Abyss Diana V2 Review (headphone)

[Ayyakhema]

All three comments you have ever made since 2018 is to criticize Amir?

yesh im out of here
please amir ban me

 

[Ayyakhema]

Well anyone who has the slightest grasp of how science works can tell that Jude (if the measurements are indeed a response to Amir’s measurements) very obviously manipulated the way the data is presented so it would look as if the headphones are not that bad.

You can get anyone who published a paper or any postgraduate student in any field of science and they would agree to that.

Infact Amir’s response was the most comprehensible response that i have read on this forum, because it requires zero acoustic knowledge to understand.

problem is, anyone with acoustic knowledge will laugh at amir assertion

 

[Tachyon88]

@tential What you said is exactly how Abyss should of handled it, but didn't. Instead of saying these come off as different and exciting and that's why people like our brand, they took issue with the measurements saying that their internal testing does not show that high of distortion and personally attacked Amir. Then they said they would get a third party to measure it and tapped a site they sponsor to do it. However, tester also says that they were not asked to measure it by abyss, but did it after they became "aware" of the thread. On top of that the headfi measurements basically confirm the high distortion that abyss says is much lower from their internal testing they have yet to release.

At the end of the day I just want the truth and I hope that Abyss can learn the right lessons from this.

 

[amirm]

in my eye, your grasping at straws here. Jude's measurements clearly demonstrate the flaws of your own measurements. rather then go back and measure again, you go on a weird tangeant about Jude's measurements box

I hope you wont be offended by how I talk to you about those matters

I am not offended by the tone although you are being quite rude. That aside, you don't seem to have understood either Jude's measurements or mine. I clearly showed using Jude's measurements that a) this headphone has huge amount of distortion in mid-frequencies and b) it indeed is deficient in sub-bass department. These were the two faults I identified with this headphone and Jude's measurements confirmed the same.

Of course, no two headphone measurements will ever match as I have repeatedly said. It is fool's gold to try to stick to that notion. But we can look for correlation and here, that was excellent. It seemed Jude thought as long as his measurements are visually different than mine, he has proven some kind of point, not realizing what the real issue at hand was.

In addition, I said in the review that I could get different results when positioning the headphone anyway. So there was no need to show some variance on the part of Jude's. What I then said was that the measurement set that I used in the review best correlated with my listening tests. Jude on the other hand, made no attempt to verify that his measurements are correct using listening tests and equalization. Kind of strange for someone who calls from subjectivist side of the equation here!

The discussion around the enclosure he is using is something that I thought of that I thought was worth having a chat about. It has no bearing on the main arguments in this review thread to the point that Jude has already confirmed my findings.

Net, net, doesn't look like you understand any headphone measurements. You were fooled by a bunch of graphs put on head-fi, ran off by wording that didn't match the data presented there and called it done with some insults thrown in for good measure.

 

[amirm]

@tential What you said is exactly how Abyss should of handled it, but didn't. Instead of saying these come off as different and exciting and that's why people like our brand, they took issue with the measurements saying that their internal testing does not show that high of distortion and personally attacked Amir. Then they said they would get a third party to measure it and tapped a site they sponsor to do it. However, tester also says that they were not asked to measure it by abyss, but did it after they became "aware" of the thread. On top of that the headfi measurements basically confirm the high distortion that abyss says is much lower from their internal testing they have yet to release.

At the end of the day I just want the truth and I hope that Abyss can learn the right lessons from this.

Well said. On reddit one of their folks post that the original statement came from someone on their team that had become angry and didn't represent their formal response. And post that they respect reviewers and their opinions. So maybe we have made them change some.

 

[KTN46]

I'm not saying abyss has to do that, but they don't have to act like their product is perfect for the audiophile science based community and the audiophile emotion based community. It's two different crowds.

I don't think they're necessarily different communities. The 'emotional' context should still not be devoid of backing/measurements. It's all well and good to say "we've designed a product that sounds good to us", but the thing with that is, well... How do you quantify this emotion of 'good'?

I think you'll find that lots of members on ASR for example like tubes. Tubes are objectively more distorted than solid state, yet we still buy and appreciate tube products. We measure tubes to see what sort of effect it has, and to correlate them with what we might like about them. I don't think quantifying enjoyment is a bad thing. Taste is subjective after all.

Where the issue asises for me is when things have ridiculous premiums to target these 'emotions' and to induce cognitive bias. When it's called out the defense usually goes "well we didn't design this to measure well, MEASUREMENTS don't matter". Look at the Schiit Yggdrasil for example. $2500USD for apparently the best, most realest, "approximation free" DAC in the universe. Yet it measures worse than even it's own cheaper DACs. Is there another metric by which we can understand how good a DAC is? Is there an emotional angle that can justify throwing that much money away? I don't think so. I think the Yggdrasil is a waste of money.

Too often I think this subjectivity angle is used to actually mean anticonsumer snake oil. To me, designed "By ear. Not by measurements" raises an eyebrow, because how else then can you account for your cognitive bias? How can you tell if a change you made actually made a difference when you're expecting a change to happen?

