I think that to be able to judge headphone we must have some acoustic experience and learning in the speakers/dedicated acoustic room controls and treatment...
If not how someone can be conscious of how must be the soundfield of an headphone rightful or wrong ?
People spoke of timbre color most of the times when they want to sell their "tasteful choice" as if the color came only from the driver alone and as if it is right because it is their "taste".... But Timbre colors experience occur in a 3-D space where the sounds are located and where each sound itself each playing chord dynamics volume extend itself in his own space.... Timbre experience and spatialization of sound are intertwinned, they dont exist one without the other....And the driver of an headphone does not exist alone but like the drivers of speakers they are embedded in a room , acoustically controlled or not....
Then because most people had no acoustic concepts, nor any experience about acoustic control, because most speakers are located in living-room, in an uncontrolled room then, they only experience the DIFFERENCE between speakers and headphones, never their convergent acoustic common ground in the ears/brain psycho-acoustic ....
Then seduced by the promise of higher pricing, and the esthetic of the suggested headphones, they deceived themselves thinking witouth any acoustic ground that their purchase MUST be the best....
I learned myself with basic room acoustic not only with mere passive treatment but with mechanical acoustic active controls too how to judge headphones, after owning my dedicated room/speakers... I did not paid an acoustician, i learned basic acoustic one week after the other and take few years to experiment and learned how to listen sounds...
And i discovered after, that the best headphones are not necessarily the costlier nor the more beautiful...
The basis is not our conscious taste, but the specfic unconscious biases of our brain/ears, and learning how to accomodate a room to our ears canals and brain and to our speakers design may taught us that there is more about a good headphone than his mere singular driver , because the shell/cup room of an headphone by the way must be acoustically controlled too as must be the room where our speakers are .... There exist three controlled embeddings dimensions of any audio system be it speakers or headphone : mechanical, electrical and acoustical...
One thing is sure i am happy now with a 100 bucks vintage headphone whose acoustic design is better than most headphone on the market today anyway being an hybrid with an acoustically controlled chamber/shell.... I dont even need to compare to know it... Why ? Because this headphone give me after the right slight modifications and optimization
a speaker like out of the head realistic experience of
timbre and
localization with no perceptible negative side effects and no heavy lacks on any acoustic factors ( transients, dynamic, timbre, bass. highs, mids, and the three parts of any soundfield : --- imaging differentiation ,--- soundstage variable dimensions according to each recording choices and--- the sound 3-d holographical dynamic volume distribution because of the right balance between sound source localization and listener envelopment experience ) ....
Price or esthetic had no grip on me now... Acoustic principles rule first and last ... It takes me 10 years of experiments to learn this lesson... It takes me 9 headphones wrong but useful purchase because i was ignorant ... We must LEARN how to listen sounds, and we dont learn by purchasing different audio components only and calling our purchase our tastes to justify it , this is consumers self deceiving action, walking the road of the consumers upgrading marketing conditionment, we must learn mostly by experimenting basic acoustic ourselves in real time in a room dedicated to audio.... Sorry i dont know any other way... Collecting headphones was not the way for me...
Nor staying happy with an headphone which would be less stunning than my past speakers listening in my dedicated room.... Then in a word: dont read reviews of costly headphones , read about simple basic acoustic and psycho-acoustic ....
At the end headphone design and listening and speaker design and listening must be convergent acoustic experience not divergent one forever....
For an intro very deep in the matter of the last applied acoustic discoveries, i recommend Dr. Choueri BACCH theory and application...Read his papers...
i think you wanted to post this in another thread. You are welcome.
