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Many thanks for the considered response.
To be clear I’m not seeking to deny the harman curve at all which I consider helpful research. I’m merely trying to improve my understanding to make better decisions. The substance of my job is to ask challenging questions in order to achieve this. It doesn’t mean that I disagree on think something is wrong. It is just a process to gain better understanding.
I think your explanation of the different FR to differentiate is very plausible. It would also make sense to make models to the different harman tuning. I would challenge the cost point though as JBL is a lower price model which is very popular in my local main electronics store so presumably not that costly to implement. I will try it. Producers seem to be making a choice not to implement harman and your explanation to differentiate makes sense. Not sure if they have other reasons.?
I did read i think that Amir said headphones are only 50pc measurements so I presume there are other factors that impact sound quality and preferences eg distortion, soundstage, resolution, dynamic contrast? I really don’t know and I’m certainly not making any claims. Just trying to understand.
Cost point that I made that it might not be "cheap" to target Harman Curve - I'm not a headphone designer so don't know but I do know it's harder to get the Harman Bass Hump in open back headphones, so that's a thing. Those JBL Tunes are closed back so it's easier to get the bass in those. Re JBL Tune being cheap and targeting Harman, then this is quite true, but those headphones have exceedingly small earcups so fitting your ears inside and getting a good seal is likely difficult for a lot of people - which means you get less bass than you should if seal is breached - so eventhough the measurements show good targeting of Harman, in reality when worn is different for a lot of people. I've had my best experiences with EQ'd open backed headphones, for open backed headphones it's hard to get that Harman Bass Hump so it's probably not cheap to achieve that (DCA manage it and you see the price).
Yeah, cool, you seem to agree with the point I made that differentiation is what headphone manufacturers like to have for their business and they wouldn't want all their headphones to sound the same. They might have some other reasons why they don't target Harman - they might genuinely believe that they've found a better curve that targets their main consumer, but you know they'd really have to do some research on that & we don't know if they do so, I suppose it's not public domain, that would all be internally kept within their organisation. A lot of people would say they probably don't do many external studies & perhaps they rely on their internal "panel of people" to evaluate and tune the headphone. I think I'm a fan of Sennheiser though, they managed to come up with that HD600 way back in 1997 which had a nice smooth measured frequency response that contained a lot of elements that are within the Harman Curve, yet this was before the Harman Research was ever conducted for headphones, following is frequency response of HD600 vs Harman Target:
It's really not far off Harman, just below 100Hz and above 5000Hz that it's off. So Sennheiser seemed to have done something right with how they've designed some of their headphone models, and you know just how popular and legendary HD600 was! So it seems some headphone companies "can get things right" with whatever non publicised research they do, but I don't think you can give all manufacturers the same credit that you could give Sennheiser for instance. Sennheiser have made some god awful headphones though, so they're not all sunshine. Some manufacturers only churn out cr*p though, so....
There is some other stuff I think in headphones that indicates certain qualities. Headphones with sealed front volumes and closed backs give more impactful bass that you tend to almost feel vs open backs even for similar bass measurements after EQ. Distortion we've mentioned before, that's an accepted measurement, you want it to be low. I've mentioned some other factors before, some in this thread:
- on head positional frequency response variation is ideally low so you can wear it with reliability on your own head.
- has to fit you properly without loss of seal
- comfort
- low unit to unit variation - eg tight manufacturing tolerances and good channel matching
- soundstage: not much point trying to really find out what determines this - so personal and variable between people, just have to try the headphone & see what you experience
- precise imaging within the soundstage: related to good channel matching, driver angle or angled pads might influence this, again no overarching hard & fast exact reasons for making one headphone better than another at this (but for sure good channel matching is part of it).
- smooth treble above 8kHz, headphone measurements don't capture this accurately, but it's also of slightly lesser importance because less music content above that point, (in my experience HD800 did this well, just based on listening).
So there's scope for manufacturers to get aspects of a headphone "right" that are more than just the measured frequency response, so there are other things that aid in your experience than just whether it is Harman Tuned or Whatever Tuned. So generally the stuff I listed in the bullet points refers these "other" things that manufacturers can try to experiment with & the consumer has to almost find out themselves about by trying the headphone in most cases or listening to people's subjective experiences.
Measured frequency response is still the most objective measure of a headphone though, and is the strongest indicator of how it will sound to you if you assume the headphone is gonna physically fit you properly. You can think of all the other things I've listed in the bullet points as stuff that is harder to find out, more of a grey area to the consumer (and also to the manufacturer in some cases).
