nanaholic
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2010
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@nanaholic
I don’t get your point. We all have sound preferences and same can be said with tuning. Good power in addition to excellent tuning wins every time. Are you telling me that the IER Z1R sounds worst out of your DMP Z1 than WM1Z? For instance, the Ibasso DX300MAX Ti has an even better tuning than the 1Z and it is much more powerful too. Every single headphones that I plugged into the Ti sounds better to me than out of my modified 1Z. Yes, that is maybe a preference but that’s also a fact to me. Hell it get pretty darn close to the sound of my modified DMP Z1 if you ask me.
The point is that it is simply a subjective preference and not a fact. What is good power and what is excellent tuning? There's are all subjective because 99/99% of the people who says these things have NEVER measured those things, they are just attributing what they hear as being true - which is conflating subjective preferences with objective fact.
Go back to the HD800 because this headphone perfectly demonstrates this and is also the phone which made me realise all the silliness of the "it sounds bad because it's not driven properly(and the reversely worded "the more power you give it the better it sounds"). The HD800t's one of those phones which is objectively measured excellent but one which I never liked. It's a phone I always listen to at events with amps of different price points but there's never a time I can listen to it for more than 2 minutes. "Oh you've just never listened to it driven proper with X amp/y cable/z dac" I was always told, because obviously it measures well and if you throw 100 grand at it how can it not sound good? This always bothered me - was there something wrong with my hearing? or am I just not sophisticated/experienced enough to "get" the HD800.
Then one day I saw an article about how all TVs have a store demo mode where the colours are more saturated than usual because statistically speaking people perceive vibrant colours being "better" and more attractive and prefer saturated colours over accurate colours, thus a TV with more saturated colours sells more/easier than one which is set to accurate colours. This instantly clicked with the engineer in my head - subjective preference and objective measures are absolutely NOT correlated. So no matter how the HD800 measures nor what equipment it gets paired with it doesn't matter - I don't know what it is exactly about the HD800 but I know I just don't like it. And I don't have to blame it on the gear being "not up to snuff to fully drive the HD800" or other nonsense like that, I don't like it as my own personal subjective preference. Just like how I don't like say, blue cheese. And because of this the flip is ALSO true, I can like something that is objectively measured terrible. The two sides are simply not correlated.
I then follow this line of thought and know that absolutely NOBODY has a colour measurement device goes to a store to test the accuracy of the TV before buying one, and when they do, they go home and eyeballs the brightness/contrast/saturation to what looks good to them and calls it a day, but would then attribute the beauty of the TV they bought being because it is a good TV on specs - and this is where the disconnection happens. I can say with confidence that 99.99% of the people have no objective data to say their TV is "better" than the other models they passed up on, they simply attributed it to the better specs without any data to back up any one it.
And audiophiles does the EXACT SAME THING with their gear.
99.99999999% of the time people have not measured the setup they are listening to, they are simply judging it with their own preferences but then attribute it to things they have absolutely no data to support, but they just don't want to admit it being subjective but rather they want confirmation that they aren't "wrong", because again, who wants to spend 100 grand on a setup and say "no it's actually bad".
And yes, I actually enjoyed the IER-Z1R out of the 60mW unbalanced output of my 1Z more than the 250mW balanced output, and I can proudly say that's just my taste without making false justification for it.