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Never tried to eq them, because I don't see a need. Best headphones I've tried by a mile and then some. But headphones are to a certain degree personal, more than speakers, so basically only your ears can decide.

Fully agree. I have myself been involved in commissioning several works from contemporary composers, as I've been singing in various semi-professional choirs for the last 15 years. I don't mean that all music needs to make its way to the top lists on Spotify. That would create a very boring and...

I think this is key. Im generally in favor of public support of art and music, and don't want market forces to dictate everything. At the same time I do think that some forms of public support for art and music have ossified some forms of music that nobody would listen to or care about unless it...

Wonderful story! My story with jazz is somewhat similar but much less dramatic. I starten to listen to jazz in my teens. Have loved it ever since. But if I'm to be honest with myself, my love affair with jazz probably started because I was attracted to everything jazz represented to me, more...

Interesting thread with many good comments already! Regarding the OP's question, yes lots of people listen very attentively to Messiaen, and similar kinds of music. I've been doing it myself for many years, even though this particular piece from Messiaen is not my favorite. Why? Several...

I'm a tenured social scientist at a university, and I agree with almost everything in this article. This is not the first time such criticism has been voiced, there have been many criticisms of the peer review system in recent years. Here's a longer and more detailed scholarly exposition of why...

This is my experience too. If placed well away from room boundaries and listened to in the near-field directivity doesn't matter that much. The farther away one sits from the speakers, the more directivity tends to matter.

This is as perfect as it gets. Wow! Hats off to Neumann. Directivity is narrow though, so some people may still prefer less perfect but wider-dispersing speakers. But in the narrow dispersion segment, this seems like the speaker to get.

Mr. Newman would be well advised to show some more humility when interacting with audio experts whose knowledge of audio research in all likelihood exceeds his own.

My subjective experience is a strong 'yes' to carpeting. Overly bright rooms are very annoying rooms to listen in IME. Too dead rooms can be boring, but the only way to make ordinary living rooms that dead is basically to use too much acoustic absoption panels. Carpeting along with nice...

Looks very interesting! But my thoughts when reading about the difficultly of creating such a passive crossover: why not just make it active then?

I don't think this is correct. It's not either this or that. A few points: a) measurements are not meaningless in any case, it's good to know about. Then the question is about interpreting those measurements b) everybody has a bias. It's not only Robinson. We can't remove those biases when we...

Sorry to be "that ASR guy", but how did you do these comparisons? Were they done A/B and volume matched, and did you do it sighted or unsighted? Asking because it is very easy to perceive a difference if you expect there to be a difference, even though the difference may not be real. There is...

Absolutely, noise levels vary a lot between such devices. I find that the noise level from my dell laptop is quite high. Don't know if it's the dac part or the audio output, kind of. Apple devices usually have quite good dacs and audio outputs though. I don't perceive any noticeable noise or...

Yes, at least for noise, which is the worst offender (the distortion story is a bit different but let's not make it too complicated). The noise level from your phone or pc is the same irrespective of volume. It's just a kind of constant noise that your device can't help itself from making. Let's...

I don't think anybody has said that noise is inaudible? The whole point (at least for me) is that some forms of distortion or noise are close to inaudible, whereas others are audible indeed. Lower-order harmonic distortion is very hard to detect once it gets down to 50 or 60 db below the signal...

I'm wondering whether the growth in noise-cancelling headphones will lead to a demand for higher dynamic range? Those headphones create artificially a low-noise environment, so it's not as important for the music to cut through all that environmental noise anymore. From what I see around me...

This is slightly off-topic, but related to what audio algorithms these AVRs come loaded with. Does anybody know when Harman's patent for the old Logic 7 expires? That's by far the best I've heard for music so far (excluding true Auro 3D material on a proper Auro 3D setup). The upmixer for stereo...

I had totally forgot, NAD already does this! Thanks for mentioning it. Well yeah, NAD's modules are expensive for what they are, but it's still cheaper than buying a whole new AVR box in order to get new functionality. Not to mention it's more sustainable. I'm sure there's room for other...

A SINAD of 80db is my personal "very happy zone", in all use cases. I don't have any big problem with a SINAD of 60db either as long as it's dominated by lower-order harmonic distortion and not high levels of noise, hissing or IMD. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that I would be able to...