chadbang
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2001
- Posts
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Remember the golden rule of reviewing. Don't give your headphones a bad one until after you've unloaded them.
Remember the golden rule of reviewing. Don't give your headphones a bad one until after you've unloaded them.
I think sometimes too many people on Head-Fi, including myself at times, take ourselves too seriously. This is a hobby we're supposed to enjoy. I get entertained by reading reviews. I have fun writing them. Just about every review I've read has a good does of subjectivity to them. Hell, I always qualify mine reviews as being just my opinion. I accept that reviews are opinions.
When you read enough of the reviews here on Head-Fi you will get to know the personality and preferences of the writer. Based on those that either closely match your own or are contrary to your, they can help.
I don't think we're doing anyone any disservice. If someone here purchases a $500 'phone, $300 amp and $200 DAC and it takes food out of their or their family's mouth shame on them. No-one here had a hand in that. But the money we all spend on our gear is disposable income. Not a necessity. So if we make an error in judgment based on a review, so what? Sell the gear and move on.
As informative and terrific as this site is with it's wealth of knowledge, it's still entertainment. And entertainment is subjective. It's the responsibility of each of us to make our own purchasing decisions.
So have fun with your headphones folks. It doesn't matter if you've spent $25 or $2500 for your rig. Listen to your favorite tunes.
The only opinions I trust are casual impressions from members who have tastes similar to my own.
Music is art and art is subjective, but here we don't judge music, we judge equipment, and equipment is engineering, not art.
The fact that the reviews are subjective is a flaw, if one could measure the accuracy* of audio equipment perfectly, we would not be having this debate.
*to my knowledge, there's no means to measure soundstage, attacks, decays, transients perfectly.
Music and art is not "subjective"...it simply is what it is. It is the idea of "bad" and "good" anything that is subjective. Bad music...bad art? No such thing without a point of personal reference. It is entirely subjective at the point when there is a human being doing the judging.
If you actually could come up with some theoretical magic black box to measure how well a pair of headphones succeed in duplicating a live performance in every way imaginable, you'd STILL have various people preferring other headphones and other ways of 'interpretting" a live performance. It does not promise that everyone who hears them will necessarily like them best because they mimic verbatim. It's like having a device that measures the taste of chocolate cake. Even if you get that device and works 100% of the time it will not report how that measured item occurs to any random individual. It will just measure a fixed set of criteria to match to some established standard. In the case of what your proposing, the standard would be to match the actual sounds of an instrument, a performance. Is that what everyone wants? Does everyone hear it the same in the first place? I doubt it. But it would give some of us a self-righteous box to perch upon and feel justified in choosing the device that measured "best in show" according to 9/10 dentists who chew gum.
If all headphones were perfect and reproduced exactly then Head-Fi would be moot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by khaos974
<quote>"snip..... This is where we disagree, to me, a headphone is not part of
art, it's not
a conductor which interprets a composer's work. It is purely a technical
device, it job is to reproduce the signal it receives, perfectly... An
analogy with an amp would be "wire with gain". There's not chocolate
deliciousness measurement device simply because there's no reference
chocolate, everyone likes something different. On the other hand in
audio, the reference would be live unamped performance, the device
that match the closest to this sound would be the greatest. With such a
device I would know that if what I hear through it is too schrill/bassy/has
a bad resonance (or whatever fault), I would have found the same thing
if I was at the live performance.
Who's to say what "live" sounds like to another person? It's like saying what "Red" looks like, or what chocolate tastes like. It's utter nonsense. [...] As I said before, my choice to to rely upon the senses I've been given to make such judgments rather than someone else's concept of what good and bad is, whether it be graphs and numbers or their own ears.
If it 'interprets' verbatim, then you'd call it "good". OK, so where does that get us? Someone else still may not enjoy it as you do (or perhaps you may not even enjoy it as much as something else).
What is it with the idea of objective measurements being able to define the response of a human being?
ALL reviews must be "taken with a grain of salt". ALL - every single one.