ChrisOc
Headphoneus Supremus
I, like @baskingshark agree that graphs can indicate quite a few things and are a useful guide to the tone of earphones. I have no issues reading graphs to (partially) determine what to expect from a particular set of IEMs.Here is a bit of Crinacle´s post on it: "You hear the term “colouration” getting thrown around a lot but here’s how I see it. When the tonality of the sound gets skewed to any direction, it goes from having a neutral tone to a coloured one. Skewing towards the low frequencies creates a “dark tonality”, while skewing towards the higher frequencies creates a “bright tonality”. Being lower-frequency-biased puts the focus more on the fundamentals and lower-order harmonics, which subjectively gives the instruments some extra richness and heft. On the other hand, being higher-frequency-biased puts the focus more on the higher-order harmonics, which can boost the clarity of the instruments as well as improving the perception of “air”."
https://crinacle.com/2021/06/04/the-tonal-technical-dichotomy-the-ief-evaluation-system/
And I agree with him. Graphs can give you a good idea of the tonality/signature of the transducer, whether it is having a lot of treble and making it an overall bright sounding tonality. Or having a lot of bass and making it warm.
What we cant tell however, is the technicalities. Stuff like how big the soundstage is, how much detail or how good the imaging is. We cant tell that from a graph and that is where our ears are better. BUT I do believe that some of these factors can be implied with graphs.
For example:
The soundstage, air and micro-details are very limited on the Zen. Why? Well, it rolls-off in the upper-treble, that area bottlenecks those 3 factors a lot.
Meanwhile, we can see that it got quite a lot of of lower-treble, what does that imply? It implies that it has a lot of macro details, and that is exactly what I hear with them.
Then we have the Oxygen. See how it has quite a lot of upper-treble? Its not a coincidence that the soundstage is very wide on it, as well as being very airy and having very good micro-details.
Then we have the Tape, and looking at the graph it looks like it has around the same upper-treble quantity as the Oxygen right? So it should have a similar soundstage, air and micro-details with my logic. But no, it doesnt, it loses in the air and soundstage while it beats the Oxygen in micro-details.
Basically, I believe that we can tell the tonality of the iem pretty accurately based on graphs but with technicalities its not as certain but it does have some implications on it.
In that I believe I am with @baskingshark, and you (solely based on your post above) and I quote him:
"Graphs are useful as a gatekeeper as such, but they definitely do not tell the full story."
The aspect of the "story" which began the discussion is whether or not someone tuning a set of IEMs would use a graph to do so.
My view, is that our ears are much more advanced and sophisticated than a graph can be, hence someone tuning earphones would use their ears to tune earphones. A graph may be supplementary but would neither be central nor essential to the tuning process.
I would be interested to hear from someone who tunes earphones to find out if they use a graph for the purpose of tuning.
However, I take your well set out points on how instructive a graph may be to assist a buyer in finding out various (but not all) characteristics of earphones. Clearly, that may be of assistance at the point of purchase.
