Originally posted by
Currawong on Youtube
Originally posted by nib95 on Youtube
Having now heard every single one of the headphones highlighted in this video besides the Hifimans, I don't really buy the whole "badly recorded" reasoning. Most music is not actually badly recorded per se, not to the point that those tracks start to sound bad purely because of the recording anyway. If they actually sound bad, it's instead likely that the headphones in question (like the HD800 and Utopia) are skewed towards highs, transparency or clarity, and this is extenuating any glare or harshness that you don't really experience with more neutral or warm sounding headphones, and that isn't really supposed to be present in the first place! Essentially, headphones like the HD800 and Utopia, are actually coloured towards detailing and this exasperates any hotness or rough edges, not because of the recording, but because of the headphones themselves.
I also think reviewers or users such as yourself, have sort of skewed the perception of what 'neutral' actually is. Headphones like the Utopia or HD800 are not neutral
imo. They are very clearly geared towards transparency (the Utopia a touch less so) and not neutrality. They are tuned to be revealing. Even looking at the frequency response charts this much is clear.
I also don't agree that the MDR-Z1R's are necessarily especially coloured. They're only really coloured when compared to these more articulate headphones, but compare them to a premium high end speaker system or live performance, and actually it's headphones like the MDR-Z1R's or LCD4's that end up sounding more honest or accurate. That warmth, that bass impact and presence, that atmosphere, it's all stuff that is present with high end speaker systems or live performances and ironically it's these supposedly "coloured" headphones like the MDR-Z1R's that better represent it.
You're right, and I should probably express it as "music that is less than ideally recorded and mastered". However, if I'm hearing distortion from a piece of music with multiple pairs of headphones, then that recording has issues that prevent it being fully enjoyed from my point of view. Since there is a large amount of music that could be described this way, I see it as a possible explanation for a common argument found online where a person has tried a more expensive pair of headphones (or other gear) and expressed that it doesn't sound better to them than what they already have, or as good as other people have said.
For example, someone just posted a review where they felt the Utopias didn't resolve more than their other headphones and rated them much lower than I did. What I'd like to do is, someday, listen with the exact set-up and music someone has where the person has had a contrasting experience to mine to understand better to what brought them to their conclusions. Their equipment list is not in the least inexpensive, so I can't help wondering, from my own experience, if it doesn't somewhat come from the quality of the recordings they were listening with.
I disagree with your thoughts on "neutral". To me, "neutral" means that they don't emphasise any particular frequency region excessively, even if such a presentation is unrealistic (and somewhat technically impossible with headphones). Sony's Justear "monitor" tuning, for example, is extremely bass-light. I'd agree though that my definition of neutral is not the same as how a live performance sounds, let alone many high-end systems. If I owned a high-end 2-channel system, I'd probably prefer it to sound like the Z1Rs do and, I'd agree, do a better job in that way. I find that I'm much more likely to purely enjoy listening with the Z1Rs than the Utopias if I were to pick a random track out of what I like for the very reasons you argued about the Utopias over-emphasising distortion in the higher frequencies.
I don't think though that you can "tune" a pair of headphones to be revealing. Either they resolve low-level detail, or they do not. To me, the Utopias, on my system, with the best recordings I have, were resolving things that most certainly the other headphones I have here were not, and that not just in frequency ranges that are stronger with them than other headphones.
