bigshot
Headphoneus Supremus
We've created a new logical fallacy, "reducto ad argumentum". I'm not going to dive into the back and forth because it doesn't look profitable, but I will toss in a question...
Did you subtract the response curve of your own headphones before you added the Harman curve, or did you just add the Harman curve without any correction?
Headphones don't generally have a flat response. Every manufacturer has their own target curve that they apply to their cans. If you add the Harman curve on top of that, you'll double your response curves and come up with weird results.
Likewise, not every measurement of headphones published on the internet is the same. Some are compensated as Castle points out in 288 and some aren't. So it's possible that the subtraction you need to do before calibrating to Harman might be off.
The third option is just that your personal physiognomy is an outlier from the Harman Curve. Not everyone thought the Harman target sounded best, just most of them did. You could be among the rest of the sample that didn't like the Harman curve.
Personally, I think Harman is a good place to start. It works well as a baseline. Then EQ in small corrections at a time over a long period of time to try to improve it for your own ears. There is no "one size fits all" response curve with headphones like there is for speakers. There's just a "one size fits most". You have to experiment and learn what works best for you.
See, that's what I don't get. IMO that line is not how speakers are "calibrated", but how they said their averaged group preferred to hear them. To me that's not only unbelievable, but when I applied those correction to my headphones, it sounded bad.
Did you subtract the response curve of your own headphones before you added the Harman curve, or did you just add the Harman curve without any correction?
Headphones don't generally have a flat response. Every manufacturer has their own target curve that they apply to their cans. If you add the Harman curve on top of that, you'll double your response curves and come up with weird results.
Likewise, not every measurement of headphones published on the internet is the same. Some are compensated as Castle points out in 288 and some aren't. So it's possible that the subtraction you need to do before calibrating to Harman might be off.
The third option is just that your personal physiognomy is an outlier from the Harman Curve. Not everyone thought the Harman target sounded best, just most of them did. You could be among the rest of the sample that didn't like the Harman curve.
Personally, I think Harman is a good place to start. It works well as a baseline. Then EQ in small corrections at a time over a long period of time to try to improve it for your own ears. There is no "one size fits all" response curve with headphones like there is for speakers. There's just a "one size fits most". You have to experiment and learn what works best for you.