A fantastic presentation. Thank you for recording it and posting. I have a much greater respect for Dan Clark and his products now and a much better understanding and appreciation for headphone design.
Dan Clark is the first person I've seen who actually cares about impulse response like we should. Reducing those resonances and maintaining truly low distortion are, for some reason, mostly ignored by most of the headphone community, and I wish that more people understood that what a lot of people enjoy or have a preference for is actually just distortion and resonances of various types.
What an awesome presentation, thanks for uploading this. I try to bite my tongue about the obsession with reviewer measurements and stick with subjective impressions most of the time, but either way it seems like an exercise in futility. Ultimately my physiology, biases, and preferences are going to be the ultimate determining factors for whether or not I'll like a headphone. Better (imo) to make sure I buy from sites with a friendly return policy. Better still to not level accusations against people or brands for squiggly lines produced by a 3rd party.
Measurements are meant to assist with your changing biases and preferences and physiology across a matter of hours, days, genres, or moods. Unfortunately many aren't self aware so they listen to a genre and buy a speaker they think does it well during whatever time of day they are listening to is, and based on initial impressions, they justify their purchase. Then they start listening to something else, at a different time of day, or get exposure long term, and then shop for the next sidestep based on their current mood, listening in the morning or evening, etc. If that's what one prefers: A never ending journey of genre based equipment coloring things to temporary taste, then ignore the "squiggly lines".
dan clark is really the best, i’ve been complaining about “flat bass” as bass light for a while lol 40:25 is the real truth most headphones don’t get right
Awesome, awesome, awesome! Even for me (being a pretty normal hobbiest musician and sound engineer) this was incredibly informative as well as easy to understand. Thanks so much for uploading, and thanks to Dan for this great talk (even though he probably won’t read through the comments here).
15:26 I'm SeenCreative over at Head-fi. I'd like to think I had a very small hand in the bass bump. As far as I can tell, I was one of the few talking about a lack of distortion reducing the perception of was. *If* this is the case, it's really fun to see an impact I made!
26:54 damn that's interesting. What I noticed between my IEM's, in this case Timeless (Planar) and Starfield (dynamic) is that Timeless seems to reproduce sound with less IMD. So it's like if I listen to some music where instruments have long decay (metal: distortion guitars, bass, background ambient) and all this different noise is layered, it becomes congested and there's a sense of ringing on Starfield whereas there's much less on Timeless. The metaphor I used is water ripples crashing to each other and distorting the edges (but idk if that's how water ripples actually work :D) which in turn causes ringing as sound fights for space.
39:22 this part is important. We talk about detail but most headphones doesn't even produce 20hz-20khz well. I want my whole audible spectrum. This should be the number one goal of any headphone. Everyone is obsessed with mids but imo it's highs that makes or breaks headphones.
34:19 Doesn't have to be the next gen; give me a grant and I'd happily do the research. I did a lot of materials modelling when I was a postdoc and now do consultancy-based design substantiation; I'd love to do research in the areas suggested, but it's finding a company to fund the research.
That 150-200 Hz bump is BS. I have headphones with that and it just makes them sound shallow. People can perceive and hear lower freq than 150. His stealth is hard to get good fit and seal on most heads and it's loosing bass loudness that way. Maybe he is just compensating it with that bump. He didn't explained Harman or he doesn't know how to. This "presentation" is just a marketing stunt. I'm over and out.
Measurements are a bit whack in audio, people place way too much emphasis on them. Use your ears first and look at a FR chart to inform your assessment.
