Edit: “The Chant” by gojira delivers the goods to satisfy my bass needs with no EQ. Most other songs (or albums) just don’t have it.
I’m sure these headphones will grow on me. I’m missing the punch and slam so far
I'm an audio engineer and audiophile that is well acquainted with metal in a very hands on way. I listen to A LOT of other genres and am very familiar with how many different things are recorded.
I really like metal, it was my first love in music, but there is no other genre with such a bad state of recording, mixing and mastering. Even the world's very best engineers in the genre are really absorbed into a culture of very bad ideas. One of the most visible and influential mastering engineers on the internet for the genre is selling a CLIPPER vst that "simulates the sound of clipping high end DA converters" as a technique for mastering. Metal recordings are thinned down to have almost no low frequencies and then made as loud as possible by any means necessary. Metal is low budget and everything emerges from DIY. The ideas being shared and standards being set are something that have made quite a mess.
You're generally going to have a hard time with listening to metal no matter what you listen on, because the recordings are bad. Even the very best metal recordings on the planet aren't good. I would go as far as to say, never evaluate anything about audio equipment with any metal. The quest to fix problems that were created by the material you are trying to reproduce will never end because it's a Sisyphean task.
The waveforms are squared off at the top. It's a much more serious problem than any eq response curve could ever fix. Metal and audiophile interests are truly a match made in hell that we both share. I cannot listen to metal on a system that is reference grade or close to it unless I'm ok for listening for a short time at a low volume and then having my ears be too tired to listen to anything else afterwards.
No one even knows what metal COULD sound like. It's a great genre of music that deserves so much better.
One of my favorite metal albums, Obzen by Meshuggah is mastered to -7.7db RMS power. It looks like a rectangle in a DAW instead of a waveform. It's loud, thin as a razor with no dynamics, almost no low frequencies. It's distorted and unpleasant. There's is no audio setup on this planet that will make it sound good. I could make a special eq curve for it and play it back on a reference setup and that's it. It won't help very much. If that same album would have been handled differently, how good it could be it's hard to even imagine good it could sound. Even though it's one of my favorite albums ever, it's the opposite of something I would use to evaluate a piece of audio equipment.
Since we're in the LCD-X thread. I will tell you, on the 2021 LCD-X metal sounds like..... exactly what the recording sounds like. They are marketed as a reference headphone and I actually think they mostly hit the mark as abstract as the concept is.
If you're really into metal, consider making a custom eq curve for different albums. Cut some 4khz and exeriment with the q factor of that cut, roll off some at the top, boost below 50hz.
