No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price
&quot;Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent.&quot;<p>And with that, this study is <i>bullshit</i>.<p>Human beings don&#x27;t listen to linear sine sweeps. We listen to <i>music</i>. Recorded music has 8+ octaves of frequency range (the bottom octave plus a little extra is almost always rolled off in real-world recordings, to ease stress on downstream components that can&#x27;t reproduce such low frequencies anyway), and 20-50db of useable dynamic range.<p>Sine wave measurements of audio gear ignore impulse response, intermodulation distortion, phase shift, and a host of other real-world physical device responses to real-world musical signals. Scientific, reductionist thinking is inadequate to get an accurate picture of the factors that matter to human listeners.<p>Frequency response and total harmonic distortion aren&#x27;t measured in these cases because they&#x27;re <i>useful</i> or <i>relevant</i>. They&#x27;re measured because they&#x27;re <i>easy to measure</i>. It&#x27;s like looking in the wrong place, because the light is better there. And the results? It&#x27;s like measuring a car&#x27;s performance by how well it can drive in a straight line at 60mph. Acceleration, braking, and turning are too hard to measure, so we ignore them...<p>I&#x27;m a musician and record producer. I&#x27;ve engineered and produced numerous albums, and rely on multiple different types of headphones for different purposes. The article&#x27;s claim that one headphone can be easily morphed into another through mere equalization is, frankly, bullshit. The two headphones I rely on the most (Beyerdynamic DT880 and AKG K240) sound wildly different. Neither is &quot;accurate&quot;. Neither are the Tannoy System 12 DMT midfield studio monitors I use for mixing, or the stock Subaru car speakers I use for reference to check the mixes from the Tannoys.<p>Audio reproduction is incredibly complex and difficult stuff. Trying to isolate one factor and saying &quot;That explains everything!&quot; is bad thinking.