I have no final opinion on this question. But he did definitely not answer my exact question, which stated the condition that two different IEMs could both be EQed perfectly to a target curve and he said something about resonances that might prevent that. But nevertheless, it seems that for headphones, as compared to amps, DACs and even speakers, the percentage what can be measured to determine the sound is the lowest. There was the case of the Mark Levison which closely followed the Harman curve but still did not sound all that great. For IEMs this is probably a bit easier as they anyway do not have a huge soundstage and so detailed imaging. But I tend more and more to believe that most, if not all, terms that are usually called technicalities, like speed, detail, air, et. are either non-existent or a consequence of the FR.Sorry but I think he answered your question, it was a closed question, yes or no. He thinks no. You really want to push that 2 identical frequency response with low enough distortion will sound exactly the same. It’s a fair belief. It make sense, but unforunately you won’t get a consensus on that. Not from research, not for the engineers working in designing headphones, not from science in a wider sense. Yoû’ll get opinions, It appears that your opinion is that the scope of what is being measured in a suite of standard measurments like we see in these page is all and complete in defining audio reproduction of transducers, all else, details « technicalities », etc, are meaningless. Me, my opinion, I agree they are meaningless, they are just word trying to describe Subjective assessments. But then, after we said that. It’a a large stretch, between « meaningless » and « all differences are imagined » From then on plenty of theories and hypothesis, Dan Clark don’t thinks everything can be measured, Putzeys think everything can be measured but it’s not necessarily the most obvious measurments that are the most defining, other have their views. Bottom line there is no consensus one ideas like « speed don’t exist » or « details is just more high » or Soundstage, etc, etc. Me I think that for electronics, pretty much sorted. In transducers… Even Amir will always put value on his listening assessment for speakers and headphones. Me I think, opinion, You ask questions that will not get you answers that are backed by facts, I think you have to accept that and accept that it’s ok for someone to say: It’s not obvious from this suite of tests, but this sound better to me than this. Because, well, the acoustic part of the reproduction chain is not all sorted, headphones sound differents, speakers sound different, once this is cleared out, well this is the factual part, then it’s interresting to try to find out why But it’s no simple binary solution to this.
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