First post here (hi!) and I have been reading this particular thread with interest so I'm going to attempt at least to make it a meaningful first post!
My intrigue in the Harman Curve/Response/Standard/whatever you want to call it, was piqued after reading about it over on head-fi a while back. As a headphone junkie I'm always motivated to explore new ideas and technologies etc.
However, there's something about the idea of predicting what will appeal to an individual or group and then applying it to headphone/driver design and tonality that just doesn't sit right with me and I find it difficult to agree or concur with everytime I read about it. I'm wondering why I'm reacting to it negatively and I think it has more to do with psychology than anything else; I see so many parallels between the Harman 'concept' and the 'conformity principle' that I am bound to be averse to it. I hate conforming to anything, that's just my personality and I think it stems from when my parents sent me to a strict fee-paying school where the cane was regularly administered and on a weekly basis in my case! However, I digress. In any case, whether it's as a net result of my wayward youth and unwillingness to 'conform' to other people's ideas, when a group of people bet one way I always bet the other way. That's just me.
I would strongly advocate reading about the psychology of 'conformity' before committing to anything that proposes a 'universal standard'.
A brief definition:
Conformity is the act of changing your behaviors in order to fit in or go along with the people around you.
I also react aversly to the 'expert' responses whenever I read anything negative said about the Harman curve idea. It usually goes something like: 'Well, what I say is right and correct because this research was peer-reviewed by other experts as well as being based on science and research' bla bla blaa.
For a non-conformist such as myself this is pretty much a red rag to bull scenario and makes me more inclined to reject it further as an affront to my individuality and personal preferences. Again, psychology more than rational thinking on my part perhaps.
I sort of agree in principle with the idea behind trying to apply a universal tonality preference standard as it makes the prospect of having a 'commercially viable' product for any given headphone manufacturer more likely by administering an established 'end user requirement' which conforms to a standard. As a former product development project manager I see the clear value in this as a legitimate project driver in the product development phase setting a path for a milestone/target worth pursuing.
But there are simply so many caveats and holes in the idea of applying a universal standard or even 'baseline' as it has been referred to that it nullifies the idea from the start. There are so many variables and dynamics that can affect an individual's hearing perception on any given day that it would introduce fog/skew into the 'research' results depending on the time of the week/month/year/season/location/environment/mood/sex/gender/clothes worn/full or empty belly etc.
E.g. some days I find myself not wanting to listen to any music and that if I did hear music at any point by accident it would probably irritate me!
E.g. preference; everyone hears sound differently.
E.g. everyone has a different frequency range of hearing
E.g. qualitative perception. Ask someone if they perceive whether discovering and then administering the Harman response to their headphones has been a benefit or disbenefit. I would be SUPER-interested to learn the result of that particular question and propose that it could quite easily be linked to the conformity principle.
Like the contentious issue of whether cables make any difference to the signal path (let's not get started on that one here!) I think the debate is set to roll on and that as with cables, there will be 2 camps; the believers and the non-believers. I think the 3 main categories as defined by the Harman response being
Harman curve lovers, More bass lovers, Less bass is better is way too constrictive. It should at least include a
Forget about it, not interested thanks category.
My own preference is to listen to music and try to approximate or emulate the sound as much as possible to how it was originally recorded. A pointless and unrealistic objective perhaps and how could you ever verify that unless you bought the same equipment that they used in the studio/mastering process from the microphones and guitar jacks, through the process loops and mixing desk, to the engineers headphones in the mastering suite and even then....!
When I crank up the music I usually rely on different choices of the various tools at my disposal and have a vague idea of whether I'm going to enjoy the music first and be satisfied with the components used to listen to the music second. Another inherent danger of applying a tonality standard is that you start listening to the equipment first and the music second, which in my book is the wrong way to go about listening to music!
But 'each to their own' as they say. I never make any bold claims about my cables and only ever describe my own listening philosophy as trying to achieve neutrality and transparency, adding nothing and taking nothing away, which is how I think we should all be listening to the music!
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