i'm pretty ok with someone with your amount of disposable income making some potentially irrational buying decisions, so this seems something that's fine to let lie, unless you really feel the need to defend the product (because you did spend like a used car worth of money on it).
like i've said before, i'm worried about the your subjective opinion encouraging others, likely without the same amount of disposable income, doing the same thing you did. ASR, objective measurement, and so on, are here to help people make better choices on what to do with their scarce resources. eg, don't buy expensive cables, don't buy power conditioners, don't buy multi-thousand dollar DACs and headphone amps. DO eq your headphones, use room correction tools with your speakers, etc.
i didn't know this stuff (ok i knew about silly cables) before i started really reading and experimenting for myself with the (not all well spent!) gear that i had, and much of my teenage years were spent stuck in a room building audio circuits! i know there are some key choices i made that i now regret where i got out of my depth and didn't have a reliable guide.
so yes, the case is closed. you have lots of disposable income. you bought a very expensive set of headphones of very dubious value from cable peddlers among other things. however, you like your purchase on subjective merit, so good for you. now we're moving on to what the measurements say and what that means for other people.
I wouldn't in a million years tell anyone on a budget to go spend thousands of dollars on a pair of headphones. For the love of God, buy a pair of Sennheiser HD600's and be done with it.
However, if someone with $5000 burning a hole in his pocket tells me that he wants to buy the best pair of headphones he can afford, I know what I will recommend to him.
And I should make it very clear, I am defending the product because I own it and it sounds great, not because I am looking to justify my purchase. I don't want to defend the product, and I am only defending the product against people trashing it who have no idea what they're talking about. I don't like how Abyss sells snake oil and tube amps and makes outlandish claims about their products. I hated the look of these headphones from the moment I first saw them and swore never to buy them, but curiosity eventually got me. They are uncomfortable and I nearly sold them when I got them because they wouldn't fit right on my head. I could have gotten every penny pack.
I really wanted to hate them. But they sound so, so good, and when I put them on I can't stop listening to them. I close my eyes and lose myself in the music.
In order not to spam this thread with any more of my posts, I will make my point here:
I have read the Harman research and Sean Olive's studies. I know what it says and doesn't say.
Firstly, they wanted to understand how to built excellent loudspeakers, so they used scientific methods involving blind testing to determine what objective measurements correlated the most with listener preference. In the end they found these measurements and created loudspeakers that are very hard to beat. Among these measurements was frequency response.
With loudspeakers out of the way, they turned their attention to headphones and in-ear monitors. They were faced with a problem, however. Blind testing allowed them to conclusively determine everything that went into engineering great loudspeakers, but they were unable to conduct blind tests on headphones with the same amount of rigor. This forced them to settle for solving a slightly different but related problem, namely figuring out what frequency response on a headphone correlated the most with listener preference. Eventually they found that frequency response, and it is what we know as the Harman target.
They compared IEM's with the simulated version of those IEM's and found a 1:1 correspondence when conducting preference tests, so they concluded that frequency response could be used to predict in most cases what IEM's listeners would prefer.
However, the inability for them to conduct a proper blind test with headphones prevented them from deriving a similar correspondence. What this means is that the Harman research does not allow us to say that frequency response alone can predict listener preference among different headphones. All things being equal, yes it can, but we are talking about comparing totally different headphones where all things aren't equal. If a headphone's frequency response deviates significantly from the Harman target, then it probably won't be preferred. The AB-1266 doesn't deviate significantly from the target, and there are only a few areas where it is more than 3dB off. I would not be surprised if the AB-1266 sounded even better if its natural frequency response tracked the Harman target more closely; I never made the claim that it is perfect.
The same research says the preferred frequency response of a pair of headphones also depends on the program material. If one is listening to music recorded with equipment calibrated to be flat and mastered on flat studio monitors, then the Harman curve will be perfect. For the majority of music that isn't produced in such a way, all of that goes out the window. This is also consistent with the research on loudspeakers; frequency response is one thing among many that correlates with listener preference for a loudspeaker, but it isn't necessarily the most important, and you can't judge a loudspeaker based solely on it. With the majority of music that is tonally off, you will be listening for other qualities.
There are reasons to believe that there are factors other than frequency response that figure into how much we enjoy a pair of headphones. They sit over our ears and not in them, so the sound we hear is acoustically modulated by our ears, and this is likely affected by the design of the headphone.
I should also add that in the Harman research, they were always looking for the measurements that correlated with listener preference and not the other way around. Listener preference was paramount. Subjective evaluation was always a part of it, so there is nothing wrong with me saying that I prefer one pair of headphones over the other. It isn't as reliable as blind-test data, but it's also not to be totally disregarded.
Here is the Harman research for anyone interested:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjABegQIJhAC&usg=AOvVaw3poq-QBHdmv1fEVquLCrzw
I've said my piece. Case closed.