Yorkshire Mouth
Major Contributor
But in practice, what does it really matter? Does anyone stick hard and fast to the EQ settings, for eg, Oratory1990 to Harman, or in fact plug those filters in first then tweak. I almost always lower the bass filters and often some of the others. How "accurate" the Harman target is only ever really becomes an issue if the only filters you can use are pre made convolved ones which cant be adjusted by the user.
But its interesting to refresh how we got to Harman. A more interesting one is how we get from the original HP curve to the one now.
I'm probably not going to put this very well, but here's my feeling.
I think this view...further legitimises debate, and gives us a fresh view.
May I offer an example. AKG K371s. Between 20hz & 100hz it's heavier on bass than Harman by c.4dB. If Harman is 6dB too bass heavy to start with, that makes for a 10dB overshoot.
In comparison, the Sennheiser HD600/650s slope from 100hz down to 20hz, starting at Harman, and ending up 11dB below at the very end.
Using that measure, the HD600s are closer to 'great speakers in a great room' (GSIAGR) than the AKGs.
From now on, when I look at Amir's headphone reviews, here's a thing I'll have in mind. When I look at what is usually his second graph (frequency response deviation from target), anything below 100hz which is within 6db of the blue line, I think needs to be considered 'within range'. And at the top, anything from around 2.5khz up to 20khz which averages 3dB above is also 'within range'.
And again, regarding your comments on applying and experiment with EQ, I think it's good to know we can use it, but I suspect most of us would like to have to use it as little as possible, due to added issues such as distortion. Using the GSIAGR target curve, you have to add a hell of a lot less EQ at the bottom end, which is clearly preferable.
I think you're right, JimBob. I think we need an exact Harman curve less and less, and more of a range. For certain, it'd be wrong to say the Harman curve is empirically 'wrong'. But surly it's equally wrong to say that one curve is 'right', or should be our target.