So yeah, if i'm not audiophile because of not loving some dead neutral sig, well, i'll be happy to say i'm not audiophile.
It's a great point, but the IEM and headphone people's ideal for what an audiophile is or isn't is different again for other weirdos in the audio world. For some folks, being an audiophile used to mean that you didn't have any vinyl less than 180g in your collection, and if you did, it was defensible as a rare original release of some kind. Other people believe that if there's not at least one horn driver in your speaker cabinets, you have no such claim to being an audiophile. Some purists demand
infinite baffle or open back dual cone speakers in their setups. Then there are the tube amp people, but the tech is hard to come by and hyper expensive relative to solid state tech that fits in the palm of your hand and has arguably the same quality. And what miffs them the most is that a DAC tweak can accurately reproduce any tube profile you could ever want. But I digress...
The point is this: technology changes, and tastes change with it. We are drowning in digitally produced music and that flat, lifeless bass expectation is just not a good ideal target for anyone. Crin has a ruler flat profile that is
possibly ideal for people doing studio work, but it's joyless, otherwise. I'm not a fan at all. Sony V6 is more fun than that curve, and it wasn't meant to be "fun".
In year 2022, there is such an extreme range of variation in music genres and music production methods that its foolhardy to pretend that a single response curve is an ideal for all recordings. You can't gauge timbre on synth based strings produced in Ableton with a chain of 10 effects behind it the same as a live recording of a string quartet. You just can't. I just can't hide my open contempt for this kind of grading and ranking on absolutes. An earphone that is terrible for classical music might be great for reggae, and it might be terrible for either of those but sound great for Eminem. That's just fine by my book. It doesn't mean it's not a good headphone.
"High Fidelity" is supposed to mean that you hear a recording as the "artist intended" and that the sound isn't colored by the equipment. Unfortunately, chasing that idea is a fool's errand. You're going to hear exactly what the sound mixers, engineers, and studio producers want you to hear. Artists have little say in the matter these days, unless they're producing on their own or for an indie label. And even then a lot of independent producers have a very rigid toolchain of DIY and off-the-shelf tech that they're going to apply to the mix, like it or not. The range of technique and method exercised in digital mixing and production is as infinite as there are people making music, which these days, is a whole bunch. The idea that one headphone's response curve is a rank "S" of for all music, globally, is just silly. All that means to me is that
nothing sounds bad on that particular phone
, but that
a whole lot of music doesn't sound great, either
. These rankings are made according to averages. When I listen to Bach I want sublime.
From a headfi and audio community perspective, how a listener engages with the music is much more important than chasing a technical ideal for the old definitions of the audiophile pursuit between critical and analytical listening. The kind of tuning that is generally heralded as being an "audiophile" tuning is typically skewed toward this more analytical listening where a warm, flat'ish midrange and rolled off treble helps sit through long listening sessions when exploring a specific genre or catalog. Critical listening is a bit more demanding and getting the balance right can be tough for a specific genre. It's a different kind of listening when picking apart how a french horn segment is supporting the parts being played on the reeds in a symphony. It doesn't mean that one or the other isn't
Audiophile Approved activity, but limiting yourself to one curve for all music and both kinds of listening just isn't logical.
And then we get back to engagement. Putting these old fogey definitions of what an audiophile is aside, there's so much variation in how music is made, how it's delivered, and what culture that it comes from (or is mixed up from) that what sounds good and helps you enjoy what you're hearing is ultimately more important than any possible definition of psycho-acoustic rigidity. Learn your ears, and stick around for those folks that are telling you the same thing.
I can't hear its superiority. For me it will always be a glorified search tool.
Maybe that's why I don't like local collections and music players. It's a glorified "on-repeat" tool. ;^)
so I asked for a refund and got my money back. 
