I'd like to add that while we appreciate you taking the effort to perform and post these measurements, it seems as if your measurement rig could use some work, at least on the acoustic side of things. It gets hard to interpret measurements when people post them out of the blue. Some of the senior pirates feel that measurements without context/reference points only add more confusion for those who want to grab information easily. If I was a bit more wet behind the ears I might not understand that the 2-3k region on the Ether is actually recessed because of the ear gain in that region, or that the massive null at 6k is some sort of ear canal resonance but could actually be hiding what else is actually going on in that region. Specifically, I would expect the Ether to actually have a slight peak around there (similar to HD800) as that's a characteristic that a few senior pirates have heard from that driver, in both the Ether and the Ether C

I recommend conferring with Hans (who has a similar rig) and other pirates to are busy measuring headphones before posting further measurements. Your measurement system needs to be adjusted with some sort of compensation or move completely away from the "in-ear" technique in order to get better results.

No biggie. The method with pinna may have advantages for picking up 10kHz upward. We'll work on standards or procedures to provide reference points in the future iteration of this site. We plan on opening the site up to a wider audience, so disclaimers and better explanations to noobs is something we are thinking a lot more about there days. The 7 different kinds of measurements by 7 different people doing it 7 different ways... the measurements need to be qualified a bit better to avoid confusion. We'll tackle it, eventually.

For now, some mental calibration with same headphones:

I wonder if the drivers are made by Fostex or OEM of Fostex. They have similar design.

Only advice I have to offer for in-ear solutions is getting the right size tri-flange tip to hold the mic in your ear canal, and you want the mic to be as flush with the opening of your ear canal as possible. You really want it to seal nicely and fit securely.

It'll never be perfect (nor will any measurement method), and results are, of course, going to be very dependent on your actual head and ears. As such, they can't always be applied broadly to everyone else, but they can give some context around how your ears and head might affect how something sounds. It won't account for anything beyond the ear canal, hearing loss, or mental processing.

Anyone is free to disagree with me, but I have yet to find a measurement method that better captures how I hear headphones than how I do it myself. I always do plenty of listening before measuring, to be clear, and don't need measurements to tell me whether I think something sounds good or bad. However, I have yet to see any set of measurements aside from my own that captures the HE-560 as being as horribly painful as I hear it or the HD600 being slightly "hot" in the 2-5KHz range. But, again, my measurements are tailored to my head and ears, so YMMV. Every other set of measurements I look at (and I do look at as many measurements as possible), compensated or not, require some mental gymnastics on my part to understand how they might translate to how I hear the headphone. Are there still going to be quirks and measurements artifacts in my setup? Oh yeah, absolutely. But I've seen that in other setups too. That's why you don't rely on them TOO much.

Should also mention that I'm guessing the WM61a has some product variance, which is hard to compensate for unless you have the mic professionally tested. The idea of seeing how it measures a known flat loudspeaker is a good start for guys like us. I have some bookshelf speakers. Dayton BR-1 and those budget Pioneer pairs from a few years back, with known measurements from other sources. I should see how they measure with my in-ear mic. I'd also make sure you run your measurement equipment minus mic in loopback mode to figure out any further compensation you'll need to apply for the hardware itself. My phantom PSU + ADC have a bit of inherent bass roll-off that I compensate for.

As I've said before, one experiment I want to try is my in-ear mic on different people. Rules out any mic variability. That way I can get a feel for how other heads and ears affect how headphones measure on this setup. Should be interesting, if not enlightening.

Difference is that they don't stick out as much compared to how I perceive them. I'm decent at reading your measurements, but had I not been, I would have assumed the HE-560 bump would have been in-line with the rest of the response and not particularly hard for my ears. Maybe weird and out of place, but not painful. Sort of like the PM-2 treble bump, which is weird but not too strong relative to the bass and mids. Takes some mental compensation on my part, where as the measurements I got for the HE-560 look as painful as they sounded to me without me having to think about compensation. That's what I meant by that.   But, again, feel free to disagree...I use my measurements primarily as a way to build context around my subjective impressions, not as some absolute truth.