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Originally Posted by rhythmdevils /img/forum/go_quote.gif
From my own point of view that is not based on science or fact, I don't really agree with the idea that we all hear headphones differently. I think that people just prefer different colorations, that it is a mental difference rather than a physical one. But, the community's reaction to IEM's seems like it would prove this yay or nay because like you said, there are none with IEM's, the sound just goes right into the ears. If opinions are just as varied with them as with full sized phones, than your reflection theory, however convincing, wouldn't account for much it seems...
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Interestingly, someone commented how, at Canjam, in the Smythe Research room, you could listen to how the set-up sounded programmed for different people's ears, and it was noticeably different for each person, so, while not "scientific proof" in the strictest sense, there was definitely something in the idea of people's ears delivering a different experience to each person. But by simple logic, everyone's ears are physically different, so there's no reason why the sound they deliver to the ear canal wouldn't be slightly different. How much so is another matter.
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Originally Posted by rhythmdevils /img/forum/go_quote.gif
So this seems like one of the main arguments. Are the HD800's revealing flaws in 99.9% of gear out there, or is that .1% of gear is synergizing well and eliminating flaw(s) in the HD800? I guess it doesn't matter in the end, but I would argue the latter. Sennheiser clearly didn't design them with this .1% of gear in mind.
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What comes to mind is, remove the word "flaws" entirely and look at it a different way. Objectively, the more resolving the drivers in a pair of headphones, the more they scale in performance as the gear they are used with scales in its resolution. Subjectively, their tonality may not be an enjoyable sonic match with certain gear, music and people. As one progresses up the scale at which gear can resolve details and where even small tonal changes are more noticeable, there's more that one might find subjectively good or bad in the differences in what one hears between components and how they interact with one another.
I've noticed as one heads towards the high-end and the soundstage grows, instruments become more separate and distinct and one moves father and father away from the all-mushed-together sound of lo-fi gear, in some respects it's harder to find a combination of components that delivers the music in a way that's enjoyable, as instead of a wall of sound, without all the distortion, music can easily start to sound boring. This is why, I think a lot of people get the "My iBuds sound better" comment when trying to introduce friends to high quality gear. They just aren't prepared for the music to come from individual instruments with "black" between them instead of a wall of sound blurred together. The HD-800s take this further ahead again, by removing more of the "wall", which with many headphones is created with a mid-bass boost. This is also why people (including myself) felt the need to re-cable them with cables that add just a touch more bass, as we want some of that warmth back, that is, the mid-bass boost part of the "wall" we're used to.
Listening, to, say, Alicia Keys as she sings in a recording studio with a degree of resolution that one can visualise the size of the booth she was standing in from the echos off the walls, with some very poor crap laid over her vocals is just too much info. Many of us like to have something to fill in the "black" with a lot of music, and hide from us the cables running across the floor of the recording studio, imagining instead we're listening to an overwhelming live performance. This is arguably more so if the music is mostly electronic.
On the other hand, there is music where we want to focus on the intensity of the individual performers so that the spirit of their performance is transferred to us as much as possible. This is where the HD-800 excels, up to the degree of the component chain's ability to do the same. However, despite this, it can end up leaving us a bit further back in the audience than is ideal to get the intensity we might crave with some music. This is much the same as putting jumbo/bagel pads on some Grados -- even if it means everything spaces out, you lose the intensity to a degree, and lose some of the "wall", and some of the fun with certain music.
The result is an annoyingly higher demand for extracting great aural enjoyment from them. Even Stax are more forgiving in this regard. Instead of bringing more fun (which, since I was quoting rhythmdevils, he might call the lack of a "flaw", though there are many technical aspects to this from their frequency response to their impedance curve we could find fault in if we looked at it objectively rather than subjectively), we get more resolve, so if not more resolution of the music, more resolution of the capabilities of the components feeding it. We're back to the Head-fi newbie fault of buying good headphones and a cheap amp and sourcing it from our cheap computer sound-card again, but much further up the scale. And we're back to square one. We either buy something that tonally balances them or we buy a lot better gear, depending on what kind of enjoyment we're looking for when listening to music.
I hope this rant made some sort of sense.
