What iv learnt over the years is graphs are only 25% of the final sound/Presintation!. Tuning is 50% of the sound. The last 25% is made up of different things?materials,drivers,crossovers etc.....
Can you please explain the difference between a graph and tuning?
I think you meant 25% tuning, 25% placebo and 50% cable materials...
additional 10% is solder material, gold is 5% better than gold/silver which is 3% better than just silver
What I've learned is that graphs only tell about half the story, while things like crossover tuning and crossover point driver interference, driver decay and resonance, driver agility, source coloration, tip attenuation and amplification, and finally personal harmonic peaks tell the rest of the story. A graph is frequently enough to gauge whether your interest is well-placed in a set, however, without a waterfall frequency response plot over time, you won't have any indication of decay, harmonic interference between drivers at their crossover points, and resonance within the set. Without graphs made from multiple amplifier sources, you won't have any indication of source coloration. Without graphs using multiple tips, you'll get no indication of how they can attenuate or amplify certain frequencies. Then you have the most subjective of all factors, which is personal harmonic peaks, which are based entirely on how each person's inner ear is shaped, how the cochlea is shaped and sized, the particular size and shape of the sound transferring bones in the ear, the size and distribution of cilia in the cochlea, etc.
A simple frequency response graph is a lot to go off of in terms of determining whether or not you may like a particular set, but there's a lot more to consider before you even start down the track of extreme diminishing returns related to things like cable material, solder material, etc.
What I've learned is the more I learn, the more I realize how uncertain things are lmao. Too much conflicting theory and information out there. A lot of it is very valid sounding so it makes it difficult to parse.
One of the main things I realized it's best to find a niche of other collectors who have a similar preference to or that you become familiar enough with some reviewers audio perception/hearing/taste to be able to adjust their feedback in a way that makes sense to you because headphone reviews literally suck. They suck because of how differently we all hear and perceive things. It could be psychoacoustic, or it could be physical/objective differences like the shapes of our ear cavities, too many possible variables but the point here still is we all hear and perceive audio fairly different. This was an expensive lesson for me, because I've bought and been disappointed by so many iems that others rave about, and vice versa.
Just the other day I was watching Dan's audio reviews, and my mind was completely blown because he called the starfields neutral bright, then said the Katos are less harsh. I own both, and my first reaction was to think this guy was nuts because the starfields are by far the most tame and least harsh iems I've ever owned, while the katos sound much more sharper/harsher to me. I like his reviews a lot for his communication abilities but I realized the way we hear our iems are very differently so they either won't help me at all or I need to parse the information he presents in a way that accounts for how differently he hears things. Another good example, the FDX1 and blessing 2 dusk, these are very highly rated by crin but the FDX1 is kinda metallic and tinny sounding sometimes, and blessing 2 is even worse in this regards, but he still rated these two so highly. I for the life of me can't understand how they're rated so highly with those sorts of glaring issues. I've come to understand some ppl just don't really mind or notice it, maybe crin has gone nose blind to it after having tried so many different iems? I mean I can't claim I'd fair any better if I had to try hundreds of iems so who can blame him if that's what happened.
I don't even want to touch on the psychological aspects more than I already have because it's such a polarizing topic and it's very easy to have your opinion crapped all over on in this hobby if people don't agree. Things like cables, graphs, dacs, etc. I'll just make it quick and only throw my two cents in on the things that I feel more certain about and I feel am not too biased about.
- do cables make a difference in sound? Tbh ive never even bothered to try and rest it cause I don't really trust myself to either be able to catch the differences or to not be biased by a placebo affect or similar. It's good to be skeptical and one should be skeptical of themselves just as well I think. I know someone tested the differences using graphs (rikudougoku I think) and found there mostly wasn't a different unless the iem was very sensitive to the resistance of the cable, like a ba iem so I'm under the impression it only matters for some iems. I think the next step forward would be testing for the skin effect but that's probably too hard to test for or the skin effect just isn't significant enough to matter in such small scale cables.
