I've had mine for about a week and I have nothing bad to say about the sound, really love them in that regard. What surprised me, seeing all the glowing comfort comments, was my only issue is on the comfort side (coming from 6XX). My ears touch the driver cover in most positions and I find the headband just feels a little loose. They stay put but it's just this slight sense of instability.

I've ordered some Dekoni pads I've heard fit this well to see if they solve some of my issues, I really wish the originals fit me a bit better because they're beautiful and the velour is lovely.

Yes of course the changes would show up in FR but if they’re disproportional and non linear depending on frequency then you in fact cannot extrapolate all extra information from FR alone, you’d need additional information to find the unknown variables. Without a valid min phase assumption there’s too many unknowns to solve. 20-50hz is for sure in most people’s audible spectrum, as is alot of the hf content susceptible to it. Again, not saying this is inherently a bad thing, but it is true. Please see my other comments below for more discussion

looks complete to me

Definitely the headphones, but if you are happy with the X2HRs, then you can rock this setup until something breaks. I recently upgraded from the X2HRs to the LCD X 2021s while it was heavily discounted during Black Friday, but I think I made that decision more because I felt a "need" to buy something new rather than feeling like the X2HRs weren't getting the job done.

Honestly, nothing negative. I bought mine from Apos and they had a free cable upgrade, so I chose the balanced 4.4 termination. I like their Flow cable much more than the stock one. I was using various upper end gaming headsets. Then I dove into the world of iems and had a couple high end sets. My 109 is paired with the Fiio k7. With this setup, there is a fullness to music. The detail and separation is fantastic. I hear things in songs that I never heard before. Songs I’ve been listening to since the 80’s.

Where? Link?

>many popular headphones (audeze, hifiman, sennheiser etc) have large portions of nonlinear and non- minimum phase response within their operating range.

Can you please post excess group delay measurements of all these 'many popular headphones' with 'large portions' of non-minimum phase response?

>I mean I would say a 5ms delay in the low frequencies in those plots is pretty significant...

That's measurement noise. See here.

I'd take the Celestee personally, it looks substantially better tuned. The Celestee is the direct replacement for the Elegia, after it was discontinued, and it has been $990 in the US while the Elegia has been selling for much less ($300-400).

If you like the Clear, the Celestee looks closer to that. Elegia is good for the low price but I think EQ is pretty much mandatory, I would not consider it if you aren't going to EQ it. Resolve has a good long term review with EQ profiles if you do go for that.

Oratory has measurements:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fo91u5wo3p3vwh6/Focal%20Celestee.pdf?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ialbitfdqmx2jr4/Focal%20Elegia.pdf?dl=0

How old are you, bruv?

[deleted]

you forgot your Abyss AB 1266 Phi TC and Eleven Audio stack

To me they are. Some find they're a little too small

When I travel, my Bose Quiet Comforts normally go with me, and whatever other headphones I feel like taking. I've travelled with my Meze 99 Classics before.

Are these galaxy Buds Pro confortable?

Thats really depends on yourself really, i haven't look into performer yet so i can't say things about it, but S12 pro is a really good iems although it is V-shaped but the midrange is not THAT bad... but still kind of subdued in some way which why i still like Hexa and holding the Kato even s12 outperform them in techincality.

> And for an audiophile audience who spend thousands on audio equipment I really don't think fiddling with a few sliders to make their stuff sound better should be too much.

As a counter point, if I'm spending thousands on equipment, I shouldn't need to.

Yeah, Etymotics are quite good at hitting the neutral target, although one should take the different HRTFs of people into account. For some, they're the epitome of neutral; for others, less so.

Maybe just my purist preferences playing around here, but I don't think that flat necessarily sounds soulless like that, although definitely a bit boring. For me, flat means tight bass in quite meagre doses, unexciting but natural mids, and a somewhat cold but not harsh treble.

To be fair, I don't like DF either, because I don't think DF is neutral for mastered tracks, maybe for recorded tracks at most. For mastered stuff, something like IEF neutral is closer to flat for me.

To be a bit more accurate: he asked a few hundred listeners, some trained, some untrained, to select their preferred sound, and he tweaked the curve accordingly. So the Harman curve isn't a neutral curve, it's a preference curve. Not flat.

By the knowing how one heaphone graph looks like you can understand the character of the sound. You just need to understand what character do you prefer and then it's way easier to find headphones or iems which most likely fit you. But graph won't tell you anything about the technical abilities of headphones. So you can't trust the graph and only the graph.

Looks good to me. What are you lacking? Do you wanna try something different or is it just GAS/FOMO?

Sure. And well in all likely event it's fine but there are some stories..

My guess is that differences other than frequency response are related to harmonic distortion, and things like ringing/resonance in the headset cup, mostly.

Harmonic distortion makes it hard to tell instruments apart because pure tones already gain extra overtones which can audibly affect the character of the sound if they are above some -60 dB relative to the main tone, and multiple tones do not blend cleanly, either, but interact and create additional extra frequencies, and it is typically called intermodulation distortion. These extra frequencies could be perceived as extra noise, or timbre changes, or such, and may make it hard to tell instruments apart. It is one of the reasons why I look for harmonic distortion graphs, especially those that have separated 2nd, 3rd, 4th and so forth, as physiological measurements of human auditory system show that the masking of the harmonic distortion mostly covers the 2nd harmonic at some -40 dB level, but barely at all for the higher ones, though there is general tendency for harmonic distortion below -60 dB to be inaudible no matter where it is.

For over-ear headphones, ringing in the cup is probably visible as narrow peaks in frequency response at some specific frequencies, assuming the graph is not overly smoothed. Ringing is usually also visible as minor kinks in impedance graph as well, as the driver behaves somewhat differently at those particular frequencies, and is likely also seen as abrupt changes in the group delay and phase. So I like to see a nice flat group delay plot up to some 10 kHz, to know that there are no phase or ringing issues to be expected. Above some frequency depending on the cup's distance to headset fixture and earlobes, the measurement device itself will add all sorts of phase issues, and generally speaking the measurement above 10 kHz is not usable. For IEMs, I think the measurement reliability extends far higher, though there will be a peak for the ear canal resonance frequency where soundwave bounces between eardrum and the IEM and the exact frequency depends on insertion depth.

In an ideal world, I'd get both and keep the Elites haha. I reckon I'll go with the used Arya's because I've a decent idea what I'll be getting into.

don't forget Kevin