Oh dear, there's so much wrong with this post I don't know where to begin...
This has never been a debate between us two. I'm just stating facts for the OP, not for you. Whether you believe them or not is your problem. I won't waste any time looking for 'sources' for widely known facts. The Internet is your friend.
This is a science forum. The person making bold, sweeping claims like "most people don't use headphones to listen to music" is the one required to provide evidence for it, not the other way around, and you've provided none whatsoever. If it's a widely known 'fact' you could have easily found and linked to that evidence with the help of your friend the internet by now.
Music producers over the last 20 years have been making music (and loads of money) thinking about end-users with crappy end-equipment. Not about people with full-range headphones or any subbass capable equipment. That is something that I know for sure, being in touch with music producers and sound engineers myself. It's a
hard truth, like it or not.
- Sound quality on a top level system has never been their main concern, because only 1% of people have top-level systems.
- But making it sound 'decent' on crappy systems has always been the major concern, because that concerns a majority of the other 99%.
- Same thing can be said about dynamics, which explains the famous loudness war. Over the last 20 years, the goal has been simple : music has to sound loud on any equipment, nevermind if it doesn't sound as good as it could. It's a business, for God's sake. Quantity over quality.
You've just listed everything that's wrong with modern music production, and one of the driving forces behind
audio's circle of confusion, which you seem to be very tightly wrapped up in. I'm not saying the above doesn't happen, I'm saying it
shouldn't happen. Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be if movies were color-graded primarily for smartphones with limited color gamut at the expense of the director's vision for the big screen or well-calibrated home theatres? Everyone has cheap
access to full-range transducers in the form of headphones/IEMs these days, so there's no excuse to not mix and master for full-range transducers.
And you have just called crinacle an untrained reviewer... lol. Maybe be a little more humble when talking about people like him (or Oratory, or Jaakko, etc., or even poor little me, check my sig just in case)
I thought this would be obvious, but that was shorthand reference to the specific definition of a trained listener in the literature, requiring passing a minimum of level 8 on
Harman's How to Listen program, as Dr. Sean Olive states in the comments on that page. As far as I'm aware, the only one of the above people who has done this is Oratory, which raises my trust in his listening
discrimination and reliability compared to those who are untrained, and so raises my trust in the EQs he creates.
And no, the HE4XX isn't nearly as good as the Sundara. Not when people have ears good enough to notice the difference.
(read until the end)
(jump to the conclusion)
You seem worryingly susceptible to random anecdotal subjective impressions you've found on the internet without much objective thought. Funnily enough, the first link perfectly illustrates my point. That was posted 3 years ago, so the Sundara they heard must have been the pre-2020 earpad version. Let's look at measurements of that compared to the HE4XX:
So pretty similar, which matches with what that user described, up until they were gaslighted by the groupthink of other redditors who were most likely at least partially suffering from subconscious price bias influencing their judgements. As for the second review you linked, he states in the
video review that he didn't even have the Sundara with him for a direct comparison with the HE4XX, so he must be going from memory, and long-term auditory memory is notoriously much worse than short-term. Not only that, but his original Sundara review was from
2 years previous, so not only is he relying on long-term memory, but that must be the pre-2020 version too. You really need to be more critical with your parsing of these online reviews. And pay more attention on here too, because if you did, you'd have noticed that I actually said this:
At $159,
this [the HE4XX] is an actually cheap planar, just as good as the Sundara
post-EQ
So this is 100% clear for you and there's no more confusion on your part, I was talking about the HE4XX after Oratory's EQ, and the Sundara 2020 revised-earpads version after Oratory's EQ, so those random internet impressions you linked don't apply in any way; they're of the wrong Sundara version, and they're without EQ.