Why are Dan Clark not recommended so much?

[sweetsounds]

I see hifiman being ‘ promoted’ so much , while well measuring Dan Clark are not

why is that?

Hifiman has a larger variety. Dan Clark is ultra-expensive only.

I had the chance to listen to the Stealth and had expectation bias that it will sound great. It didn't, probably because I am not a headphone guy to start with. The sound presentation is unnatural to me, so my brain goes "whatever". It is sounding nicely flat and remote, but doesn't draw me into the music.
I am wearing glasses and in the tweet by Sean Olive, people need to take off the glasses before testing, because the seal is broken. That doesn't sound like my use case.

The famous HD800 from Sennheiser also wasn't a super-duper step up compared to my HD600, more spacy, but somewhat soft.

I also picked up a Susvara and actually liked it until I saw the price tag. Also the other Hifiman on the booth had a more involving sound. Maybe there is a more exciting sound signature to Hifiman.

 

[BrokenEnglishGuy]

Because Dan Clark makes headphones with high resonance frequency and low front/rear volume which makes their headphones have low tolerance to leakage. That means, when they do not seal well on the head, the bass starts rolling off:
View attachment 288224

Second problem is, Headphones with high acoustic impedance measures different on different heads. Headphones should be designed with low acoustic impedance so that they can measure same on different ears canals which might have different levels of acoustic impedance.
Let's check the HpTF of DCA Stealth, this is how DCA Stealth behave on a dozen or so real humans, at the blocked ear canal entrance:
View attachment 288234
The measurement above was shared by Sean Olive. You can see that the bad leakage tolerance is also a problem on DCA Stealth too. Also on top of that because the driver is designed to have high acoustic impedance, the way it measures differs from one ear canal to another. The perceived tonality of DCA Stealth greatly depends on the ear canal geometry of the listener.

Another post by Sean Olive which goes a bit more detail on the topic:
View attachment 288225


In conclusion, DCA makes headphones which measure good on measurement rigs without paying attention to physics behind sound propagation of headphones. They are not well received by people who just listen with their ears and anyone who doesn't have the same acoustic impedance as GRAS 45CA's coupler might not agree with tonality of DCA headphones.

For more information: https://danishsoundcluster.dk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Olive_DSD_2022.pdf Page 29 and onwards.

I can't dissaggre more with this post, i even feel embarazing of the amount of likes...

All headphones loss bass LFE when you break the seal, same happens to IEMs. They ALL need pads.
'' high acoustic impedance '' ? seriously?. The planars from DCA have ultra low impedance but in fact most planars headphones are very low impedance, but aren't much efficient.

with high acoustic impedance measures different on different heads

What? high impedance things measures different on differents heads... ?

The perceived tonality of DCA Stealth greatly depends on the ear canal geometry of the listener

??.
All headphones/iems are EARS dependient. Thats because headphones / ieams measurements are kind of worthless, unlike speakers measurements. Thats why you see CUSTOM in-ears and not ''custom speakers'' to the owner ear.

 

[BrokenEnglishGuy]

Hifiman has a larger variety. Dan Clark is ultra-expensive only.

I had the chance to listen to the Stealth and had expectation bias that it will sound great. It didn't, probably because I am not a headphone guy to start with. The sound presentation is unnatural to me, so my brain goes "whatever". It is sounding nicely flat and remote, but doesn't draw me into the music.
I am wearing glasses and in the tweet by Sean Olive, people need to take off the glasses before testing, because the seal is broken. That doesn't sound like my use case.

The famous HD800 from Sennheiser also wasn't a super-duper step up compared to my HD600, more spacy, but somewhat soft.

I also picked up a Susvara and actually liked it until I saw the price tag. Also the other Hifiman on the booth had a more involving sound. Maybe there is a more exciting sound signature to Hifiman.

Headphones are a personal thing, if your ears like the FR from X headphone. You are hearing your '' end game ''.
Unlike speakers, they are room depending.

 

[someguyontheinternet]

Hifiman has a larger variety. Dan Clark is ultra-expensive only.

Dan Clark has a 500$ model (Aeon RT). While not cheap, I wouldn't call it "ultra-expensive".

 

[ThatGuyYouKnow]

Well there is a ton of hype around headphones and headphone gear.
I mean it’s kind of the future.

