Comments on Profile Post by Lyander

If it's at least not super offensive i'm much more interested in the harmonic distortion profile. Most people can follow a recipe but not everyone can cook, is that a good analogy? idk lol

@Riotvan haha, I'm more just amused and bewildered at how lots of folk are dismissive of CSD, IR, and other time domain-based measurements. Distortion DEFINITELY is a massive factor in determining whether something is actually bad or not, though. One of many elements

Yup i like the holistic approach and not just for audio stuff.

As someone who does not understand most technical measurements, I feel, probably mistakenly, that frequency response is one of the more accessible and easy to understand. There are probably many, many "audiophiles" at my level of ignorance or worse.

@Thad E Ginathom It's more the fact that folks who have been in the hobby for a while and, in my opinion, who might be expected to believe differently, have started espousing the same causing it to be parroted by others that triggered this post. To be fair, lots of these same folks are among the "DACs don't make a difference" crowd.

Did you look at stuff from the special people at Headphones.com? More treble is more detail?

@fraggler And more upper treble is increased transient response.

I disagree so strongly with the reviewers at headphones.com about this that I refuse to read/watch any more of their content.

@ilikebananafudge_ I think that there are still folk there with functional ears and steady preferences so I haven't quite stricken them all from consideration, I just have trouble seeing how and why they've started pushing this.

I feel everything leads to perceptions of different frequency response which lead to different staging etc. I liked the graph marv posted a while back of the perceived frequency response of all the yggys, despite the measurements.

@Cellist88 right, but that's perception which is very different from what's *measurably* there, no? I'm not saying that there are things that'll NEVER be measurable (that just sounds silly to me), only that lots of discussions nowadays are overly reductive. Don't remember that post re: the Yggdrasils, do you remember which thread that was in?

So kind as a link to the article, lots of content over there…

regardless of measurements, the perceived response is different in different portions. Feels like measurements are in 2d, when the sound is actually one or 2 dimensions higher. Here is the graph. https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?attachments/upload_2021-9-26_17-59-47-png.28396/

NO

There's a lot to unpack about the implicit assumptions contained within FR supremacy ideology, but instead of addressing all of those things individually, here's something to ponder - if you would not appraise the performance of a microphone based on FR alone, why would you do so with a headphone?

Alternatively, if we assume that FR is the only thing that matters, then doesn't a product's stock FR no longer matter when EQ exists?

Whether transducers or sources/amps, people have known for almost a century that the harmonic makeup of the distortion is very important. Read this from 1949 and see the ref. to work done in the 1930s: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1949-30.pdf . Now consider Sennheiser bass vs planar (or even biodyna) bass.

And specifically regarding sources, remember "all CD players sound the same" from the 1990s and see @Cellist88 response: if it's mostly about FR, and even distortion (which in most cases measures low enough to be supposedly imperceptible), how could different DACs sound different?

Measurements are nothing if the physical processes that cause them aren't understood.

Grateful for this space where whinging about audio nerdisms is met with considerate discourse LMAO

I’m still wondering if maybe everything might be HIDDEN somewhere within FR. Like the squiggles of an impulse response are frequencies, too, e.g.. I just don’t think such stuff is easily visible in an FR plot or can be used to just EQ a different resolution or sth like that.