I play games (mostly Valheim, but really anything with little to no voice over work), relax in a dark room, or do some work from home.

If you insist on a dongle, the Qudelix 5K comes with a great equalizer that you can use to tweak the bass closer to your liking. It’s about $100 and offers great value in power and features for that price. It will also connect to your phone via Bluetooth, and you can clip it to your clothing for something closer to a wireless experience than you normally get from an IEM.

Yes for sure, if you love 650 bass then probably the 600 won't be your preference tuning wise. For me I have the Hifiman Arya (with EQ) for bass heavy tracks when I want some punch/slam.

This is an online audio fallacy / myth. Time domain and frequency domain are only equivalent if both are infinite.

I wrote out a longer response in replay to a different comment, but an easy way to see the issue with what you’re starting is to ask how bass response would appear on the above chart (which is completely flat past ~0.002 seconds. One cycle at 200 hz is 0.005 seconds. One cycle at 20 hz is 0.05 seconds! How could you possibly infer anything about the bass response of that unit from that graph? How then can you say that graph is telling us only and exactly what the FR is?

If we want to get real technical, you’d also have to address how certain time domain translations do NOT alter the frequency domain (see shift property of the Fourier transform). That is, time delays do not alter the frequency domain. Relative timing information is very likely lost due to these two effects (representing the freq domain on a finite spectrum and not accounting for time delays).

Please stop propagating this misunderstanding that time and frequency are 100% equivalent

Lol we have our own accounts. Plus I’m better at money management then she is.

For headphones, I think it's almost entirely irrelevant. Theoretically, if you're playing high-res music files and your DAC's low pass filter isn't chopping off everything above 20K in the first place, it could mean that the Sundara could reproduce some of the highest harmonics of instruments (there is cited research from Boyk showing that many instruments naturally produce harmonics above 20KHz, and sometimes up to 100 KHz), however, the level of those ultrasonic harmonics is extremely low, at most 2% on trumpets and usually under 1% of the total energy of the note being played. Thus, it's of generally no use.

If you want to see how well-extended the treble reproduction is on a headphone, the FR graph is a better representation even though the treble is where the rigs generally aren't that accurate, and treble perception will vary greatly with differences in the shape of the ear. The FR ranges provided by the manufacturer are practically worthless.

Since we're on the topic of ultrasonic perception, the ability to perceive "sound-like" sensations isn't limited to hearing. There's research from Lenhardt et al. that people can understand speech through bone conduction via an ultrasonic carrier wave. So even though all of the frequencies being sent to the person are ultrasonic, the person perceives speech, rather than high-frequency noise. Some hearing aids work like this. So we can't "hear" in the normal sense beyond 20KHz, but somehow our brains can glean data from ultrasonic frequencies. That's not relevant to headphones, at least none that are on the market, but it's an interesting tidbit of info.

You bought $1300 IEMs and don’t expect the wife to notice? I need that kind of bank account immediately.

This man knows which acids not to fuck with.

Even if you could hear above 20kHz, many people forget, that the vast majority of microphones don’t record sounds beyond 20kHz anyway lol

Now drive them Balanced. There's a reason the headphones in the pictures on the Schiit website are all plugged in by the 4pin Balanced. https://www.schiit.com/products/jotunheim-1?Finish=514&Module=517&Voltage=520&Plug%20Type=522&

Waterfall plots are misleading when it comes to headphones, since headphones are mostly minimum phase, the "decay" from a Waterfall plot is directly linked to the FR. You can see this if you EQ the headphone or just shift the headphone on the measurment rig so the FR slightly changes, the "decay" will also change equally with the FR change.

Waterfall plots are designed for speakers and room treatment, and they work for that since it's measuring in different conditions, but for use in headphone measurements they can be more misleading rather than helpful if viewed the same way as waterfall plots for loudspeakers

Been hearing really good things about IEM’s and 64Audio. So I decided to pull the trigger and risk getting yelled at by the wife ( if she finds out ). Getting the ear impressions was a pain cuz of the distance to the audiologist office. $50 an ear with digital scans and 1.5 hrs each way. Also if anyone is interested the 10% off code works JKAZAM for JesseKazam on Twitch.

Are you claiming that Amir doesn't take extra care to have a proper seal and make sure that variables like pad wear are accounted for? /s

Isn't it nicer to see a full spectrum waterfall plot for decay?

For example, at what frequency is this? Or is this like the aggregate average?

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No, at best you can hear 20 k if it's super loud, at BEST. It's just stupid marketing, like they measured and the headphones could also hit 75 k so they were like yea why not write that on the box, hell dude your DAC even integrated sound is very likely to have a cutoff around 20 k. So yea.

Those headphones may have a frequency response over 20kHz, but that is a diffuse information, you could have 30kHz with 60dB less than 1kHz and still be considered to have a frequency response over 20kHz, the company will set its own way to represent the limit.

Gaming or just laing lazy in my chair and listenting to thr details of the music. Sometimes i even fall asleep to it

It's just good old marketing... Most instruments you'd every hear in music sit between 20 Hz and 20kHz so whatever figure on the box of a headphone is just visual candy marketing

teenage engineering m1

Mostly think about how to play them on whatever instrument I'm most interested in at that current moment.

Gotcha. The photo makes the dial look like it's at 3 o'clock. Once you get balanced you'll need a lot less gain with the Jot 2.

It's pointless marketing.