Resolve Reacts to Head-Fi

In this instance, it's been Cameron who's put this together. And I haven't seen these, so I don't know what any of them say. And because this is HeadFi in particular, there could be some spicy ones. For folks who are unaware, who've been living under a rock, HeadFi is, of course, one of the most well-known audio forums. It's one of the original ones. And it is sort of an anchor point for the broader headphone enthusiast community. It's certainly the place where I've started. I've spent quite a lot of time on HeadFi. And as have, you know, the rest of us and probably many of you guys watching as well. The thing is, the community on HeadFi is also known for having some perspectives on things that are a little bit more outlandish.

They believe certain things there on HeadFi that can be quite interesting. Interesting indeed. So we're probably going to get some of that today. And while I imagine some of this might come across as a little bit combative, my hope is that there's some utility in this, particularly to do with more difficult concepts that people might be getting the wrong idea about. So let's get going here and take a look at what Cameron has put together for us to react to. So the first one here is in the category of takes for you to agree or disagree with. So perspectives to agree or disagree with. And this first one is, man realizes the truth about headphones. Okay, let's see.

I've heard a good deal of headphones in my life and I have to say, I just can't stand listening to any of them without EQ. Well done. The most I can do is acknowledge the potential behind the headphone, but that's it. The simple little 10 band equalizer sitting on top of my speaker amp has kept me from spending more than I need to on equipment because it can easily turn a sound signature I don't quite like into something that is just short of perfect. Alright, so this is basically somebody extolling the virtues of EQ, learning about EQ, and realizing the benefit that it has. And this is absolutely true. The thing is, this is just a 10-band EQ that they're talking about. Wait until they get into digital EQ with parametric EQ, right?

So full parametric, where you can essentially adjust anything. Once you become EQ-pilled, it becomes difficult to listen to any headphones without it because you realize pretty quickly that all headphones can be improved with EQ. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad headphones without EQ, and headphones should be good enough without EQ, the fact that you can improve a sound signature with EQ does not excuse a bad sounding headphone, but yeah, I mean if you really do want to get the most out of your headphone listening experience, that necessarily requires diving into EQ. And I'm going to say that about literally every single headphone. I have never come across a single headphone that can't be improved in some way. Or how about, think about it this way.

I've never come across a headphone that can't be personalized more. So this is a great take. Alright, let's keep going. Headphone reviews are useless. Alright, so this person says that keeping in mind that human perception of a headphone is very, very heavily influenced by expectation and emotion. The only useful thing a headphone review could provide is an analysis of comfort and build quality. And a frequency response graph comparing the headphones to other ones of a similar price range. They're looking for something to objectively convey the properties of the headphone. And this person ends up saying, there is no need for silly subjective descriptors of the sound. All right, so this seems like somebody coming to the realization of the private language problem and the issues that that creates when people are reporting their experiences of these devices online.

We are necessarily having different perceptual experiences of these things and we attach meaning to things differently. So what's the point of communicating this? What's the point of making these reports that are based on these subjective descriptors? That's a reasonable and fair problem and indeed criticism of reviews. They then go the other way way too hard and talk about how, you know, the only useful thing about a review is frequency response data and, you know, build and comfort. Obviously, it's still incredibly useful to get a subjective report from a real human being because that gives you an indication based on the in-situ response when you're actually like wearing the headphones, you know, maybe the frequency response behavior is different in this condition than it is on the condition of the measurement fixture.

So for starters, the FR at the eardrum of the individual person could be different. And that is a meaningful data point to have, even if it's through the lens of a subjective report. And the second benefit is this also gives you a full picture of the psychoacoustic system. So if somebody is telling you, hey, this headphone sounds really detailed, but it's a little bit more intimate for the soundstage, that gives you all the other additional things to do with the experience of using that product that you might not have gotten from just the frequency response graph alone. I'm not talking here necessarily about placebo, though entirely possible. I'm talking about the subjective effects that that frequency response confers to the individual. And that's a useful thing.

We don't; there is this distinction that people have in their minds about like how the objective and the subjective and the, you know, the tonality and the technicalities. This is all the same thing. This is frequency response at the eardrum, but how that translates to the subjective experience of an individual, of any person, that's highly useful as well. All right, let's move on. All right. Impulse response slash timing. Is just as important as frequency response. Oh boy. All right, so this is somebody essentially talking about how there is a time domain component that is relevant for sound quality that is separate from frequency response. This is a fairly common misconception that we see cropping up regularly.