Furthermore, @amirm clearly has his emotional angle as well, which people often tend to ignore:

At the same time I can't imagine anyone being able to make a good case that you should have a chunk of your spectrum taken out from the lower to middle treble. This is where a lot of "air" and sense of "hi-fi" exists in music.

Equalization was hampered by difficulty in measuring the headphone and the fact that distortion can work against you, creating more harshness and artifacts as you attempt to fill in the holes. I don't mind distortion if the response is too high in that region.

Yes, I have read the other reviews where people say they died and gone to heaven after listening to this headphone. Don't ask me to rationalize their experiences. I am here to rationalize mine.

These are statements with subjective qualifiers, only difference being is that they were explained and rationalised with objective measurements and methodology. You can understand this review with its measurements and still think "...huh this headphone might totally be for me!". But at least then you'd understand it. I prefer something a bit flatter than the Harman curve, and I've liked headphones that @amirm has recommended against. I use his subjective taste and objective measurements to better understand my own.

The bottom like is, it's very easy to appeal to emotion. $3000 cables that look really pretty appeal to emotion as well. You could argue that their purpose is "emotional", that the differences they claim to make are more "emotionally heard". Yet we are fine at laughing at them as snake oil because the only thing that they can do is make the buyer feel that they have better audio. We should ground the basis for our emotions in a more consumer friendly manner. The performance to price ratio of the Diana V2 should not be excused.

 

[BDWoody]

yesh im out of here
please amir ban me

I'll take care of that... Don't want you to have to ask twice.

 

[the_brunx]

Im thinking If that story was true. They would have already apologized to you/reviewers by now. Have they?... until then it just seems like standard backlash damage control.

 

[Dj7675]

I am not a big fan of conflict, in particular if things get out of hand. Also, I am also not currently a “headphone” guy (Might change though). This thread was extremely educational on the the what, why, and how of Amir’s headphone measurements. These kind of things are a huge drain on time and energy I am sure. But in this case, the effort was put forth in a very well thought out and digestible format for even the least knowledgeable (which I appreciate).

 

[the_brunx]

Why would abyss post this video without any caption or explaination on headfi when the previous comment before it says:
„Don’t succumb to the psychopaths.“

 

[amirm]

Why would abyss post this video without any caption or explaination on headfi when the previous comment before it says:
„Don’t succumb to the psychopaths.“?

Simple: they know this is one of my favorite movies and by posting that they are saying I am right and Jude was wrong!!!

 

[the_brunx]

Someone needs to unplug their keyboard.
this is now ridiculous.

 

[_thelaughingman]

Someone is clearly butt hurt at being called out for their substandard product.

 

[AJ571]

Abyss appear to be at the meme level of corporate communication.

Might as well be having this conversation on 4chan for all the value this adds.

 

[Dealux]

Could the unit you have be a dud or because Abyss doesn't particularly care about measurements there's quite a large amount of unit variation?

 

[Francis Vaughan]

Could the unit you have be a dud or because Abyss doesn't particularly care about measurements there's quite a large amount of unit variation?

Maybe, but despite the obfuscation and self serving rhetoric, Jude basically confirmed Amir’s measurements. The numbers don’t exactly line up, but whether the variation is between measurements or units or both is unknown.
At this price point I would hope for individual unit measurements as part of the QA process. It would only take a minute or two. Heck there was a time when you would expect a nice printed set of graphs in the box.
It does appear that Abyss don’t really care as much as they might. I can’t say they are on my Christmas wish list.

 

[solderdude]

The distortion just appears to be more dramatic in linear scale plots.
The ones Amir usually shows are linear, the ones most others produce are log type scale.

For both methods something can be said.
For the linear scale one could say that if the plot comes away from the bottom it starts to become potentially audible.
Not so in the bass though. You need much higher numbers for this to be audible.

In log scales you can easily see how low distortion gets. But even this might well be the measurement system bottoming out so has to be assessed with that knowledge in mind.

Jude did not do the 114dB test. There are also differences in absolute levels which can have several causes. The only REAL comparison would be if Jude measured the exact headphone Amir had and under the same conditions and at the same levels.

Amir chose to show distortion of one measurement... maybe the worst.
Jude chose to show his distortion measurement and may have selected the best.

I have measured a lot of headphones and distortion can differ substantially under different fit/seal and even between L and R.
On top of that... percentage may be more deceiving than the ones showing dB's instead of percentage. For this reason I usually show both.

 

[Chocomel]

https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/kxw8qe i compared/overlaid jude's and amir's Measurements here in case people are interested in a more direct comparison.

 

[solderdude]

The HE560 distortion numbers in percent differ because % is a relative number and due to bass roll-off with a poorer seal the distance in dB between signal and distortion products is smaller, hence a different percentage.

The Jude vs Amir plots show very similar behavior. Certainly within product tolerances.

 

[Chocomel]

The HE560 distortion numbers in percent differ because % is a relative number and due to bass roll-off with a poorer seal the distance in dB between signal and distortion products is smaller, hence a different percentage.

The Jude vs Amir plots show very similar behavior. Certainly within product tolerances.

You mean the difference in distortion is solely due to different FR? I might be misinterpreting your comment