Mainstream taste in audio is crap. Designing headphones for a target audience that thinks Spotify HQ mode is sufficient is not going to produce a very good product, audio-quality-wise.
Because there aren't any "natural" / "neutral" / whatever speakers / headphones / cochlear implants. They all get a signal and a task: make this sound the way the listener wants.
"Just make it sound as it did when it was (live) recorded"? That's not going to happen even assuming some "perfect" speakers (not headphones), unless you can also supply the room, audience, humidity, and appropriate level of inebriation.
Apple has done a lot of of work on adjusting AirPods to your head and ear, IIRC. That's all software, and exactly the sort of thing they've been good at, even in the last few years.
It's basically iPhone camera vs. Canon & Nikon, the sequel. How many times did people on HN insist phone cameras will never be as good as SLRs, because the latter have the five pound of glass it takes to create good photos?
Turns out software and sensors are a pretty good substitute. While some features of good lenses are still not quite there (bokeh), they've eviscerated them in other, arguably more important disciplines (low light).
Apple could have made these as good as $500 Sennheiser/Grado/Sony cans. But they didn't.
Rants about "traveling with an orchestra" don't even make sense when one listens to music produced exclusively in-the-box. And even if I am listening to recorded material what is wrong with nuance and detail... after all that is what the mixing and mastering engineers heard when they made it. Do you think they choose their microphones and recording hardware willy-nilly?
Software is a terrible substitute for hardware! Hardware is easier to understand, latency-free, and produces a more harmonically interesting result
You remind me of a buddy of mine that has hearing loss from the marines. He is a giant headphone nut, and owns numerous $500+ pairs of headphones. All sorts of head phone amplifiers and dacs. But his hearing loss prevents any of that from really even mattering.
Hearing loss is a weird beast that takes many forms. If he truly cannot tell the difference between Beats and his setup in a blind hearing test then maybe I would agree. Do you know if he's done this?
I think you're taking about audio pre-processing stuff that Spotify or others do to qualitatively ""enhance"" audio for their lowest common denominator listeners, which is completely independent from what's being discussed.
Whom amongst us has not been told that this fancy power cable will be the second coming of Christ?
Mainsteam taste is what sells products. Obviously you're not part of the target market and should probably just move on.
I've done A/B testing with decent headphones (http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html) and not been able to tell the difference. Maybe you can, but I'd bet that most people can't, and in any case the result is far from butchery.
A lot of people love to fret about this stuff and convince themselves they can tell for the exact same reasons uninformed people go out and buy $200 cables.
It's also the same as people who install Gentoo so they can tune their CFLAGS to be 0.0000001% faster under certain workloads at the cost of not running on any other machine and crashing inexplicably on occasion.
We all love optimizing things, regardless of the actual real-world benefits.
I've mostly noticed differences in lower frequencies seeming attenuated in electronic bass music, though it is possible that this might be due to mastering (for stream vs CD) or normalization
You can get Sennheiser HD280's, where the audio quality is likely worlds apart from these, and earcup padding that attenuates outside noise by something like 30db passively, for $60. Or you could be a doof and buy these Apple cans