The thing that they might not realize is that time-based views like cumulative spectral decay or the waterfall plots, that sort of thing, that actually is just frequency response, just a different view of it. And that is because headphones in 99. 9% of cases are minimum phase devices, meaning that the time domain information is proportional to the frequency response information. So you may have seen these graphs that show spectral decay or waterfall plots or whatever, where you see, you know, there's certain kind of ringing going on, you know, sort of a big wall of decay is what it looks like visually. People will then use those visualizations to indicate that, hey, the frequency response is one thing, but here's all this other stuff that shows that it's quite messy, right?

Or something along those lines. The thing is, because headphones are minimum phase, if you fix that peak or whatever that feature is in the frequency response, that decay feature disappears with it. So it is directly proportional. It is predictably proportional. It is, for most of the frequency range, inseparable from frequency response the vast majority of the time. Now, when we're talking about the ultra high frequency stuff, my understanding at least is that this is where there might be some room for scrutiny. And there are some cases where headphones are also not strictly minimum phase. And that's where it might be useful to use this kind of visualization. But for the ideas that people are usually bringing to the table when they're talking about time-based views, they're usually talking about it as being a separate category of evaluation that is of similar relevance to frequency response; in actuality, it just is frequency response, just seen a different way.

All right, next one. Phase alteration in EQ is a feature, not a bug. All right, so this person says, just to clarify, the reason EQ alters phase is because that is literally how minimum phase EQ works, both for analog and digital. In other words, it's a feature, not a bug. This is a good post. And as you say, minimum phase EQ is pretty much a freebie for headphones. Since phase smearing isn't the issue, it is with loudspeakers. This person is replying to somebody saying, analog equalizers not only have the potential to alter phase, they also do alter phase. But as this person says, the real distinction shouldn't be between analog and digital EQ, but between graphic EQ and parametric EQ. There is no reason with headphones why analog EQ would be better.

Digital EQ is perfectly fine. It's usually a lot more accessible and easy to be fine-grained, and also you're not going to be as limited by the components that you're using. So you may as well use digital EQ and it may as well be parametric. All right, so the next category here is memes slash sadness. But just before getting into memes and sadness, I want to tell you about headphones. com. They're the ones who sponsored this channel. They make it possible for us to bring you these videos. Headphones. Com is of course a great place to learn about and buy headphones. It's where we publish all of our articles. Like say if you want to learn about things like diffuse field or if soundstage is something that actually matters, check out Headphones.

com and some of the articles that we published up there. In addition to that, Headphones. com also has has a forum community, we will be also posting a thread where you guys can have us react to your spicy takes. So I'll leave all that linked in the description below. But remember, if you like any of the content that we do here on this channel, consider Headphones. Come the next time you're in the market for a new pair of headphones or audio equipment. Okay, back to the video. Let's see what Cameron has come up with here. This person says, 'a few more tweak discoveries here.' ESD mats under and over ground boxes. More spacious and organic sounding along with under the ground boxes. What? Under any dampening feet.

A tiny silver rock of crystals on the outside of headphones. All right, so here's the thing. If this person is being serious, which maybe they're not, but if they're being serious, this is one of the weirder and darker ends of the audiophile space. And it's the kind of thing that in my view gives the term audiophile a bad reputation. You can be an enthusiast about how your music sounds without needing to get into audiophile rocks and crystals and whatever else, right? Somebody having fun, but let's move on. Oh, this is a follow-up from the same person. Oh my god! This person literally has crystals and rocks. Oh my god. After a whole evening of comparison with two to three of each separate color in all of my ground boxes.

My general findings were: clear equals brighter and more clear, but good base. White plus brown equals more V-shaped and second best. Okay, I'm, I still, this might be just somebody going so hard on the shitposts, you know? Like, this might be somebody just, like, taking it to the fullest potential, because this is absurd. Let's collectively move on from this, and I'm going to do the same here. Uh, yep, that's, that's head five for you, I guess. All right, so here's the next one. Let's get into, this one's going to be about cables. All right, so the idea here is somebody was saying that a K701, AKG K71, could be made to sound better than a different headphone, I presume. Not by replacing the cables or the drivers or anything else, but by replacing the quarter-inch connecting jack.

