Are we limiting transparency to everything up to the headphones? If so, then yes. I am not a fan of balancing amplifiers, DACs and DAPs when I have enough of a time with the headphones themselves.
If not, hard no: literally flat FR headphones and IEMs sound completely wrong as you normally hear sound 'filtered' by your ears. Without applying that filter in the form of a unique frequency response, the sounds are not even close to accurate.
I’ve heard many systems over the years and tone is probably the most important aspect? Tone-color? Maybe?
But what’s fascinating is the love of a color in the response. Meaning I figure most displays that are consistently accurate and transparent are relatively flat. Thus we tend to believe that color is not transparent?
Even in graphic-arts........color is not transparent! Transparent is transparent.
Still it’s argued what flat is. The Harmon curve gets updated all the time. Truly........ in a way these terms are not relevant.
Though:
You can find out quickly the people looking for super transparent. The reality is that at times super transparent ends up boring. Almost everything for sale can have a slight added character. It’s the reason why stuff we buy has personality. It’s difficult, though yes, thinking back I found relatively flat response examples. It’s a list that would be agreed upon and also argued about. Everyone has their own idea of transparent in the end. What ends up happening is stuff has character. Even the AKGK1000 has a character. The Sony R-10 has a character. These examples could be closer to neutral than most but something is going on somewhere which will set their tone apart. Obviously there can be narrow or wide examples of soundstage that’s neutral. Each creation of wood used as cups, ends with it’s own harmonic resonance. And when we remove the wood and replace it with something else there is still personality.
But how much of this personality keeps us from being close to how the recording really is? You know when trying $10 earbuds that the music is far away. It’s farthest from being lifelike! And maybe the $50,000 system is more lifelike but has some pizzazz? What is that pizzazz? Color. I’m not saying the expensive system is going to be more lifelike just because it’s expensive. We all know that just spending money is not always the answer. And the term musical.........in time started to be used against us!
Musical!
Oh, it’s not transparent then it must be trying to be musical?
Where did that come from? Maybe someone was trying to justify how they liked color?
But I guess it would be tailored for me.........heavily tailored.
The curve was updated over the years because they were still ongoing research on the subject. They spent almost a decade on this. I don't expect it to change much from now on(maybe the IEM one? IDK if they care, given all the variations we can end up with just from insertion and tips).
Harman does not claim to have a flat curve, but to have a curve picked by most people as a preference(clearly talking statistics here). Intuitively we have some reasons to assume that flat and preferred might be closely related, and the results aren't radically different from what an objective approach of flat sound at the ear would give. But while not radically different, they did get a curve different enough right at the start. For example, the boost in the low end contradicts an objective approach of flat sound at the ear.
We could reason that people try to compensate the lack of tactile bass or something like that, but those are only assumptions, we don't have the answer(I don't).
The curve is something close to what most people picked in the tests. That's what it claims to be and is probably the most rigorous answer to OP's question as frequency response is a leading variable in term of subjective preference. If for some reason most people don't prefer the average objective flat sound, then most people prefer something colored. ^_^ or maybe it's just that we're making false assumptions when considering flat on headphones/IEMs? Or we do that well, but then the results are messed up because we play albums mastered and panned for speakers(I vote that!)? Or maybe like with the bass, our ears aren't the only sensor for the music experience? I think it could go any way. Most likely there is a nice mix of us going for our own flat because we're used to it and it has a primitive appeal and reassurance, and us going for something else because we're not actually used to listening to music flat(recording, mixing, mastering, playback systems). I've heard music through TV, crappy speakers in stores and IEMs way more in my life than I've heard actual instruments or live bands. Does that alter my notion of normal flat? I honestly have no idea, probably not because I still spend the rest of the time with myself in the real world, so my hearing calibration should be pretty stable? But I do believe that all those non flat transducers will have changed my expectations of how sound should be and how some of my favorite bands should sound.
