Agree with the Clears too. Ironically I ended up with the Sony mdr-z1r which is closed back to compliment the clear but it serves as more of more bass wider soundstage mood.

The short answer is: because headphones are not used for sound reinforcement and music is not recorded for headphones. The long answer is...

1950s: <Crickets>

1960s: Why would you want to listen to music through this strange military/medical aparatus?

1970: OK, here you go, but we have no clue how to voice this thing and our microphones don't really resemble human ear.

1980: Alright, weirdo, we now have a microphone that resembles human ear median between 1 and 3kHz and then it goes haywire, lol. Also here's a bit of theory that your headphones should have mainly midrange. Our transducers don't have enough bandwidth anyway. What is this Walkman thing again? Musicians want hearing aid? What?

1990: Hey, we figured that adding more bass and highs actually makes these things pretty nice. AKG didn't get the memo, lol. With some educated guesses, we got this tonality thing down for speech intelligibility. It works for music too. Aha and those earplugs, that musicians wanted are tuned nicely too, but only by one brand.

2000: Earbuds, earbuds everywhere! You want some earbuds? We have earbuds. AKG still didn't get the memo.

2010: Doesn't it suck that earbuds don't have bass? And laptop speakers, they don't have bass too. You know what, we have headphones that have nothing but bass and suddenly headphones are cool now. People are getting rich off them and scientists are suddenly interested in them for real. We have preference curves now and new tech. ALG finally releases a headphone with bass.

2020: Those earplug/hearing aid things are now all the rave and the technology is speeding up. Soon we'll have MEMS drivers and the price-performance will go through the roof.

Meanwhile speakers started this aorund the 30s I think and by 60s measurement tech and theory was pretty solid with HiFi and whatnot. People needed speakers for radio, TV and concerts, PA. Headphones were considered dangerous, uncomfortable, sonically inferior. Just generally meh.

Nobody really cared for headphones until 2010 when dubstep happened and high frequencies were killing your soul while bass was scarce through the PC speakers. It was all about bass.

When it comes to loudspeaker research it too went through phases and voicing is still an open question every time a new tech drops that allows for more channels etc. Just recently I watched a video by Dave Rat, where he argued that we need to use one channel per one microphone track so that engineers don't need to mix. He made a very live sounding speaker that way. Currently we're in a post-Toole world, where every loudspeaker is a slim tower with a waveguided tweeter, that sounds dead off axis, and is tuned for smooth power response rather than on axis FR. Meanwhile our most recent headphone microphone covers 20Hz-6kHz, lol. But they're catching up because of the wearable hype.

Please give us your thoughts on how they sound!

All these problems are about phenomenology and the problem of qualia.

Honestly if you want good budget in-ears just get Truthear Hola for 20$ or Truthear Zero for 50$.

No need to drop 500$ on headphones if something low tier like AKG buds lasted you that long lol

If it was made like the macbook pro power cables from 2014 onward, the outer sheath will begin to decay within 2 years of use. I've been through 3 power bricks because of that, on my last presently on its record breaking run but has multiple gaps in the outer layer (exposed conductor). When it fails that sucker is done, not buying more Apple stuff.

I remember doing the same to the logitech g430 long 2.3m cable. I only did half the cable though.

damn save some p*ssy for us

The HD8XX had changes done to the driver and has an added resonator, the stickers are a miniscule part of the sound change.

Check out the EQ preset in my review post, I tried Eqing them close to the HD800s.

The Dekoni pads are likely to affect the frequency response in a negative way

They are using the standard wired Earpods not AirPods

And tweaking a closed headphone to be pretty close to an anechoic chamber is not a difficult thing to do.

If you listen to a speaker in a room with some reflection, you will likely also hear bass reverberations. Harman's research takes into account these reverberations because they consider the type of environment in which people normally listen to music.

You are unlikely to see someone listening to music in an anechoic chamber.

Regardless of Sharur, Harman performed virtualizations (EQ) so that one headphone could sound like another, which is part of the methodologies used to develop the Harman Target. Among the studies conducted, individuals did not report significant differences between the original headphone and the equalized one, although there may be differences when wearing them in your ears. It is worth noting that the main differences will be found in the range of 1 kHz to 20 kHz, as these are the ranges with the greatest variations among HRTFs. u/West-Cheek-156

I don't know their exact release date, but I've heard 70s Stax estats that sounded perfectly hi-fi.

Amps are fundamental to lots of electronics applications, so all of that was worked out pretty early. Hi-fi headphones are more of a niche, and I don't know how big that niche was back then - hi-fi playback at home/stereo sound/etc was all pretty nascent in the 60s. Materials/manufacturing/engineering has also come a very long way since them, especially with the rise of computers and everything that enabled.

where is gold shielding? where is oil immerse pvc layer XD

Read about this subject here. TL;DR: The cleaner the headphone is between frequencies, especially in the high frequency region, the more definition it can have, and as a result, you will notice more "details." These descriptions correlate with the idea of auditory masking.

Among audiophile reviews and headphone frequency response graphs, what correlates with the idea of "more detail" is usually the region above 10kHz.

The region above 10 kHz is usually reduced in headphones as it is a region that we hear at high volume, but some headphones made for audiophiles have a lot of activity above that region so that the details in that range can be heard more easily.

On that note, I got a free iPhone 13 for work and I don't like it at all. They even screwed up the calculator. Like, how do you fuck up something that simple

Definitely because I got a job doing repairs at Audio Technica US a little over a month ago. I had been through various headphones before, primarily because I found it hard to find ones that were comfortable with glasses, or some had different sounds that I found better for gaming/music.

Now that I've been able to listen to cheap and expensive headphones, open and closed back, and headphones with different materials, it's been growing on me to try other brands and different styles and get a good personal setup going.

Planning on dropping ~$100 on a few different chifi IEMs tonight to get the ball rolling.

https://canjamglobal.com/attend/ there will be a canjam chicago this year, i know its not the ideal auditioning environment but its certainly better than nothing

Sharur in shambles.

Since they are pairing them with software that can presumably compensate for any non-flatness to the frequency response, all that matters is that their FR be well characterized and that it be capable of producing the requisite volume at all frequencies. They probably also have a precise understanding of the amp involved so that they know the exact volume that a certain level signal will produce at any given frequency.

Has the bass boost eq preset dropped yet…

First I see someone use ' to notate time minutes.