Okay, there are some very specific scenarios where a cable might make a difference. And that has to do with ultra, ultra low impedance headphones like the RAL stuff, the ribbon headphones, or some very low impedance IEMs where you might find a scenario where a cable would have an impedance relationship that would cause a difference. The same would be true with, you know, higher open impedance, you know, source. Then there's the jacks side of it, which is what this person's talking about. I suppose there is a scenario. Where in theory, a jack could make a difference again if you had that really ultra low impedance situation, but not with a K701. There's not anything damaged or broken to do with the connectors if they're functioning correctly, that one of them might, you know, reveal a different kind of sound signature compared to the other one.

Yeah, I don't buy that. All right, let's move on to the next one here. All right, this is somebody saying, frequency response isn't everything. The RE262 has better speed slash dynamics and timbre, in their opinion. This is something where people are certainly familiar with that style of evaluating products. Frequency response is often used as a disqualifier or to show, hey, this headphone or this thing is bad. This experience that you had, that was a good experience, you didn't have that experience or something along those lines, to be a little bit dickish about it. And then they will often tell you, well, but that's not everything. There's this other side of it, too, which is this, you know, technical side of things,

views. But that also doesn't mean that it's not frequency response that's responsible for these experiences. It's just that the existing analysis of frequency response isn't all there is to it. And when people are talking about speed and dynamics and timbre and all this stuff, just because that's caused by frequency response doesn't mean that their experience is invalid or anything like that, right? Their experience of speed and dynamics didn't happen. It did happen. It's just that there is a very real and measurable cause. And if we were to measure at their eardrum and have a better analysis of frequency response and understand how frequency response relates to these experiences better, we'd do a better job of making sense of such a subjective report. All right, let's move on.

All right, so this is somebody quoting somebody talking about how they are agnostic in regards to cables or the idea of pure power. And the person quoting says, imagine taking the advice of people who can't hear the difference in cables. Basically, it's like saying, oh, you can't hear a difference in cables. You're a non-cable believer. Therefore, I can't trust what you have to say about these products because you're an inferior listener. The ironic thing about this is that if this were such an obvious difference as this person's making it out to be, then this is something that they should be able to demonstrate and it shouldn't be up for debate. I tend to think that for things like this, the burden of proof is on the person making these kinds of extraordinary claims about how much cables make a difference, not that, oh, this person is such a bad listener that they can't hear this obvious difference.

Usually people talking about this kind of thing are not talking about anything measurable, because as soon as people go into that, it falls apart. But also when you suggest to them, hey, maybe give blind testing a try, they'll find all kinds of reasons why that's not a good idea. And yeah, that's a bit of a problem. Let's move on. And more cable memeing, let's go. Okay, so this is interesting. This is somebody who's gone even further down there to talk about not necessarily whether or not cables make a difference, but rather trying to attach specific subjective qualities to given properties of those cables. Some people think that gold boosts the mid-range. However, this is actually distortion, similar to the tube sound phenomenon. More distortion sometimes makes timbre richer by adding more harmonics.

I mean, interesting. But the side effects might reduce transparency and focus. This is why some brands market in such a way. If this is true, this would be easy enough to measure, right? And so if somebody is making this kind of claim, let's measure it. All right, now we get into some questions. Do we need an updated version of the Harman study? Why slash why not? Is it time for a broader survey of a new Harman curve? Harman spelled incorrectly. Everybody spells it incorrectly. What? Come on. It's Harman, you know. I think that there's certain criticism of the Harman research that's valid, that's reasonable. But I don't know that I would say sample size is one of them. I don't know that sample size would be the problem.

I know that that's probably the most common criticism. But I actually think that, you know, if you increase the sample size, your results will probably be pretty similar to what they got. For anybody who hasn't been following the research that closely, more research has actually been done, particularly to do with in-ear headphones since some of the publication. The more recent in-ear research has shown that very different sound profiles can be rated similarly well or similarly highly. One of them being Harman IE, but another one being, you know, very much not Harman IE. And this goes to show that the biggest limitation of the Harman research is this idea still of, you know, one target is to be preferred. The takeaway should be preferences fall within a range, not, hey, this is the target to shoot for.

I think what happens is people maybe don't realize that there's a lot more research that was actually done that isn't part of the typical headlines that people see about the Harman target. They'll see the targets and they'll go, oh, that's what the research was. And then it's concluded. And certainly from the perspectives of, you know, Harman International, this is having spoken with Sean Olive about this, the person behind it. they were under the impression that, you know, that research was concluded, but he was still interested in it. And so he kept doing more studies. He did some recent methods of adjustment testing to see what people preferred in in-ear headphones, and to see how things worked with the new B&K 5. 2. 8. It's not like the interest in that stuff has stopped.

