I've been A/Bing quite nice 3 headphones for little trying to nail down which one I want to keep. I can figure out which tonality I like (I actually found out I like most of tonality for it's own... but don't have budget to get multiple of them right now... or don't want to.. yet...)
I can definitely distinguish staging and imaging without problem. Bleeding, etc. However, there is something that is what I am thinking might be in staging side of story. There is this one headphone that is... bit strange. (Honestly more noticeable when A/Bing... not as much by itself).
It definitely has decently large staging, imaging position is quite good, but somehow, I feel like i am enclosed in somewhat smaller sphere. Funny thing is... it does project sounds pretty far out... almost 80-90% of the other two. But I feel like I am in much smaller space... like half or 1/3 of it for most of music.
Is there a word for this or how do you describe this?
It's near impossible to put a finger on something causing your feelings, because so much can and surely does play a part in it. The other trouble is how a given headphone can sound quite different to different listeners. In practice, you and I would probably have some differences at various levels, some feelings would be the same or similar enough that vague subjective description would match both experiences, but some things probably would be different. Mostly frequency response and some little subjective impact from time delay expectations (from a different distance between our ears). The end result can be as predictable and intuitive as differences in vertical placement from FR or a feeling of a more pin like sound source for brighter signatures, or small changes in panning from how we would interpret the same time delay differently. But that's only the basics of psychoacoustics where one change in isolation is well studied and understood. 2 might become a problem, 5 or 10 differences at the same time, even small but audible ones, and it's nearly chaos when it comes to predict how different people would interpret the sound.
If some headphones are closed back, there could be several guesses I could make, without any certainty that either one explains your experience(I'm the overconfident type ^_^) :
- closed back seems to affect some people because the lack of outside noises or the unnatural attenuation of them kills the idea that you're hearing free, unmuffled sound. The notion of enclosed sound becomes one possible explanation for the brain.
-closed back is likely to have low bleeding outside, sometimes with fully open headphones, they bleed so much, you even end up getting some of the reverb from nearby walls (they'd have to be rather close to you admittedly). I do not know if and when that is noticed by the brain, but of course it could then participate in a belief of real audio source in the room, giving more hope to a bigger perceived distance in your interpretation of the experience.
-The bass. My own experience with bass is something quite specific when it comes to headstage or soundstage or whatever we probably wrongly decide to call it. Certain amounts and quality of bass can give me a feeling of being immersed in the bass and I experienced that specific feeling as being fairly independent of the concept of pinpointing the location of instruments at some distance with much higher frequency content. I'd say instruments are somewhere, and the bass(certain types), is the matter all around me that can feel more or less massive and more or less surrounding. My guess and experience, from a statistically irrelevant number of headphones, has been so far that elevated distortions tend to disrupt my impression of that big bubble of bass everywhere. Sadly, I only had THD measurements, which is rarely the type of distortion we actually care about subjectively(unless it's absurdly big). So, correlating feelings and measurements is a dead end for me on this. It's just somewhat more likely for high THD in the bass to also manifest other distortions, so I keep playing the guessing game to satisfy my own ideas, but that's as far as I can go. Maybe it's BS
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I only mention it because your post made me think back on that particular feeling. Kind of about the impression of space, but also maybe not really about instrument placement and distance.
Oh man, that's funny! It didn't occur to me that you would be demoing the E3, I was just talking from my own experience with the Aeon and how I learned to describe its sound and relating that to the descriptions you provided. I am planning on demoing the E3, but it seems from your comments that it still has at least some of that closed-ness that I found annoying on the Aeon.
Edit to add: The Dan Clark headphones sound like a room with heavy acoustic damping. Like a recording room or sound isolation booth. I've been in sound isolation booths for fan noise testing at work, and conversations with coworkers sound weird in those spaces. Their voices become oddly intense (kind of like vocals on a Dan Clark headphone), much more so than in an office room of the same size. I think our brains associate reverb with size, and since the Dan Clarks have less reverb than other headphones due to damping, they sound smaller than their soundstages would imply.
We do use reverb for a lot of assumptions about room size and distances, but for the most part, the changes in reverb from a headphone to another are simply too small to match what happens in a room. How fast a driver stops moving is fast, even for big 'slow' dynamic drivers. And internal reverb inside a cup is also short because there is obviously not much distance to reach and come back from(very tiny room inside a headphone). The brain would not notice most of those, and if it did in extreme cases (not sure if it even happens, but I'm willing to keep an open mind), I would argue that there is no way the brain would mistake such small delays/distances for room size delays/distances.
I fully get what you're talking about as a subjective feeling, though. I just don't see actual reverb difference caused by a headphone as a likely explanation for it.
) All 3 of them are very enjoyable but a little bit in different way. I made a pick at this point but I would have been good with any of them to be honest.
