> Equalizing for headphones is corrupting the source to compensate for junk equipment

It's not corrupting anything, modern digital linear equalization is transparent to the source aside from the adjustment to the frequencies, which you are intentionally changing. This is not corruption.

> And listening from a PC is evidence that one is decidedly not an audiophile

Oh okay, so you get to gatekeep what an audiophile is now, as opposed to someone who just enjoys good sound? Grow up.

> notice the absence of any mention of PC peripherals in material targeted at actual audiophiles like Stereophile and Absolute Sound

More gatekeeping garbage, irrelevant.

> The only place a PC fits in an audiophile’s world is as a Roon endpoint from which to feed actually good audio equipment

Yeah, most of the time PC parts feed into a DAC of some kind that is external to the device. This is braindead obvious, and no one disputed that. Maybe reading comprehension is your issue, considering your initial response was a reply to a question nobody even asked.

> none of which has any facility for EQing headphones because there is no market for that among people spending real money on audio equipment … including fine headphones.

Several devices come with in-built parametric EQ, if you spend enough for it. And guess what, there is NO SUCH THING as a perfect transducer, it doesn't exist anywhere. That's why EQ is a thing, to adjust the parts that we either do not like, or have issues. There's a reason why recording engineers like myself USE EQ in our mastering process, because perfection literally doesn't exist. And no, there really is no difference between doing it in the master and doing it for your audio system, the result is EXACTLY the same when it reaches the analog portions of what you're using.

Thank you for confirming you're clueless, though.