Something similar to how I discovered and listened to Queen for years almost exclusively on one pair of speakers in the same room, and I have almost stopped listening to the band when IEMs became my main music source for a time. And I have the opposite cases too, like Muse, I looped their albums on basically 2 pairs of IEMs. That's how they should sound to me, and I don't get the same emotion or appeal with IEMs that feel flatter to my ears, or with speakers. Habits have a solid say on my preferences, and I'm guessing it's similar for many people. Same as deciding what our favorite music genres are. Few people wake up one morning and decide that jazz is the best stuff ever if they never listened to anything like it before.
I'm getting quite deep for someone who's only way of selecting or organizing music consists of "me likes it! It goes in the me-likes playlist!".
The curve was updated over the years because they were still ongoing research on the subject. They spent almost a decade on this. I don't expect it to change much from now on(maybe the IEM one? IDK if they care, given all the variations we can end up with just from insertion and tips).
Harman does not claim to have a flat curve, but to have a curve picked by most people as a preference(clearly talking statistics here). Intuitively we have some reasons to assume that flat and preferred might be closely related, and the results aren't radically different from what an objective approach of flat sound at the ear would give. But while not radically different, they did get a curve different enough right at the start. For example, the boost in the low end contradicts an objective approach of flat sound at the ear.
We could reason that people try to compensate the lack of tactile bass or something like that, but those are only assumptions, we don't have the answer(I don't).
The curve is something close to what most people picked in the tests. That's what it claims to be and is probably the most rigorous answer to OP's question as frequency response is a leading variable in term of subjective preference. If for some reason most people don't prefer the average objective flat sound, then most people prefer something colored. ^_^ or maybe it's just that we're making false assumptions when considering flat on headphones/IEMs? Or we do that well, but then the results are messed up because we play albums mastered and panned for speakers(I vote that!)? Or maybe like with the bass, our ears aren't the only sensor for the music experience? I think it could go any way. Most likely there is a nice mix of us going for our own flat because we're used to it and it has a primitive appeal and reassurance, and us going for something else because we're not actually used to listening to music flat(recording, mixing, mastering, playback systems). I've heard music through TV, crappy speakers in stores and IEMs way more in my life than I've heard actual instruments or live bands. Does that alter my notion of normal flat? I honestly have no idea, probably not because I still spend the rest of the time with myself in the real world, so my hearing calibration should be pretty stable? But I do believe that all those non flat transducers will have changed my expectations of how sound should be and how some of my favorite bands should sound.
Something similar to how I discovered and listened to Queen for years almost exclusively on one pair of speakers in the same room, and I have almost stopped listening to the band when IEMs became my main music source for a time. And I have the opposite cases too, like Muse, I looped their albums on basically 2 pairs of IEMs. That's how they should sound to me, and I don't get the same emotion or appeal with IEMs that feel flatter to my ears, or with speakers. Habits have a solid say on my preferences, and I'm guessing it's similar for many people. Same as deciding what our favorite music genres are. Few people wake up one morning and decide that jazz is the best stuff ever if they never listened to anything like it before.
I'm getting quite deep for someone who's only way of selecting or organizing music consists of "me likes it! It goes in the me-likes playlist!".
The all thing contains many different tests, trying to EQ, using different real headphones, using the same headphone simulating different headphones and different target signatures, trials on different ethnicities(on different continents), trials on different age groups, etc. It's a beautiful series of papers.
From their final summary:
OUR MAIN RESEARCH GOALS
•What is the optimal headphone response in terms of sound quality?
•Is it the same for Around Ear (AE) / On Ear (OE) and In-ear (IE) headphones?
•To what extent do listeners agree on the preferred target response?
•Can we predict listeners’ headphone sound quality preferences based on objective measurements?
More here: https://www.listeninc.com/wp/media/Perception_and_-Measurement_of_Headphones_Sean_Olive.pdf
for each individual paper, most or all of them only had a period of free access and are now behind the moronic and scandalous knowledge paywall(this concerns AES, but pretty much all scientific research is in the same situation). sometimes google has an alternative answer ^_^.
ps: I said almost a decade of work, they say 5 years. I suggest to trust them .
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