skewed. Anyone in the know who does headphone measurements for a living knows it.
That being said, if someone enjoys going through some sort of academic process to see how frequency response or distortion varies with improper fitment to a test fixture, have at it. We call that a learning curve, it's what one would do to understand what not to do when measuring.
So the question is, why ASR knowingly published flawed measurements? So far the only reason given is they wanted to show how the headphone would 'sound' with a gap between ear pad and head. IMO this is nothing but BS, plain and simple.
As a side note, we hear music in a completely different way than a microphone, which is why research is still a work in progress on how measurements correlate to the human experience of listening. If interested in how we interpret sound, I would suggest reading the book
'This is Your Brain on Music'. While not all chapters may interest you, I'll bet you'll find at least a few enlightening. It's an easy read.
Thanks everyone for your support!
Joe and The ABYSS Team
