Well I'm sorry if I offended you. I think you are also interpreting me in the wrong way. I have no issues with people educating others. I had an issue with sweeping generalizations.
It is also odd that on one hand, you are basically making your post for advanced audiophiles (the ones who agree with you) while attempting to educate the lowbie audiophiles (people like me). I am all for education, thats why I spend dozens of hours on headfi reading stuff each week.
Here are my particular questions towards this topic:
1) Why should newbies strive for Neutrality? The answer so far is that professionals strive for neutrality. The question is, how does that relate to us and will it provide a better listening experience or does this imply that we need to train our ears to enjoy neutrality?
2) You say that colored Headphones will provide too much for songs heavy on such characteristics. But in reality, we find plenty of low to mid level audiophiles who immensely enjoy those colored qualities when their genre of music is also already skewed towards those qualities (people who like dark songs like dark headphones, people who like bass songs like bass headphones, etc). How do we explain this?
3) Should lowbies and mid level audiophiles be striving for what constitutes as the best sounding headphones for professionals irregardless of their own tastes? Is it better to not enjoy certain music because of someone elses ideals?
These are my main questions. I think you believe I am challenging your authority on technical matters. That is not what is happening. I am questioning the logic of determining enjoyment by neutrality (do I really need to prefer the HD600 over similarly priced Grados, Ultrasones or AKGs?). This question is very relevant because in all likely hood, most people (including audiophiles) may never reach the stage that you are talking about as evident by people having been fans of non-neutral gear for decades. Maybe I am misinterpreting your message but if there is any group of people that you should elaborate to, it would be the people questioning you, not the ones who agree and are already "there".
I'm not offended at all. I'm just trying to explain my reasons for trying to educate others. I'm not doing this to try to feel "superior" or trample on those who are "inferior." I really don't have a need for that. I teach hundreds of students already, and if I felt so insecure in myself to have such unhealthy cravings, I would've satisfied that craving in the classroom already. I'm simply passionate about music and audio, and I want to see the communities I'm a part of rise up and be the best it can be, regardless of their budget or musical taste--to be informed and educated. That's it really--pure and simple.
Now, your questions:
1) Why should newbies strive for Neutrality? The answer so far is that professionals strive for neutrality. The question is, how does that relate to us and will it provide a better listening experience or does this imply that we need to train our ears to enjoy neutrality?
It's simply a matter of "you don't know what you're missing until you experience it." Those who have never truly experience the acceptable range of neutrality and accuracy simply are blissful in their ignorance. They can't miss what they can't hear, such as detailed and textured bass notes where you can actually hear the pluck of the string, the attack, the overtones, the effect the acoustics of the recording space has on the instrument, such as the clear separation of early reflections and the main body of the reverb, how it decays, and even the model/brand of bass guitar, synthesizer, double-bass, etc being played, and how they sound different from each other. To them, most bass notes are mushy, rounded on-note affairs that sound similar, with no nuances, differences, dynamics, or detail. The only times they can hear some differences is perhaps when the instrument part is naked and playing solo. Even then, the level of fidelity is not there at all--the realism, the expressiveness, dimensionality, and presence.
And that's just one simple example. There are many more--from vocals, guitars, drums, orchestral strings, synthesizers, drum machines, ethnic percussion, sound effects, spoken dialogue, and so on. On skewed systems, there's just so much information missing in the audio, or severely skewed, and people who aren't aware of these issues simply don't know it.
But the truth is, if they don't know they're missing it, then it has no effect on how happy they are. For many people, they can live a whole life that way and be perfectly happy.
What tends to happen, is that one of them will one day accidentally hear a more neutral system--maybe at a friend's house, maybe tagging along with a friend to a pro audio studio, or maybe at a respectable audio store. They would hear a song that they know well, but hear for the first time all those details, nuances, and dynamics they never knew were there. That is when they wake up from The Matrix the way Neo did, and that is also when they are given the choice of the red or blue pill. One pill allows them to remain blissfully happy in their ignorance, and the other pill will show them the truth--but they will have to make an effort to fight for it--to learn, to grow, and to excel as listeners, actively listening, as opposed to passive listening. They will also need to scrutinize their audio gear, read reviews, do comparison tests, do double-blind tests, ask questions, as well as buy and sell gear until they find what they deem as satisfactory. The path to true fidelity becomes a passion, and the reward is that they'll hear things they've never heard before--music becomes much more dimensional, alive, detailed, textured, dynamic, expressive, emotional--all of those things--that is the payoff (and a vastly better fate than what the "real world" was like in The Matrix. You don't get killed by machines or have to live in weird tribes).
