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I don't know why you're so set on disagreeing with DAN S - he's clearly talking about the sonic signature, the flavour of the headphone - not it's technical ability.
Thanks, Greq. Yes, I'm talking about the broad, general flavour, not the specific technicalities. The frequency response curve, if you want to get more technical. FR curves come in a few broad categories: warm, bright, neutral, and u-shaped. (And possibly a few more, like n-shaped.) In that respect, I find the Momentum similar to the HD650.
For a novice head-fier (and I think the Momentum is partially aimed at novices), the general sonic signature is a helpful way to start thinking about the sound of headphones. Once you get more into it, you start thinking about soundstage width and depth, speed, etc.
And as you point out, roguegeek, open and closed headphones are very different sounding, so that's another good point for a novice. For the same price, closed headphones tend to sound worse than open headphones because the resonances in the closed chamber are difficult to tame. The closed chamber also tends to make the sound more congested with looser, louder bass, and I find closed headphones are also more prone to edgy, irritating treble.
For that reason, I like my closed headphones to be warm, and I think that's partly what makes the Momentum sound as good as it does. I also like a portable headphone to be bassy because when you're outside, the noise of traffic, trains, planes, etc. seems to interfere with the bass more than the treble. So bright portables will end up sounding super bright, and warm headphones will often end up sounding fairly neutral.
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I think it's easy to miscommunicate through a keyboard and that seems to be what has happened here
Yeah, the language around this stuff isn't very exact or consistently used. Isn't there a famous quote that writing about music is like dancing about architecture? I feel like we do the same thing here when we try to describe how one headphone sounds versus another. Sometimes people actually agree on something, but because they're using language differently, they appear to disagree. I felt like we were doing something like that.