I learned an invaluable lesson from purchasing these headphones. I already own a collection I’m delighted with, including a Hifiman HEKse, HEK Stealth and Edition XS, Sony Z1Rs, Meze Elites and 2020 Utopias, and my preferred genres are rock, synth pop, New Wave, alternative and other “modern” genres—as such I have a particular preference for a full, powerful and physical bass. Not an overbearing, slovenly Beats bass, but one that offers a considerable fun factor and a sound on the meatier side.
I’ve pad rolled most of my cans to enhance this—all the stock fenestrated pads have been replaced by solid leather ones, to help reinforce the low end. The Utopias have Stellia pads. The Meze have the solid leather variety cribbed from the Empyrean. The Hifiman HE1000’s have Dekoni Hybrids. All of these have nicely colored the low end to my great pleasure.
I also have the iFi Pro iCAN Signature amp just so I can avail myself of its xBass analog bass boost. I keep it on full at all times and I love it. I guess I’m a child of the 80’s and just have a thing for U-shaped tuning.
But I have been frequenting this site for a good while now, and being highly susceptible to FOMO, I had this nagging curiosity about what I might be missing by not having a headphone that truly nailed the Harman target. I’ve come to the conclusion after dozens of headphone reviews that tuning, specifically Harman, is the sine qua non criterion for getting an enthusiastic recommendation on here. I’ve tried to get on board with the premise that things such as “detail” (which I’m told doesn’t really exist), imaging, timbre, soundstage, speed, precision, and other allegedly “audiophool” terms are apocryphal and that all headphones are indistinguishable if they’re PEQ’s to Harman. I’m still having some trouble with my ears telling me otherwise, but boy I’m trying my best.
So upon reading this review of yet another DCA masterpiece of Harman compliance, I finally caved in and decided to hear what I’ve been missing by settling for all these costly flagships that have gotten tossed in the round file on here, but that I adore nonetheless. I’m sure it’s a simple matter of cognitive bias on my part. Hey, I’m human.
When my E3s arrived, I was dazzled. First of all they were drop dead gorgeous. Clearly a marvel of design and innovative engineering. I spent a good half hour trying to wrap my head (so to speak) around how these bold set of cans with large drivers and gobs of carbon fiber somehow folded down by some origami witchcraft into a tiny form factor that fit snugly into a neat little case that fits in the side pocket of my backpack with room to spare. The XLR cable itself looked like it cost a million dollars, and the nifty way the connectors snapped snugly into place was joyous enough by itself—I spent several minutes of pleasure just connecting and unconnecting them over and over so I could feel that formidable click as they popped into place.
The blue accents on the silky black background were equally marvelous—they look especially wicked when they’re collapsed down and rested on my table. The E3 logo looks like the marquee on some monument from the undefined future. These headphones are nothing if not a statement piece for sure.
So I sat down for a listen, my very first time experiencing a tuning standard out of the box that has been proven through several iterations of large sample sizes and SOTA statistical analysis to be the human ideal. I had spent hours staring at that big hump at the far left of the FRC that was so foreign compared to all the sloped roll offs I’ve grown accustomed to for all the other coveted premium cans out there—and now, putting them on my head I braced myself for a bass response unlike anything I had ever heard in my life.
You can probably guess by now that it wasn’t there. I was truly gobsmacked—I went back and forth between my rolled off HEKses to the E3s to my modded Utopias and back to the E3s, over and over again, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. Compared to my stalwart favorite headphones I was used to, these E3s sounded positively hollow—certainly their performance otherwise was absolutely top notch, but there was no “slam”, fullness, warmth, energy or fun at all compared to all these “can’t be recommended without EQ” headphones I’d paid a fortune for and hung my head in shame for adoring.
I fled to this thread in desperation for an explanation. I was offered all sorts of hypotheses that just didn’t align with what my senses were telling me. I eventually gave up, until I had basically resigned myself to having defective ears—although I did run pink noise through these damn things for about two weeks straight in spite of myself hoping for a miracle that never came.
Then I happened to come back here recently looking to see if anyone else shared my perceptions. And I suddenly realized that there had been one sage bit of advice offered to me that I had somehow overlooked—namely to forget about focusing on the sub bass rolloff on the far left of the FRCs, and instead redirect my eyes on the MID BASS between my Utopias/HEKses compared to these here E3s. And sure enough, it turns out that Harman tuning doesn’t care so much about that particular region from 80-140hz or so. Harman is much more about solving that sloping rolloff in the sub bass region instead. And of course the mid bass is where all that fullness, warmth and slam lives, which is why I love the headphones I have. When I went back to listen to the E3s, sure enough that emphasized sub bass was there all along, all the more audible because there’s nothing to obscure it from its neighbors to the right a bit.
And so, the lesson I learned? Turns out I really don’t like Harman tuning. I sort of detest it, actually. I actually far, far prefer U-shaped tuning, which my HEKs and Utopias give me in spades. I should have known better, because like just about all FOMO, I wasn’t missing a damn thing.
But I do greatly appreciate the lesson learned. For almost every other set of values on this site, I’m in enthusiastic agreement. But in terms of headphone reviews, I dare to take a firm and unyielding exception. I don’t at all agree that all headphones are indistinguishable other than how they’re tuned, and in regards to assessing performance, Harman is a nice standard to use for comparative purposes, but it should be way down the list of performance criteria to judge a set of headphones. Tuning is the one aspect of a headphone that is easily adjustable—it’s in how a headphone performs that separates a cheapie from a feat of technology and precision.
I’ve been fully soaked and obsessed with music and audio for at least 50 of my 54 years, and I feel confident that cognitive bias fully recognized, I can still tell the difference between music artfully and skillfully presented vs clumsy junk. I simply refuse to believe that nothing separates my HE1000ses from a cheap set of Beyer Dynamics or Fostex other than alignment with that so-called ideal curve. For others on here who have felt similar bewilderment with the headphone choices that get the golfing panther on here, you’re not alone. PM me.
