Quote from: khaos on February 25, 2012, 02:00:40 PM

Has something happened to UE, he's no longer posting on HF?

Well I heard through the grapevine that the HD700 test subjects were being Jedi-mind-tricked into offering nice handy quotes for CES on behalf of Sennheiser Singapore. Supposedly UE disappeared around this time.

Maybe Headfonia's HD700 were made from the ashes of UE's black bones, that's why they sound so good

Which forum are you going to post it in though?

I can't imagine my post regarding he LCD-2 and $700 cables would survive outside of the sound science forum.

So I think I have a few ideas about why headphones vary so much in their sound, even all the way at the top and wonder what everyone here thinks about it.

The first reason is probably because HRTFs can vary a lot from person to person.  I should have saved it since I can't find it anymore but a while ago when I was searching on Google Scholar I found an  interesting paper.  Many different subjects had the FR changes due to their personal HRTFs measured.  There was a graph with an average response but there were also bars showing the range of measured values and IIRC at some frequencies there was more than 10db in variation between different subjects.

That pretty much implies that two people could disagree about whether the LCD-2 or SR507 had the more neutral FR and that both of them could actually be right.

The second reason is that the basic design of a headphone is so compromised and full of trade-offs that by itself it doesn't get within a mile of the neutrality of speakers, let alone a real performance.  The most obvious shortcomings are the lack of full body tactile sensation and the fact that 99% of the time headphones are feed source material mixed for speakers which assumes a lot of acoustic crosstalk between channels.  These kind of things necessitate compromises and unless you've stated a specific goal for your headphone system ahead of time there's no way to say that choosing one compromise instead of another is the "wrong" choice and farther from neutral.

Basically I'm coming around to the idea that by themselves all headphones are so colored that touting one as neutral in an overall sense is like citing the measurements of you RealDoll as evidence of it being just like the real thing.

I'd have to do a little more research before flat out claiming this, but I also think that all these compromises and differences actually confuse people's senses to such a degree that their ability to even notice that a headphone is severely colored as compared to something they'd hear from a distance.  Just trying to imagine people arguing over speakers as different as an LCD-3 and a PS1000 almost give me a headache.  With headphones being so disconnected from most people's perception of reality there's no reason for designers not to go hog wild with whatever strikes their fancy.

None of that's an excuse for the piss poor QC or lazy design that was mentioned in this thread but it does explain the wide variety of FRs. 

What about a hypothetical ED8 speaker merits a law suit over the RS1 speaker's laughter?

According to RD the HD800 is the weaponized face tweeter...

I heard an ED8 briefly once and don't remember any issues with the highs.  It was a while ago and I didn't take any notes though...