The Sonarworks sound preference test is kind of unreliable if you don't have a supported headphone, but if you try the vocal tracks with all your gear, you might be able to find a common factor. One thing to watch for is whether it consistently shows you a large dip at ~3 kHz, as human hearing can vary a lot around there.

Other potential causes are a broken/defective DAC or amp or simply listening too loud. Try switching out other parts of your audio chain or lowering the volume.

I EQ'd this IEM to the Harman curve, and the result sounded like banshees were screeching at me from the center of my skull. Fantastic improvement!

Hifiman staging, timbre, and slam can change radically depending on the angle and position in which the headphones are worn on the head, so you need to find the sweet spot. Rule of thumb is that if the stage sounds tall, you probably messed up.

Can't speak for those three headphones in particular, but when in the ideal spot, Hifiman's HE1000V2 sounds closer to my near-field loudspeakers than anything else I've heard, including the comparatively depth-lacking HD800S.

If you throw marbles randomly into a funnel, some of them will go straight in while others will bounce off the bowl bit first before entering after a time delay. Replace the marbles with continuous waves, and the relative delay results in a dip at a certain frequency caused by phase cancellation/destructive interference.

In practice, your pinna (the part of your ear that sticks out of your head) creates this notch at somewhere between 6-12 kHz. Because your pinna isn't perfectly round, the time lag (and thus where and how deep this notch in the treble is) depends on the location of a sound source, which your brain uses for sound localization.

Since headphones are beaming sound right at your pinna, they can potentially acoustically interact with it in a way that creates this notch, as you can see in dummy ear mic measurements like this. IEMs can also be tuned with dips in the treble that artificially simulate this notch.

Have you seen what the US medical system charges for catheter tubing? Desperation can drive people to do some wild things.

Do you wear glasses or have long hair? Seeing you add extra bass to the LCD-X and Elegia makes me think you might be having seal issues.

It's nice to see someone else in the Anti-Elevated Treble Gang. Too much treble energy is basically the root of all evil, whether it's poor macrodynamics caused by specific harmonic overtones drowning out everything else, plasticky timbre that ravages vocal- and bass-centric tracks, making them sound artifically smoothed-over or limp, or transient smearing that leads to severe loss of detail and congestion.

The standard definition would be "the ability to render small-scale volume gradations." What I actually listen for is how clearly a headphone/IEM can reproduce the S and the K in this track. With something with poor microdynamics, at least one of those will get drowned out due to unevenness in said gradations. The midrange and upper bass also influence microdynamics, though, so I use a separate piano track for those and focus on the initial attack.

Also, it's precisely because the track is so busy that it's an effective stress test for gear. Generic Jazz Track in Audiophile CD Compilation #26 is comparatively poor for testing sound quality because it's undemanding and sounds good on everything, being slow-paced, relatively simplistic, and midrange-centric.

My #1 most-used test track is Night Club Junkie by YUC'e without a doubt.

• The percussion at 1:14 provides a load of information about a headphone's treble detailing, microdynamics, high-end extension, etc. in just a few seconds. TOTL goes TSK!, tribrid IEMs with wispy treble go Tskh., the midrange stuff often has blunt attack and goes Tk!, and low-quality gear with one-note treble goes T! or K!

• The basslines at 0:31 and 0:58 are "pure" (no overtones to deal with) and play at different frequencies, making evaluating low-end detail, texturing, timbre, slam, etc. straightforward.

• The female vocals thrown in can help identify issues with intelligibility, clarity, midrange timbre, sibilance/hollowness, etc., although there are better tracks for this.

If a Hifiman headphone sounds "tall", try changing the position or angle you're wearing it at your head. Hifiman's headphone line is more sensitive to headphone placement than many others', so you need to find the sweet spot to take care of that imaging funkiness.

>A blind man once told me, I'd rather be blind everyday instead of deaf, for can listen to the sound of music and my loved ones. If I slipped your hd8xx onto him, he would insist on going deaf and being released from his prison of pain.

😂

Unless you're listening to 96 kbps Kazaa rips from 2003, better headphones will make music sound better. You might notice that cymbals sound a bit less shimmery if you listen to the same 10-second music sample a dozen times, but the quality drop is so much smaller than the variance introduced by differences in how studios record/mix/master tracks that it's honestly not worth worrying about (except maybe in rare, extreme edge cases).

Note that because audiophilia is fundamentally just dressed-up consumerism, you'll see a lot of this kind of gatekeeping poorly rooted in reality from people trying to seem more refined for knowing how to buy things. It's like how people stopped buying Merlot not because they compared its taste to other wines' firsthand and concluded it was worse, but because a character in a movie they watched once told them that cultured people don't drink it.

The pad swap brings up the upper mids to correct the suckout/lack of presence that the Elear suffers from, though it goes a bit past neutral and ends up sounding forward. The bass loses some oomph, but enough of the original slam is retained that you may or may not mind depending on your bass preferences. If you've got a problem with the Elear sounding too intense at high volumes, using Clear pads might potentially exacerbate that, though I don't have complaints about sibilance myself. Tuning-wise, the Elear w/ Clear pads are neutral-ish but upper-mid-forward and bright-leaning, basically existing to listen to J-pop with, though it'll sound at least okay with most stuff that's thrown at it.

Use oratory1990's Harman presets instead of AutoEQ if you can.

AutoEQ can't properly adjust the upper treble because of the inherent unreliability of headphone measurements in that region, while oratory1990 actually listens to his presets to ensure they sound right. The stuff I've seen/heard AutoEQ output for headphones like the N700NC M2 (scooping out 6 kHz on a headphone that's already got plasticky timbre because of excess upper treble) is honestly a hot mess.