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I think you missed the perfectly valid critique, that sennheiser sub bass roll off very quickly. An eq filter won't fix this without distorting sound.

I didn’t miss it; it’s just not valid. (1) The HD800S is actually not as highly regarded as you may think on ASR because these issues do show up in the measurements and are pointed out in the review (did you read it?), but also (2) the HD800’s issues are indeed very much fixable with EQ, and I can confirm this subjectively with direct experience with my HD800S.

I hope you’re not thinking I’m advocating a crude N-band equalizer to broadly boost the bass and reduce the treble to fix the HD800’s thin-ness and brightness. I’m talking about very precise filters that the community has optimized mathematically to fit the measured response to the ideal Harman target curve: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...

There is no reason scientifically to believe this wouldn’t work, other than the maximum driver excursion and distortion limits of the headphones. Fortunately the HD800S bass is extremely clean and undistorted, and they respond really well here. I’ve tried this with other headphones, and most cheaper headphones do struggle greatly, while the HD800S sub-bass is extremely impressive, clean, and powerful when EQ’ed in this way. And even more importantly, this works wonders to smooth out peaks in the treble that sound too harsh to be prior to EQ.

Even if it couldn’t be fixed with precise EQ though, this is still something we can measure objectively via max SPL and distortion vs frequency tests. For example, another highly regarded headphone is the Focal Clear, and it unfortunately has severe bass SPL / driver excursion limits that rules it out from being corrected in this way.

Of course it’s a fair criticism that such expensive headphones should require EQ at all! And the HD800S are indeed criticized in this way on ASR! Sadly though, it seems virtually all headphones do require EQ to sound remotely near their maximum possible sound quality potential, in terms of their physical capability. I personally love the HD800S for a number of reasons, but one of them is extreme comfort (which definitely is subjective), but I will be the first to admit their sound is painful to my ears until corrected with EQ.

You claim high-end audio is not subjective, but then bring up the Harman target. You're defeating your own point. As you know, the Harman target is a "mass market" pleasing option for average joe's. Its not the be all and end all of audio signatures. I am in the "bass head" camp, and I loathe it for a lot of the stuff I listen to. I'd take a JVC HA-SZ2000 over the HD 800s for my taste.

If you re-read my posts, you'll note several things I point out or at least allude to, beyond the oversimplified characterization of "not subjective":

(1) We have an objective science that disambiguates and understands differences that are subjective versus universal preferences in speakers (to some reasonable threshold of population universality; e.g. maybe you find some 0.0000001% population that prefers horrible screeching noises added to any audio content, but arguing for this as an important dimension of subjective variability that we need to incorporate into hardware is I hope clearly absurd).

(2) The vast majority of subjective variability relates to differences in frequency response, which are extremely easy and cheap to adjust in software -- no need to cycle through many multi-thousand dollar headphones or speakers just in hopes of finding one that suits your preferred frequency response target.

(3) Almost every kind of imperfection that can't be corrected via frequency response tuning (e.g. undistorted SPL capability, THD, IMD, off-axis smoothness and similarity to on-axis for speakers, power handling and dynamic compression, etc.) turns out to be almost universally disliked versus when that imperfection does not exist.

(4) Once frequency response balance is factored out either via custom EQ or a "mass market" target curve (which for headphones is indeed more of a compromise, but for speakers is not even remotely a subjective matter, since there are mountains of scientific evidence over decades proving over and over again that the preferred anechoic frequency response for speakers is flat, i.e. the mathematically perfect identity function), which naturally yields a preferred in-room target curve of a smoothly declining slope -- very little (if any) subjective variability remains (e.g. bass boost or treble tilt to taste is one such example).

(5) To be clear, some subjective variability does remain, but it mostly relates to head fit and comfort (for headphones), and for speakers is much more nuanced and tends to relate to beam width and height differences. In both cases, the science is capable of examining these precisely, not in some kind of vague or hand-wavy woo woo sense. Lastly, there is always some need to make some coarse adjustments to bass and treble when listening to older recordings or recordings which were mastered to a non-neutral reference curve (as they should be, else it's impossible to ever reconstruct what was intended) -- but this is not so much a matter of listener preference as it is correcting for mixing/mastering errors in older or lower quality tracks.

>I own the HD800S and if it wasn’t for the scientifically derived EQ filters some community members have developed, I would be entirely unable to listen to them for the reasons exactly as you describe. But once the EQ is applied fixing their FR curve to the Harman target curve, suddenly the sound signature dramatically changes from unlistenably painful (for metal music, for example) to perfectly balanced sound.

That's why I prefer flat, little coloured gear (IEMs in my case) and do minute adjustments in EQ if I really must. I've got enough of a wide range of styles I listen to in any given time frame that I would get more bad than good from gear with a strong signature. I've been happy with my Etymotic ER4.

> The consensus science shows that for speakers, an “objective best” does exist (such that the objective “best” has extremely high likelihood of sounding best to >95% of people)

Are there some product(s) that you can name off the top of your head as examples?