Marketers know that millennials and younger generations are gamers, and unfortunately live in smaller homes, condos , apartments and so they are a HUGE headphone market.

this is why we have seen and will see an even larger surge in headphones and related gear.
this is also why there is a TON of garbage of over priced, sh$tty measuring headphones and gear being peddled.
Not to mention everyone and their mother have YouTube ‘ reviews’. Which are basically the new infomercial.

So the older these newer generations become, the more discretional income they have and why are being targeted for all of these products.

So keep your eyes open. I’m seeing a ton of super badly measuring products that are being peddled to the younger crowd just so you can be ‘ the cool kid on the block’

well thats my contribution as an older guy here.

Hype in audio goes far back and probably peaked when Bose and Beats became all the rage. Headphone YouTubers can still be useful, because some of them are good at accurately describing the type of sound to expect and have a broad base of knowledge as to how the competitive offerings sound.

As for gamers, the difference today is that influence now generally skews towards the negative side as many gamers want to hate things just to hate them. There are popular YouTubers out there who are famous because they literally scream about how much they hate certain games, minimizing thousands of developer hours into loud sound bites that generate millions of views.

 

[Nkam]

Hifiman has a larger variety. Dan Clark is ultra-expensive only.

I had the chance to listen to the Stealth and had expectation bias that it will sound great. It didn't, probably because I am not a headphone guy to start with. The sound presentation is unnatural to me, so my brain goes "whatever". It is sounding nicely flat and remote, but doesn't draw me into the music.
I am wearing glasses and in the tweet by Sean Olive, people need to take off the glasses before testing, because the seal is broken. That doesn't sound like my use case.

The famous HD800 from Sennheiser also wasn't a super-duper step up compared to my HD600, more spacy, but somewhat soft.

I also picked up a Susvara and actually liked it until I saw the price tag. Also the other Hifiman on the booth had a more involving sound. Maybe there is a more exciting sound signature to Hifiman.

yeah I’m not a headphone guy at all.
just have them on the side , and want to preserve my hearing.
so I don’t want something Uber expensive. Just to sound half decent

speakers cannot be beat for sound. It’s just physics.

 

[Bow_Wazoo]

I guess I should give HiFiMan another chance at some point.

Absolutely

 

[Klonatans]

Hifiman is a big company capable of scale economies with uncomparable budget for advertising.

I still remember the huge and heavy MrSpeakers Alpha Dog headphones I had some 8 years ago.

 

[Blockader]

I can't dissaggre more with this post, i even feel embarazing of the amount of likes...

All headphones loss bass LFE when you break the seal, same happens to IEMs. They ALL need pads.
'' high acoustic impedance '' ? seriously?. The planars from DCA have ultra low impedance but in fact most planars headphones are very low impedance, but aren't much efficient.


What? high impedance things measures different on differents heads... ?


??.
All headphones/iems are EARS dependient. Thats because headphones / ieams measurements are kind of worthless, unlike speakers measurements. Thats why you see CUSTOM in-ears and not ''custom speakers'' to the owner ear.

You are confusing electrical impedance with acoustic impedance. Please understand the concepts first before you make such bold claims. Please read the attached pdf. I'm talking about acoustic impedance here. Headphones interact with acoustic impedance of the human ear canal. All measurement rigs have something called coupler to simulate acoustic impedance of the human ear canal. Headphones with low resonance frequency(which is determined by mass and stiffness) are less effected by the acoustic impedance of the ear canal than headphones with high acoustic impedance. The way headphones measure on measurement rigs might not translate to your ear canal well depending on the acoustic impedance of headphones.

I attached the articles you need to read to understand the concept here. These are available online.

In case you are still in doubt:

Here is the difference between how few headphones measured on different 15 individuals. As you can see the transfer function of closed backs is less consistent than open back headphones. The reason is that the air is trapped inside closed backs and the stiffness of the air inside the system is high.(as a result total stiffness of the whole system is high) High stiffness translates to high acoustic impedance. High acoustic impedance headphones tend to get more influenced by the individuals ear canal geometry than headphones with low acoustic impedance. Remember that headphones push air AGAINST the air inside your ear canal.

here you can see how some headphones measured on 15 different heads.