- graphs and tuning. I think we need to to start differentiating the two. Tuning matters, graphs just help us visualize it and have data. There are so many other things that graphs don't show. Don't live and die by the graph, especially if you only have a frequency response graph. There are so many other things that affect sound that won't show on a fr curve graph. I wasn't too sure here what to think until the katos happened. Everywhere you look, the brass and steel nozzle graphs are pretty much nearly identical. Yet when I try them both they sound significantly more different than the fr graphs indicate. The brass nozzle was warmer, softer, darker and thicker sounding, I didn't even have to listen hard for it or anything, it was a fairly black and white thing for me. I had always wondered why some of my more similarly tuned iems could sound so different to me, was I just tripping? I realize now I wasn't tripping and that it's cause there are a lot more factors that influence sound that can't be captured on a fr curve graph. Graphs are definitely helpful, but they are definitely to live and die by. At the point I'm just curious what those other important factors are. Is it the the transient response graphs, harmonic distortion graphs, fr curve graphs that include partials, all of the above? No idea, but I'm definitely of mind that fr curves can't tell you more than half the story, but sadly other people's audio impressions can not only be unreliable but also untell some if the story since you may end up having a completely different experience with said iem.
- Dacs and source do change the sound a bit, even though I was convinced they wouldn't by much or at all. Is it for better? I won't make any claims there, even cheap dacs sound completely fine to me, but some of the higher end ones I've tried and owned like the 9038s g3 make things sound a bit sharper/brighter, and ive found the effect slightly more noticable with higher fidelity audio. I couldn't tell you why but I bet any of us could just go and ask on the e1da server and probably get a great explanation from e1da himself. For what it matters I'm able to hear almost the full 20khz range, and from what I understand most audio doesn't have much data in those really high upper frequencies, especially in compressed data so maybe that's what I'm hearing a little more audibly in some tracks?
- I'm also under the belief that there's no such thing as truely neutral because that's way too dependant on how the tracks you listen to are mastered. All you can hope for is to find something that will reproduce audio in a way that's as close to real as possible or in a pleasing way to you.
- ba vs DD timbre. Another super polarizing topic but I think most ppl agree most ba and DD iems sound fairly different. I've always been of mind that ba iems sound terrible because of my bad experiences with the dusk but after trying some more iems im trying to be more open minded about ba iems because I've tried some pretty good hybrid that didn't have weird timbre or metallic sound and have also tried some DD iems that I didn't agree with sound wise very much like the metallic/tinnyness of the fdx1. Which is why I want to try experimenting with a few more hybrids or a good all ba set. I guess it all comes down to the overall engineering, design, materials, tuning and implemention or at least a combination of some of those things, since different drivers have so many different properties that can affect sound, especially complicating things the more drivers and driver types you add.
- Lofi vs midfi vs hifi. I'm increasingly becoming convinced that the differences between the three tiers are getting smaller every year, as manufacturers get more experienced and tech gets cheaper. You should see how cheap older audio gear goes for on the used market, it's mind boggling how things that used to cost near kilobuck selling for only a fraction of the price now. It's still kinda hard to parse through all these new gear being released almost daily, knowing what's snake oil or what new tech still isn't mature enough which is why I appreciate the budget categories most where you're less likely to get scammed for crazy marked up gear that's trying to just ride it's fancy marketing. I've been burned too many times by $150-350 iems that just sounded like total fails to me lol, but atleast it's starting to look like if you look hard enough you will sure find some hidden gems that will easily rival much more expensive headphones. Sadly I haven't tried any totl gear yet so my experience only goes as far as the $350 bracket. I have talked with some ppl who own thousands of dollars in iems and it's funny to me how a lot of their favorite iems aren't even that expensive, for example a few of them admitted to me they enjoy and listen to their na2+ most. This was a major shock to me at first but I'm starting to see why this can be the case for some ppl since I still haven't found anything I like more than my starfields yet. Sadly I think ppl are not too vocal about these kinds of opinions because it's very easy to get shot down if you don't say something agreeable lol. It's no wonder a lot of reviewers just sound like shills rating everything between 8-10/10, especially more expensive sets, when the community often reacts like that.
