Ok, perhaps I misunderstood your OP, but as I understood it, you all knew which amplifiers you were listening to during these comparisons. Given the improbability of anything objective other than perhaps high-frequency response being responsible, I think you need to repeat the test - blind and...
The noise and distortion of all these amplifiers is almost certainly below any threshold at which they might become audible. The most likely explanations are (1) that levels were not correctly matched and that your brain interpreted this as one amp sounding different from the others, (2) that...
There's a wealth of knowledge in the BBC archives. I've linked here to the 1970s archive, but you can select any decade of interest on the right left, and then scroll through the various papers and reports.
That will be true in some cases, but completely recording-dependent. It all depends on the relative spectra of direct sound and reflected sound in the recoridng, and the nature of the deviation in FR upon reproduction.
A deviation in the reproduced FR may just as well make a recording sound...
I don't see how a headphone's frequency response can give a "live" or "dead" perception per se.
And I think you're glossing over an important fact regarding the Harman starting response. Although it was taken with two speakers in a room, it was taken beyond that room's critical distance, such...
@watchnerd will the result of this poll be binding again? Lol.
And have you already bought the Luxman that won the previous poll?
And should I put all my future audio decisions to popular ASR vote?
You're basically correct there. A DF response is a response in a highly reverberant room. The thing is, since we are dealing with headphones here, it doesn't really matter whether the response was obtained in a diffuse field or in a just-normally reflective room - if the two responses are...
Ok, sure, I don't mean to suggest that "preferred" implies that it is not neutral, and I certainly don't mean to imply that it is not good. I just am hesitant to make a generalisation about the relationship between preference and neutrality that comes from one set of studies involving speakers...
But this is the common misunderstanding re: the HTC. It was not derived this way at all.
This is essentially the process that was followed:
EQ a pair of loudspeakers in the Harman listening room so that the in-room steady state response is flat.
Measure this response using a HATS (NB: the...
Haha, no, because there are many different kinds of noise and distortion, and you won't find a DAC with the same noise/distortion characteristics as your TT and the vinyls you play on it.
However, if you ripped your vinyls to digital with decent gear, they would sound exactly the same as they...
Essentially, yes. Maybe $100 per unit if you wanted to be extra cautious (paranoid IMHO) about not potentially adding any audible noise/distortion with the DAC/preamp, or more than $100 if you wanted special functionality (e.g. balanced outputs, EQ, etc).
It's very likely there's a real...
Well, that's why I said "as a practical matter". Since headphones don't resemble listening rooms in any way whatsoever really, you have to start from somewhere. What starting point would you suggest, and why?
In addition to what others have mentioned, the optimal shape for a waveguide is not the optimal shape for a woofer cone and surround. A compromise needs to therefore be made between the two (generally, the most advanced designs essentially compromise in favour of waveguide shape, which I agree...