@SolarCetacean Count me jealous of the comfort you are experiencing with these headphones. Is it simply a perfect fit for your head, as in proper seal at the front and back of the pads with even pressure throughout?
As for what you described with transient decay, unless it rather has to do with treble quantity, it could be correlated with the cumulative spectral decay (CSD; how each frequency decays for an impulse input, hence which resonances are excited) measurements. E.g. With you and others noticing that extra sizzle or whatever to transients on the Susvara, that might be the "hideous" CSD managing to be audible in actual music rather than just when listening to isolated impulses like in
http://pcfarina.eng.unipr.it/Acustica-samples/Dirac.wav.
Figure 1: Susvara CSD from
https://www.soundstagenetwork.com/i...fiman-susvara-headphones&catid=263&Itemid=203.
I would suspect the DCA Corina to manage to have a much cleaner CSD at the expense of dulled transients from the damping required to achieve such. I did measure a higher than average but controlled upper midrange CSD on the X9000 and Sennheiser HE-1, so estats with less damping probably do inherently trade off transient sharpness for a less clean transient decay which in this case you seem to prefer the sound of. My holy grail is to be able to couple both incisive transients with a clean decay so I can enjoy both that sharpness, impact, and tactility, as well as a "black background" not polluted by any decay products, my only hearing the actual decay within the recording. The Final Audio D8000 pro was probably the closest to that, but it encountered sub-bass clipping or rattle more quickly than the other headphones I tried, and its presentation is too small for my liking.
I did recently figure out how to display the step response of my headphones as calculated from the logarithmic sine sweep and hence impulse response; these make objective considerations of headphone "speed" much more intuitive to spot out and correlate with experience:
The step response in the below is always in teal.
Figure 2: HiFiMan Arya Stealth impulse and step response. Here, you can see that the powerful incisiveness I head out of it can be correlated to a sharp step response. On the other hand, that edge is dirtier, and the decay is dominated by a 4.3 kHz resonance, though one can EQ that peak down.
Figure 3: Meze Elite stock hybrid pads impulse and step response. Here, the attack of the step response is clearly rounder and hence duller.
Figure 4: Impulse and step response for the Meze Elite hybrid pads with my flat and Harman-like "V3 PEQ". Here, the magnitude and phase response corrections achieved with my minimum-phase EQ have incurred a speed and sharpness comparable to the Arya Stealth's stock performance, its having a cleaner step response decay and thanks to my EQ, greater sub-bass extension (if it extended all the way down to 0 Hz, then the step response would not decay like thus). The Stax SR-X9000 had a yet faster initial rise time, but a subsequent initially more rapid drop-off before rebounding and returning to normal decay, whether or not this adds to a sense of increased incisiveness; its impulse response also had a less prominent secondary spike which I guess contributes to its initially faster decay.
Figure 5: Impulse and step response for the Meze Elite hybrid pads with my personal HRTF applied by SPART AmbiBIN and EQed with Equalizer APO to my in-ear measurement for a free-field speaker panned 30 degrees left relative to my left ear. This is assessing my current binaural head-tracking setup where I simulate a perfectly neutral stereo triangle within an anechoic chamber. Transients are still incisive, though having a more rounded initiation, and the decay was initially faster and dirtier; note that this was without my preferred 5 dB 100 Hz low shelf.
Figure 6: Same as above, but with both the left and right channels playing in phase. Here, the decay envelope is more bolstered, possibly contributing more weight while the sound from the left channel alone might have been sharp but thin.
Figure 5: Audio-Technica ATH-M50xBT impulse and step response. My first audiophile headphone from 2019. Other than that initial spike, the step response is quite rounded or dulled.
Figure 6: Jabra Elite 85h impulse and step response. My work-at-home headset from 2021. Here, without EQ, the step response is quite duller yet than the stock Meze Elite. Otherwise, both this and the ATH-M50xBT had exceptionally clean CSDs falling below my measurements' noise floor.
In short, the perceived transient sharpness I heard when listening to
http://pcfarina.eng.unipr.it/Acustica-samples/Dirac.wav correlated well with the measured step responses.