Before worshipping measurements, maybe understand what measurements tell first. Especially if you so uninformed that you confuse electrical impedance with acoustic impedance. @BrokenEnglishGuy

 

[ObjectiveSubjectivist]

music reproduction has nothing to do with art, it is pure science.

Amen.
Unfortunately go through various different forums and read what people are saying... About magic about house sound about magic ingredients and taste...

 

[markanini]

Maybe it's just me, advanced properties like acoustic impedance aside, my attention in this discussion is drawn to the validity of attributing lower FR consistency to a brand. Because open-backs and closed-backs have known divergences in this area regardless of brand, per the data that's been provided. Drawing conclusions beyond that is missing some important steps at the moment.

 

[Blockader]

This was a known problem with DCA/Mrspeaker headphones since a while. Not only closed back headphones of Dan Clark had this problem, also DCA open back headphones used to have bad leakage tolerance and low FR consistency which is a very rare thing to see in other open back headphones. (check my first post in this thread for Ether 2's leakage tolerance) As MayaTL pointed out earlier, one of the DCA closed backs has the best FR consistency among all closed backs. I hope Dan Clark finally has addressed this problem and he is working on it. Headphones with high acoustic impedance have some tuning advantages, making them easier to fine-tune them to measure really well on a specific test fixture or one individuals head.

On the other hand, Beyerdynamic & Sennheiser were paying attention to FR consistency and leakage tolerance since decades.

 

[BrokenEnglishGuy]

You are confusing electrical impedance with acoustic impedance. Please understand the concepts first before you make such bold claims. Please read the attached pdf. I'm talking about acoustic impedance here. Headphones interact with acoustic impedance of the human ear canal. All measurement rigs have something called coupler to simulate acoustic impedance of the human ear canal. Headphones with low resonance frequency(which is determined by mass and stiffness but for leakage tolerance and HpTF stiffness is a bit more important) are less effected by the acoustic impedance of the ear canal than headphones with high acoustic impedance. The way headphones measure on measurement rigs might not translate to your ear canal well depending on the acoustic impedance of headphones.

I attached the articles you need to read to understand the concept here. These are available online.

In case you are still in doubt:

but here is some basics before I move on:
Below the resonance frequency, the dominating force is stiffness: F = k * x
Above the resonance frequency, the dominating force is inertia: F = m * a
View attachment 288760
Here is the difference between how few headphones measured on different 15 individuals. As you can see the transfer function of closed backs is less consistent than open back headphones. The reason is that the air is trapped inside closed backs and the stiffness of the air inside the system is high.(as a result total stiffness of the whole system is high) High stiffness translates to high acoustic impedance. High acoustic impedance headphones tend to get more influenced by the individuals ear canal geometry than headphones with low acoustic impedance. Remember that headphones push air AGAINST the air inside your ear canal.


View attachment 288761
here you can see how some headphones measured on 15 different heads.

Before worshipping measurements, maybe understand what measurements tell first. Especially if you so uninformed that you confuse electrical impedance with acoustic impedance. @BrokenEnglishGuy

Haha.
Too much wall text for admit that you are very confused. You got no idea.

In fact you insist putting these graph for no-reason. Again. These arent going to support ur claims.

Can you share your “ acoustic impedance measurements“? These are the only graph needed and you didnt post it

Posting graph about thing that i already told you dont help your arguments.

Please, share with us the acoustic impedance measurements. Not a wall text, not needed. Not the “ electrical impedance “ of course.

 

[JanesJr1]

Because some of their models sound good? Counterintuitive, I know. The DCA Noire is the only planar headphone to have really impressed me thus far, and is easily the best closed-back I've heard for multipurpose listening.

Agree with you on the Noire. However, I have seen so many posts on ASR or elsewhere that I cannot reconcile at all with my own experience (esp. with regard to bass) about the Noire specifically as well as other DCA phones, that I find the comments above about variation in head transfer function (due to closed-back or high resonance frequency or whatever) helpful. Noire has perfect-pitch for me, but maybe not so for some others.

 

[Blockader]

Haha.
Too much wall text for admit that you are very confused. You got no idea.

In fact you insist putting these graph for no-reason. Again. These arent going to support ur claims.

Can you share your “ acoustic impedance measurements“? These are the only graph needed and you didnt post it

Posting graph about thing that i already told you dont help your arguments.

