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Originally Posted by MatsudaMan /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I preface this with:
These are just my whimsical thoughts and should in no way be taken seriously.
Is it just me, or do the same people that judge speakers/headphones based on their respective ability to reproduce pink noise are the same one's who buy speakers/headphones based on frequency graphs? I know this is kind of a tangent and hijacking of a thread, but I just think that it's kind of a silly utterly unmusical way of observing music. Similar is the difference between feeling/aesthetic of music and theoretical breakdown of music. IMO the latter is hugely lacking/overly clinical and gets only skin deep to what music is. IMO, music is like the universe, and pink noise and frequency graphs are like theorems created by fish in a tank trying to understand the universe.
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Matsuda, When I bought my DT880 05s, I bought them because everybody on headfi seems to rave about them and puts them on top of the heap with the K701 and HD650. I had read all the reports from members on their experiences using the various headphones and how wonderful the synergy between their equipment and the phones had worked out. As you probably know, as do all others on this forum, this can be an enormous time-sink and you'll end up being in the same place in the end. You may narrow down the phones to three or four, but have no idea how this phone will sound with your source, cables, amp, recable, DACs, and whatever else is out there; all in a quest to have the end result, the headphones, sound the way you want them. And I think some people on this forum need to have their hearing checked and have had their headphones up wayyyy too loud over time. Many musicians have a hard time hearing from being on stage, and will argue about sound quality.
Getting used to an overly bright or harsh headphone can sometimes mean suffering from a temporary threshold shift of your hearing to the change in sound. (I've actually been calling this "Ear Burn In" and think it happens all the time with people on here) If your ears are fatigued, you should probably find a better suited phone to your hearing ability before you wipe it out, deaden it, or need more and more analytical/bright/colored phones. Come to think of it, do a lot of new headphone users complain about phones sounding to analytical before they get some time under some phones? Maybe its because they have good hearing early, and their EARS actually get burnt in? hmmm....
This has been on my mind for a while, as I think my DT880s are bright as hell, and I can't stand them. I don't need phones to be loud in the upper ranges to hear detail, and it doesn't need to be sharp and grainy to compensate for a lack of it either, which is why I generally like flat phones. If I would've looked at the graphs of the DT880s before I bought them, I would have seen that they're like 10db higher than the rest of the range. I would've chosen the K601 or K701 instead of these. I ended up depending on reviews from users who have an infinite number of system configurations which never offer truly objective assessments of phones, just how they sound on THEIR system. I'd like to find out how it will be on my system, and if data is available from a meter that can at least narrow down the frequency response or signature before I hear from people about how tubes vs. solid vs. cables, etc. etc., I'll more than likely be using that heavily in selecting my next pair of phones. Meters usually don't have personal tastes, opinions, comfort levels, and can be recalibrated before use, unlike the organic ear drum, which can be damaged and never fixed.
So, I like graphs and quantitative measuring tools, and in the end, we all end up complaining about extension, range, poor mixing, levels, etc., so why not take the tools/methods we use late in the game, and apply them early? I'm sure the builders of the phones use meters and find great value in their use, so why not do what they do? Use graphs and available data. It keeps it simple and extremely time efficient. I've seen people buy and trade all kinds of stuff on here, even buying a pair of phones on the lower end of a series, to get an idea of house sound before going up the top of the line, and sometimes going full circle based on system specific info people write on the forum. Too much dickering for me.
