Hifiman has awful QC; I have on good authority by a major regional distributor that Hifiman has the highest RMA rates by a mile vs Audeze, DCA, Sennheiser, Meze, Fostex.
I'm
more than familiar with Harman curves and their derivation. They are a great starting point. But to deem it a universal target is naive and dogmatic, especially when, as I show, it is merely one school of internally coherent thought among several others, each having no lesser claim to legitimacy rooted in psychoacoustics.
First of all, I never said that strict adherence to Harman curves was the definitive endpoint—I argued that bass rolloffs that start plummeting at 120hz were deviations from Harman compliance, and arguably classist and retrograde. Not every audiophile by a long shot listens exclusively to orchestral pieces. The snobbery inherent to scoffing at V shaped tuning for music that demands it is tiresomely insulting and exclusive, and this hard line drawn between tacky Beats Pro options for the unsophisticated listener and reference (ie flat as a pancake and bass poor), high priced options for audiophile aesthetes is an archaic principle that is no longer valid.
Second, Hifiman has exponentially improved their QC in the past couple of years, and their past reputation for sloppy builds continues to sully their efforts unfairly (at least among the price points I’ve bought). I have an Edition XS, HE1000se, Ananda Nano, HE1000 Stealth, previously owned the Arya Stealth and have auditioned or gifted many others in the past year and I’ve never seen so much as an infinitesimal flaw in any of them.
My 2020 Focal Utopias however, which cost two to three times as much, are subversively notorious for driver failure, and their customer service is abysmal. Their 2022 “upgrade” at almost $1,500 more, is virtually identical to the 2020 version, other than the driver failure issue being ostensibly fixed—their respective FRCs line up almost exactly, and they made a couple of marginal aesthetic changes, that’s it. And recently they were magnanimous enough to offer a $1,000 trade in for the old Utopias to go towards the price of the brand new ones! A reputable company would be transparent about their design flaw for a $4,400 investment and offer their customers a marginal, if any, price to trade in for a reliable unit. They didn’t.
Meanwhile HifiMan will honor any trade up from a lower priced model to a higher one for only the cost of shipping your cans in and a fraction of the list price difference—back when the Arya Stealths were $1,299 and the HE1000 Stealths were $1,999, I traded in my year-old Arya’s for the brand new HEK Stealths for $500 ($200 bucks less than the price difference with no depreciation).
That’s a rare gesture of honesty, transparency and generosity for a manufacturer in this market. How often do you get a deal paying full price for a set of high end headphones?
This entire forum is in part an exercise in holding headphones accountable to Harman compliance, and to date a scant few have passed muster—the Dan Clark options are one example with few peers, although the most recent HifiMan offerings have been put to the bench yet. The headphone market has been inscrutably indifferent to adopting a standard that has been quite rigorously validated as a strongly preferred one over old-school “reference” tuning, particularly when it comes to bass presence, and the only explanation is the persistence of bygone inviolable rules for what constitutes “audiophile” standards.
Pertinent to my original reply, during several periods in the past few years I included the full range of the iconic, lionized Sennheiser options in my audition processes, and indeed I found their soundstages and detail retrieval to be extraordinary—but I quickly concluded that anyone looking to one of these to generate any degree of excitement for rock music must be clinically insane. I’m pretty much bone-tired of reading reviews that pussyfoot around the lack of bass, pandering to their advertisers by using mealy mouthed language such as “although these headphones are by no means suited for bass heads, the low end is impeccably rendered and precise, never once encroaching on the mids, where the heart of the music lives”.
I defiantly reject the notion that anyone who values a robust bass response must be relegated to the “bass head” class, as if rock and other modern genres were the stuff of rubes and proletarians. There is no more glaring example of this than Meze’s own lineup, to the most exaggerated extent—their “consumer grade”, best selling standby, the 99 Classic, is so stuffed to the gills with bass that you can barely make out the fundamentals of the music, whereas the higher priced Elites (and now these 109 pros) have glaring bass roll offs. My Meze Elites are so inexplicably tuned that they are effectively the
reverse of V shaped tuning—they lack bass
and high end. I’ve come up with the most bizarre PEQ for those things, to rescue me from hearing vocals and nothing else.
I intended no contentiousness towards you with my response at all, despite how I may have come across. I tend to have strong opinions about products I’ve paid an excessive amount for that have left me with disappointment. And I’ve had a hell of a struggle trying to find a set of cans that suits my taste that are suitable for critical listening
and excitement. HifiMan has been one manufacturer who has come through for me in this regard and treated me with generosity as a customer as well, and I’m eager to champion them for it. For those who are happy with the Sennheiser sound, they have my full respect—I just have altogether different tastes.
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