TheFrator t1_j2f7nz9 wrote on December 31, 2022 at 8:46 PM

Hey! Also a data scientist reporting in. I'm passionate about headphones and have spent a lot of time reading forums and watching videos on the topic. Frequency response is the only measurement that matters for headphones (CSD and waterfall are useless).

Measured frequency response (at least for over ears) will not match exactly what you hear because the measurement rig has a different anatomy than your ears.

This is a graph of 40 different peoples perception of FR, and the divergence starts at 1Khz.

So how a headphone looks on its FR, and how it is perceived by the individual, is subjective.

Check out the paper: https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/227875122/1995_M_ller_et_al_AES_Journal_a.pdf

Now assuming your headphone is tuned to the same target by referencing a measurement rig, they still sound different. I'm with Resolve as far as explaining as to why- the reason being diaphragm material. I've EQ'd my HD660 to my LCD-5 stock FR and vice/versa using Crinacle's paid graphing tool. And they just sound different- especially in the leading edge (attack) and decay of notes as well as the LCD-5 imaging is far more accurate (the HD660 is blobish).

I recommend trying two separate headphones and EQing them to the same target and you'll experience that they sound differently in areas other than tonal balance.

lr_science OP t1_j2fxmua wrote on December 31, 2022 at 11:59 PM

Thanks for your response! I've read parts of that paper now and it's interesting, albeit only concerned with FR. I'm aware that different ears have different signal modulations and that paper shows this quite well (although I wish the plots were digital color images to see individual traces). However, "finding the perfect tune" isn't my concern here.

>Frequency response is the only measurement that matters for headphones (CSD and waterfall are useless).

This is much more what I'm after -- why are they useless in your opinion?

>I recommend trying two separate headphones and EQing them to the same target and you'll experience that they sound differently in areas other than tonal balance.

Yes, that's my starting point for this. Precisely because there is more to a headphone than timbre, I want to know how these things can be measured. RTINGS measures a bunch of things (as listed in the first post), although none of that relates to dynamics, and a few things aren't perfectly clear to me, plus I don't know how agreed upon their methods are in the headphone world.

BTW my comparison was between the 990s and 1990s, which have very comparable timbre, but the 1990s have what I would describe as a larger dynamic range, faster response, better imaging, and cleaner sound. Or the other way around, the 990s sound a little lush and sluggish in comparison.