Unfortunately, people almost never agreeing on stuff is a problem the entire Internet has. It’s not a big deal in this case, it was just something I was curious about since it contradicts an agenda
headphones.com consistently pushes (IEMs needing a push in the upper mids to sound neutral to humans). I already have my ideal IEMs (Aful Cantor, which funny enough doesn’t have a push in the upper mids yet doesn’t sound recessed to me) so the answer to my question is kinda irrelevant to me anyway
Still not ideal though. One generally wants a straightforward answer when they ask a question.
Simple, read stuff like this
https://www.researchgate.net/public...d_Modelling_Techniques_of_Ear_Canal_Acoustics and some more on HRTF(how frequency response changes between people and between directions), then try to invent a rational about why a single FR(frequency response) can replace everything and why it's good for everybody. If you can do it, you didn't understand HRTF or human hearing.
And I'm saying that as someone with great respect for all the work done on headphones and IEMs by Harman, or the ideas from the OG at etymotic guys and a few others. They all knew better but got asked to look for the best choice among all the bad ones, and they delivered something on that flawed request.
After all, one FR is what headphone and IEM makers had to offer, so they did make up rationals with weak assumptions so that some curves would look a tiny bit more objective than others. The most famous of them is the diffuse field target. Someone went like: "We're screwed with that single FR target BS they ask us to invent, everybody here knows it should change with position and listeners. So here's my solution, we'll make a room so horribly reverberant that the position of the sound source won't even matter anymore, we'll measure that somehow with some standard to reject human differences, find some average, problem solved". Someone else went: "I'll measure speakers at 30° on some statistical average dummy head and copy it onto whatever". Someone else went: "I like that, so I'm selling IEMs with that FR". And of course someone went: "I put a driver into some shell my cousin designed based on how he knew how to make molds in that shape, it has a weird FR, but I'll market it as super audiophile stuff and some sucker will buy it if I spend all the money I didn't use on acoustic engineers and R&D, on marketing".
Ultimately, even if all was great and IEMs weren't a strange experience feeling nothing like a band playing somewhere in front of you, or even speakers, you'd still have what I explained last time. We could have as much as 10dB difference between our respective amount of ear canal gain because of the differences in our ear canals.
Some IEMs go deep in the ear, some do not, how do you factor that in some generalization about FR? Let's just talk practicality. Various measurement rigs won't let you insert the IEM like you would in your own ear(I sure could never insert my ER4 in my various cheapo couplers like I did in my own ears, and in my one experience of something with a fake outer ear, some shells wouldn't fit properly). Some people even insist on always getting the same distance between the driver and the coupler when measuring IEMs(admittedly some of the earliest measurement standards suggested as much, but then again they also suggested an amplifier with an output impedance of 100+ohm ^_^ great to measure IEMs...). Given how much impact insertion can have on the actual gain and the frequency of the resonances, who cares about who's got the longest career, the biggest penis, what some studio in Japan thinks is right, or the more intuitively believable rational? Different people are different. Different IEMs are different (even within the same pairs by some margin), Different measurement sources are giving different FR graphs for various reasons (one being that different couplers, exactly like different ears, have different acoustic impedances).
It's expecting a consensus on something entirely listener dependent, that's absurd. It's no better than arguing over what's the best food(po ta to!)
So from that, is there a trend in FR for IEMs aimed at Sound engineers to have less gain around 3kHz? Are IEMs aimed at the sound engineer even made for mixing outside a live concert? Perhaps. I do not know the answers. But if such a FR trend does exist and is favored by engineers, is it because it's more neutral? NO! That I can answer with confidence for the reasons explained here and in my previous answer to you. We all have ear canals, they create resonance, and we have always heard sounds IRL with it included. I cannot fathom what logic could ever justify removing it to get closer to neutral. It simply doesn't make sense.
But you, enjoying something that doesn't show much boost on some graph, obviously that's very fine. Out of the bunch of possibilities around that premise, I cannot say which one concerns you and that IEM in particular. Maybe the music genres you like don't suffer from reducing that area? Maybe you have a narrow and fairly short ear canal, and you still need some boost to sound neutral, but between too much boost and not enough, not enough simply feels much better? Maybe you're like me and hate having too much 4kHz and an IEM with a flat raw FR between 1 and 5kHz never hisses or hits too hard? IDK I'M not you. But I don't believe it has anything to do with sound engineers mixing on IEM or some FR being universally flat.
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