2) You say that colored Headphones will provide too much for songs heavy on such characteristics. But in reality, we find plenty of low to mid level audiophiles who immensely enjoy those colored qualities when their genre of music is also already skewed towards those qualities (people who like dark songs like dark headphones, people who like bass songs like bass headphones, etc). How do we explain this?
I think my answer to the previous question already answered this. They simply have no idea what they're missing.
The fact is, I'm often barking up the wrong tree around here, such as at that digiZoid ZO thread--a thread I should have never posted in, because the type of consumers who buy such products are not interested in anything I have to say.
3) Should lowbies and mid level audiophiles be striving for what constitutes as the best sounding headphones for professionals irregardless of their own tastes? Is it better to not enjoy certain music because of someone elses ideals?
You have to separate musical taste/genres from the playback system. This is the very first step you must take if you want to become serious about listening to music.
The playback system should be transparent--totally neutral, without bias. It will reproduce any kind of audio, exactly as the musician, singer, producer, engineer, and director intended. The music itself is the bias--the production style, the sonic signature, what instruments were used, how the vocals were recorded and processed, how the sound effects were mixed. Different bands, musical artists, producers, engineers, movie directors--they all have their own creative preferences, and they will imbue their work with those preferences. If your playback system is transparent, then you will hear their creative preferences clearly, as they intended you to. If your system is skewed, then you're not hearing exactly what they worked so hard for you to hear.
When musicians, singers, producers, and engineers are in the studio, painstakingly crafting a specific a sonic signature, they want you to be able to hear it as closely to how they made it as possible. If they're spending hours and weeks and months tweaking their guitar sounds, making tiny adjustments to get the sound just so, picking specific mic pre's to get vocals to have that magical tone they were after, compressing and EQ'ing exactly so to get that drum track pumping just right, placing their mic arrays with painstaking precision around the concert hall to capture the orchestra exactly so--wouldn't it be nice if you can actually hear the results of all the painstaking work, as closely to what they intended as possible? They are all monitoring on neutral and accurate systems, and to hear what they were hearing in the studio, you need to be using a playback system that is within that range of acceptable neutrality/accuracy. Otherwise, so much of their hard work goes down the drain. You wouldn't wear a pair of glasses with a color tint when you go to an art gallery to look at beautiful paintings, or watch a movie, would you? Then why would you want your audio playback system to have a colored bias?
I know you dislike the analogy with television, but it really is similar. Your television is not biased towards police dramas, or chick flicks, or horror movies, or action thrillers, or comedies. All movies simply play the same on your television, and you want your television to be as neutral and accurate as possible. So with music, it's the same--your system should be neutral, and whatever style of music you play on it, will simply sound as it should be. It's a totally flawed concept to have a system that only plays back jazz well, but can't play hip-hop or electronica well, or vice versa, or any other combination where any genre/style of music is excluded from its capabilities. A transparent, neutral, and accurate system will be able to play anything and everything, and do an equally good job at all of them.
If you are listening to a song on a neutral system, and you wished that the song had more bass, then it simply means the musical artist who made that song didn't agree with your idea of how much bass should be in that song. It is not the fault of the playback system. You can use EQ to give that song more bass, but realize that you are now inserting your own preference into the equation, and it is not what the musical artist intended. Another song with plenty of bass will sound just right on that system, but it's not as if the system is now all of a sudden correct, whereas with the previous song it was wrong. If you feel the need to put extra bass on everything you listen to, then you basically have a skewed sense of how music ought to sound, and the culprit is the decades of brainwashing by consumer audio trends. And then we go full circle back to questions #1--why should someone try to unlearn their bias and embrace neutral, accurate, true fidelity.