If you want to stay ignorant, that's your problem. In fact, all the graphs I posted were from Sean Olive even if you do not believe to what I am saying, you can see the FR inconsistency of closed back headphones in Sean Olive's posts. Your disagreement and your lack of dedication to learn new things can't change how science works. After all, the question is: Do headphones measure same next to eardrum of every individual just like how they measured on a measurement rig? The answer is no, and all headphone designers should pay more attention to make the disparities of measurements between different individuals and measurement rigs as small as possible.

I'll give you one more example:

see the difference how headphones measure on text fixtures vs how they measure on different human heads? Check the 3rd point: Above 2khz headphone measurements do not align well with how they measure on different heads.

Can you share your “ acoustic impedance measurements“? These are the only graph needed and you didnt post it

That's exactly the problem. We should include FR consistency, leakage tolerance and maybe even the resonance frequency of drivers as a part of measurements. That been said, you can check resonance frequency of a driver by checking where its impedance curve peaks. This will only work for dynamic headphones though because planar drivers are so thin and lightweight that they are damped by the stiffness air surrounding the driver hence their impedance curve is flat unless the designers used passive filters. There are certain methods to measure Fs of planars too but that's not too necessary because as long as a planar shows a consistent behavior in bass with leakage that means that acoustic impedance of the system is low enough, just like here:

Headphone Test Lab test results manufacturers hifiman susvara

Headphone Test Lab test results manufacturers hifiman susvara

headphonetestlab.co.uk

 

[ThatGuyYouKnow]

Agree with you on the Noire. However, I have seen so many posts on ASR or elsewhere that I cannot reconcile at all with my own experience (esp. with regard to bass) about the Noire specifically as well as other DCA phones, that I find the comments above about variation in head transfer function (due to closed-back or high resonance frequency or whatever) helpful. Noire has perfect-pitch for me, but maybe not so for some others.

Doesn't that difference in opinion and experience apply to virtually every headphone out there, though? Many sing praises for Sennheiser, but none of their headphones that I've listened to impressed me all that much. I like many of Beyerdynamic's headphones released in the past and present, but I've seen countless opinions dumping on them for reasons that in no way resonate with my own experience.

 

[JanesJr1]

Dan Clark has a high entry hurdle. They dont have a popular mid-fi headphone like the Sundara, the 6XX, the 612 or the 770 which might give you appetite to check out the more expensive ones.

This appears to be an assessment of public perception, not of product-offering As far as an actual mid-fi product, I have done many level-matched, EQ-matched A/B comparisons between DCA/Drop Closed X and the Sundara, which are both <$500 headphones. Again, when EQ-matched to Harman (just for the sake of this comparison), I found they sound remarkably similar, with some pretty minor persistent variation in sound stage, bass resonance and instrument separation. But I like 'em both, and a lot more than my HD6XX's. My point is that DCA is there in what you call the "mid-fi" market, and if you tell me DCA isn't as well-known, you may be right. I'm just one, subjective listener who takes care in trying to make semi-objective comparisons as well as I can, but as far as I can tell, they both have very good product at a budget price.

(... Although, the DCA Closed X is a closed-back, and if Sean Olive is right, maybe the X is more subject to HTF variation than the Sundara....)

 

[Blockader]

For those who want to learn the concept more:

Acoustic impedance

 

[asrUser]

Doesn't that difference in opinion and experience apply to virtually every headphone out there, though? Many sing praises for Sennheiser, but none of their headphones that I've listened to impressed me all that much. I like many of Beyerdynamic's headphones released in the past and present, but I've seen countless opinions dumping on them for reasons that in no way resonate with my own experience.

I actually don't understand why Beyerdynamic only creates headphones with small earpads. Sennheiser on the other hand makes those more spacious.

 

[JanesJr1]

Doesn't that difference in opinion and experience apply to virtually every headphone out there, though? Many sing praises for Sennheiser, but none of their headphones that I've listened to impressed me all that much. I like many of Beyerdynamic's headphones released in the past and present, but I've seen countless opinions dumping on them for reasons that in no way resonate with my own experience.

Maybe you and I have similar HTF's; I am underwhelmed by Sennheiser as well. (Haven't tried the Beyerdynamic's.)