obobskivich
Headphoneus Supremus
Please do not use car analogies. Please, I beg you. It has nothing to do with this discussion, it is not a reasonable analogy, and it just muddies the discussion. The use of car analogies in technical non-automotive discussions is probably one of the biggest reasons that "people" have such a hard time with many technical concepts, because they always want to find a way to "make it like a car" and it just will never fit into that mold, no matter how forcefully you attempt it. There's probably a list of logical fallacies that encompass this too.
To beat on the audio measurements thing: all currently published headphone frequency response measurements are done on more or less proprietary systems, using their own coupler/interface setups, compensation and weighting curves, and placement methodology. What this means is that you can not (and should not) try to directly compare measurements from one source to another, as they are not comparable. The best that any current measurement resource is aiming at is repeat-ability within their own datasets (InnerFidelity's data has been tested and mostly holds up to this bar; Tyll has written about it on the InnerFidelity blog). So why does this matter? Because it means what you're seeing in the measurement output is not a 1:1 of exactly what you get out of the headphone (and even if it was, what would that tell you? (for the nitpicky: InnerFidelity provides the raw freq response plotted for most headphones too, at their different placement positions on the HATS)), its the result of the headphone going through whatever coupler (which, like room acoustics, can make a big difference), through whatever compensation/weighting, and then plotted. There are reasons this is still useful, but looking at it and going "I will like this" or "I will not like this" is not one of them (that's actually a place no science can go, no matter how much some wish it could). Bottom line is that hearing things for yourself is ultimately still the best way to determine whether or not something sounds good to you, or satisfies your desires, and ultimately you have to make that choice for yourself. There is no objective "this is faster" (or anything even remotely comparable to that kind of warped car analogy, because again, car analogies have no place in this discussion - at all) or perhaps more to what you're after, "this is better" because ultimately we have yet to define what "better" should really look like for a headphone in terms of observed performance characteristics. This of course won't stop plenty of listicle-esque content aggregators from insisting otherwise, because page hits sell ads.
I'll add there is no "lie" or "Truth" here - just observed data being presented as information. What one makes of that information is independent of the information itself (hence why its objective), but ultimately when it comes to "do I like this?" or "does this satisfy me?" said objective information is worthless for answering that question.
My point is, listen for yourself and make your decision with that experience in mind. Ultimately that's still the best we have, for better or worse. The suggestions I made were based on such experience, and are not meant to be "the gospel truth" but instead options to consider while you're out auditioning things.
Finally, to beat on this even further, while I completely agree with (and even stated in my initial post, so how/why this came as a surprise I am unsure...) the HD 600 being "less bassy" I would take issue with the contention that PRO900 are even measured as "less bassy" relative to the M-100 (and I know from having heard both of them this is also not the case, to say nothing of other sonic qualities beyond bass quantity), based on the InnerFidelity measurements, even with all of the above qualifications AND the questions over how well InnerFidelity's coupler system interacts with S-LOGIC (and Ultrasone has published a number of papers at AES about S-LOGIC and headphone measurements and how S-LOGIC interacts with different ear shapes and couplers, and there have been discussions in the past about the transferability of measurements of S-LOGIC headphones to real world listening specifically due to the dependence on ear/head/etc shape). Both of them look like fairly bassy headphones on the FR plot, with the PRO900 looking more dramatically v-shaped and proportionally bassier. So like I said originally, they're worth a listen as an alternative. Of course try other headphones too, like the Fostex, and the Sony, and so forth, and find one that ultimately suits your personal taste. And that's something nobody can help you with - we can just give you ideas of things to look at. End of the day you have to make the choice what to do with that information.
I'd add a few more things that measurements (at least from InnerFidelity) can help with:
- They can show measured sensitivity and impedance, which can help in picking an amplifier.
- InnerFidelity actually does measure isolation (as far as I know they're the only ones that do) - I have no idea how repeatable their isolation measurement is to real world conditions, but its certainly better than nothing (and you are 100% right that frequency response won't tell you about isolation).
As far as the EQ discussion, I really like how GoldenEars (another headphone measurement site) talks about EQ on their measurement sets - they basically show whether or not the headphone can achieve their desired response curve via EQ. Now, this doesn't mean you can magically "fix" a headphone (or speaker) with EQ (especially with the graphic/parametric EQs that I'm assuming most folks are using), but some headphones/speaker systems will respond better to EQ than others, especially if your goal is to "trim" rather than "boost" (always the better way to use an EQ). So for example if you take something that has a lot of bass response, like say Fostex TH-900, you can EQ it down into a thin sounding can if you want, but if you take something that has not a lot of bass response, like say a Beyerdynamic DT880, you can't EQ it up to TH-900 levels of bass output. You also may bring in tons of distortion and noise if you attempt to do so. And even if you could hypothetically level match two different headphones at a given frequency, you wouldn't be able to change their sound staging/imaging (since that has more to do with radiation and enclosure design + coupling to the head), and there'd still be a question of "is this repeatable to the human head" since bass is heavily seal dependent and the coupler/HATS/etc may not be a perfect simulacra for your specific headshape, or you may have to adjust the positioning/tension/whatever for comfort and that can have a (not insignificant) impact on bass/presentation/etc too. Especially with headphones that do something unconventional with driver placement trying to achieve better imaging/presentation (like Ultrasone).
The best analogy I've ever heard for EQ is that its like seasoning on food - you can't unburn a steak by adding more salt to it, but you may enhance a good cut of meat with appropriate application of seasoning. Same goes for DSP effects (e.g. Creative Crystalizer).
Again I'm not saying "boo to measurements" - just that they aren't capable of being the be-all end-all "Truth" about how something will sound, and that even if they could provide such an absolute view, it still won't tell you whether or not you like how something sounds. They have their place and they serve a purpose, and should certainly be used where applicable.
As I recall, Ultrasone actually did a study on S-LOGIC and head/ear shape a few years ago, and determined that something like 30% of the human population is estimated to be "incompatible" with S-LOGIC due to outer ear shape. For those people, Ultrasone headphones apparently sound extremely shrill, thin, over-bright, and over-bearing. This was done in response to customer feedback iirc, and was also part of the reason they've tried re-designing S-LOGIC in recent years. I have no idea if they've followed up that study with the reworked S-LOGIC Plus or S-LOGIC EX implementations though. It also raises the question of whether or not they are unique in this "problem" of anatomical compatibility (I would guess "no" and also guess that different designs are probably more or less "forgiving" in this respect, but this is one of many big unanswered questions in headphone measurement (as in, I'm not aware of anyone having gone and done this research)). Certainly they're not for everyone (but I would contend no headphone is), and they're very unique in their presentation. Still, worth a look if you're after bassy headphones, especially if you want to consider something that doesn't comport with the more typical "bassy and warm" (if not "bassy and muddy") archetype.
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