It's just that there hasn't been as much of a commercial thrust behind it. And so in that respect, I think, yes, I think it'd be great if there could be some more publicly available preference research that gets done; I don't care as much about having thousands of people. I care more about improving the methodology and improving maybe some of the conditions in which that research gets done. And so, for example, one of the things that I would love is a better sense of what the in situ frequency response was for the different individuals, and to see what happens when you isolate preference from the frequency response behavior variation that we get when different people are wearing different headphones. Because what folks may not realize is that the behavior of the headphones actually changes depending on the condition, right?

So depending on the heads that they're placed on. And so when you isolate or control for frequency response at the eardrums of the individuals, what happens with preference then? But that's a topic for another time. Maybe we can see that at some point. All right, what is the real difference or reason for super expensive versus cheaper headphones? All right, so this person says, what is it that makes the real material difference between say a set of IEMs that is sold at $200 versus a set that goes for $2,000? What does justify the sometimes truly eye-watering price tags of some top-of-the-line pieces? In many ways, what you are paying for is something to be more specific.

And in some cases, that ends up being quite a bit worse or something being of, certain types of materials you know like made out of wood or made out of you know a fancier more expensive kind of thing, more luxurious feeling, right. The thing is, a certain price point allows the manufacturer to make things a certain way if they're particularly committed to a given you know type of driver technology or something that is going to meaningfully increase the material cost then that will impact where they want to price the product because they're going to depend on a certain margin, but don't think that as a consumer this is something that you need to care about. You know the thing with all of this is that inexpensive products can be great, expensive products can be great, but inexpensive products can also be terrible and expensive products can also be terrible.

So in my view it's really just down to the choices made by the manufacturer for how they want to bring a product to market. If they want to go high end, if they want to go budget, it's much more a question of manufacturing means. Do you have the tooling set up to be able to do this at scale? And also what the brand is trying to achieve with their presence within the market. So if they want to be seen as a luxury brand or a high end brand or something along those lines, that's going to impact the choices that they make for where they release their product. And also it can affect what they can do with their economies of scale. So that's kind of how I see the whole question of price point.

All right, next one. Is it normal for ears to ring after listening to headphones? You're listening too loud. If that happens, don't do that. Is placebo bad if it means you enjoy your system more? This is like tapping into the idea to think positive for overall health of your body compared to negative, except in this case, you affect the sound. My main issue with this is that this can lead to spending money erroneously. Which I guess is the entirety of this hobby, but also spending money on things that are ultimately scams. So it actually does matter that we scrutinize our experiences. Like, I don't care if this person or if one person or you individually are, you know, just having a good time. Like, yeah, have a good time.

But if we let this influence overrun to how we communicate with others about this stuff, you know telling people hey, this is the most amazing cable! It does all this crazy stuff right, or the audio file rocks or whatever, right? Like this is the kind of thing that's going to prop up or give an industry really a give it give a place in the industry for some of the scams that exist, And so we have to be willing at some level to scrutinize our experiences and our perceptions of these things. And now if you are reporting this and communicating your enthusiasm for this, it is then perpetuating a cycle of erroneous purchase behavior when people could have been spending that money on things that actually did make a difference and would have led them to have better experiences in the end.

And the last thing I'll say on that is when the veil of placebo falls away, that sucks. When you realize, oh, I just spent this money on this thing that doesn't do anything, that sucks. All right, last one. Should you use CrossFeed? No. This is just a switch that makes your music sound worse. If you do want to have a more realistic experience with headphones, that's where binaural audio comes into play. And if you're looking for that kind of thing, binaural recordings are the way to go because it's a very interesting experience and one that is so much better than just injecting CrossFit into your thing. There are some devices that do this better than others, but in my mind, yeah, it's not something I ever use. Okay, that does it for this video.

I hope this has been entertaining or informational or interesting in some capacity. Who knows? Let me know down in the comments below some of your perspectives on the things I've talked about here in this video today. Maybe you think that cables do make a difference. And who knows? Maybe we'll do a versus the YouTube comment section at some point for one of these videos. And maybe yours will be featured. All right, that's it for me. Consider liking the video if you liked it and subscribe if you found it fun and want to see more of this kind of stuff. And until next time, I'll see you guys later. Bye for now. Bye.