So if iem's with a single dd, ba's or a planar were tested for differences (without knowing which was played), there would be differences but you wouldn't be able to pick out the planar or others?
A completely sealed tiny planar with a membrane the size of the BA's membrane for "fair" matching?
And of course they'd all have the same sensitivity?
I expect that the best sounding planars are vented and are IDK somewhere around 15mm at least. So yes I think that overall, I could guess they're not the same because nothing is going to be the same anyway.
But really I have no idea about what would happen, were we able to somehow do an apple to apple test(just determining what that should be, seems like it would give us a headache). But even without that, how often have I been in a situation of not knowing the 2 IEMs, not knowing the drivers, and just purely guessing? I know the answer for myself, never! I have to go back to being a teen, and then all the in ear I had, were DD earbuds anyway.
It's not hard to feel like we know stuff in hindsight.
Maybe we also fall in the circular system where consumers expect something from a tech, so more of the IEMs with that tech are perhaps tuned for that expectations? IDK.
I always have the reverse experience, where I know what I have, I listen with all my expectations, biases, focusing on what I want to find, then my brain decides it has found some pattern after maybe 2 or 3 IEMs vaguely sounding similar in a given way, and me knowing they have tech A. From now on when I'll try tech A, I'll expect, seek, maybe even invent that sound characteristic. When I find it, I knew it all along! When I don't, maybe I forget about that event more easily, or I find some excuse like it's not that good and that's why my clever oversimplification of a rule doesn't work.
We interpret reality as so many patterns, we love them, we live with and for them, and in a slightly less messed up way, we're all a little bit of Jim Carey in The number 23.
I guess all that pointless rambling to say that gregorio asked how you knew about the sound differences between driver types because, and maybe you're starting to also see that pattern a little too often for your own taste, in here we don't like people drawing objective conclusions from completely subjective and poorly controlled impressions. When the system is multivariable, just ignoring all but one variable, while actually not doing anything to control or remove all the others, it's the very thing we reject in this section.
And as I often suggest, there is absolutely no negative impact to just saying we don't know when a question has too many variables for us to handle. Here or in my life, I have nothing but respect for those who can just tell me they don't know when they don't. And here, the sound of different driver techs, just what I managed to think about makes it too complicated for me.
Now if I ask myself casually what I feel about driver techs in IEMs, I'll think that BA's roll off too early(single BA as we are talking single everything, right?), even though I've owned an er4S that had nice extension in the trebles, maybe even a little too much for my taste.
I'll think that DD are the best sounding, and that planars have weirdo treble.
That's not just a blatant overgeneralization, that I expect many people to disagree with and even some people to agree with(like just about any opinion about anything). Some of those ideas I didn't even get from IEMs. But they're in my head anyway. My brain simplified everything to a fault and turned it into a simple pattern indeed, driver techs.
I can say all this for the anecdote, and have more sense than to actually claim it's the objective truth. Just consider any question, any system, think about the variables actually involved, if there are 2 or 3 more than the 2 you wanted to correlate, chances are that the answer is more complicated than whatever your guts told you. Doesn't mean your guts will stop talking to you, they won't.
In conclusion, IDK how to test that because I can't think of conditions that wouldn't be unfair to a driver tech. So I revert to my previous post, we probably shouldn't even try to reduce IEM sounds to their driver tech( could also applies to amps, DACs, and much more).