For the absolute best, cost is no object? Genelec 8351B + W371A, Revel F328Be, Dutch & Dutch 8C, Kii Three BXT, and many others.

But you really don’t need to pay this much unless you want the absolute best quality AND quantity (capable of going extremely loud, which is an engineering challenge that requires expensive solutions). You may find the “Speaker Attr Comparison” tab here useful to explore the price vs performance spectrum: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?pages/Spe...

I would recommend learning to read the individual reviewed speaker measurements though, since there definitely is some information lost when compressing these incredibly rich measurements down to a single number, and the science still has some room to improve since there are some dimensions (e.g. the importance of low distortion at high SPL, or beam width) that this fairly old aggregate score model does not currently incorporate.

There definitely is some subjective taste involved, but the important thing is that we can measure these dimensions objectively and understand which is subjective (and why), and which is not a matter of subjective personal taste. We can explore these personal preference tradeoffs without completely surrendering to the subjective nonsense that ‘anything goes’.

For example, it looks like the most subjective factor remaining in speakers is the overall beam width — whether you want a more directional sound, or a more omnidirectional one that fills the room more broadly. This topic is at the edge/fringe of the established science, but the general consensus here is that the objective best would be a multichannel surround sound system of medium beam speakers, where you can either replay recordings meant for multichannel systems, or for traditional stereo recordings at least dynamically select how frontal vs surround you want a particular stereo recoding to be reproduced (just as you can e.g. easily adjust bass boost to taste depending on what you’re listening to, if it wasn’t recorded/mixed the way you like). But given that most people want to minimize the number and size of speakers in their room, there does tend to be a practical challenge of preference here if you can only pick one style (wide vs medium vs narrow beam) for stereo recordings (which while not an ideal format, constitute 99.999% of all music people enjoy).

We have top-line Genelecs in our home theatre (with a custom center channel horn for dialog). But most "audiophiles" won't like them even though they are as accurate a speaker as you can get.

As a 58-year-old, the sound I like when listening to music is probably a bit off from "accurate". It's a combination of trying to match the sound I grew up hearing (which admittedly was colored by the way records were mastered in the 70s!) and the fact that my high-end hearing isn't what it used to be. I think considerations like that are what drive "audiophile" audio.

Plus, when you get to be 50+ and have some money to spare, there's a cool factor. A preposterous turntable is just like a luxury wrist-watch. You don't buy a $80,000 watch because it tells better time....

If a $80k watch or turntable makes you happy, then that’s great for you. The reason the science matters here is because most people don’t necessarily have a ton of money to waste, and aren’t necessarily trying to recreate a historical reproduction of some old records (along with all their flaws); most people just want to listen to their favorite music and have it sound the best it can for a reasonable price. This is where the science has the definitive answers, with the potential exception of really old recordings with various quirks due to the lack of well-established audio recording and reproduction science at the time. But digitizing such old works involves some creative art in trying to recreate the authentic old sound when played on modern speakers, and this can be done well (and is done well, in some but not all cases).

But for example, there is no magical difference between a good studio monitor and good audiophile speakers. The differences are well understood and easily measurable. Studio monitors are often more neutral and flat, but also may tend to have a narrower beam, while audiophile speakers often have wider beams and perhaps some coloration like bass boost and treble boost or reduction.

What’s great about the science is it removes all this subjective guesswork. For example, my Genelec 8351B’s out of the box sound too bright for my tastes. But thankfully their built-in DSP allows me not only to calibrate them to perfection to my room, but tune the overall sonic signature to my preference (a gentle downward slope, for a warmer sound). The beauty of good speakers is you can do this in software, rather than buying a different pair of speakers.

About the only thing you can’t tune in software with good speakers is the beam width (assuming there are no flaws like directivity mismatches, distortion, etc. which can never be fixed in DSP). And that’s why e.g. my Genelec still sound different from my Revel speakers: the Genelec are medium width beam, while the Revel are very wide.

Depending on the music genre, this matters. I prefer the wider beam sound on older music and more traditional “audiophile” style music, so for that I tend to prefer the Revels. But for newer music, I and almost everyone else prefers the Genelec’s presentation. It’s important that this is not some subjectivist mystery: it completely makes sense, and through this understanding we are empowered to engineer or select the best speaker for the job without making it unattainably expensive or impossibly convoluted via subjective claims.

> For the absolute best, cost is no object? Genelec 8351B + W371A, Revel F328Be, Dutch & Dutch 8C, Kii Three BXT, and many others.

Yeah, I'll probably be in the price point of B&W, Totem, or Kef. :)

I went with Kef because they measure almost as well as Revel/Genelec, but were much cheaper than either of those options in my country.

Also Kef has a slightly higher directivity than Revel which I believe means that the room makes less difference to the sound than it would with a lower directivity speaker, so therefore it should sound better in worse/smaller rooms. I prefer the aesthetics of Kef over Revel/Genelec as well, but that's a matter of taste.

Very happy with my decision.