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c0ng0pr0 t1_iy3l06d wrote

I have yet to cross paths with a clear definition of what “technicalities” are.

Is this like the physical properties of what the hardware is made of?

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dongas420 t1_iy3regb wrote

Communicating ideas by language effectively depends on everyone involved possessing a common baseline of experiences, particularly anything involving the senses.

Without that, you're stuck wrapping everything up in abstractions such as PRTF accuracy that don't entirely correspond 1:1 to what's actually going on (What do you mean, this IEM has a deep-sounding stage? Doesn't it bypass the pinna entirely?), and there's only so much you can do to explain to someone who's never seen before why, say, painting all of their walls hot pink is a bad idea.

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rhalf t1_iy4jt05 wrote

>Communicating ideas by language effectively depends on everyone involved possessing a common baseline of experiences, particularly anything involving the senses.

Audiophilia is like that, but audiophiles are trying to communicate things WAY more subtle than the resolution of their 'common baseline of experiences'.
At least if they knew well what they're talking about, they wouldn't say that somehitng has slow bass, if having a darker sound or quiet upper range is the same thing.

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dongas420 t1_iy4m1pf wrote

Bloated bass with notes that lack crispness and bleed into each other is something pretty much anyone who's listened to the crappy stuff should have heard before. It's hardly subtle.

Excess mid-/upper bass is part of what causes it, but a lot of it's related to subtle issues with treble presentation that are hard to point out on a graph, especially if you don't know what you're looking for. "Slow bass" is handy shorthand for all that.

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rhalf t1_iy4nwlt wrote

This is different to what other people are describing online. PEople say that a subwoofer has slow bass...

It's just an inacurate language.
IF it's not bass that's doing it, then it's not slow bass. It's everything else that you described.

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dongas420 t1_iy4qwl4 wrote

Subs have their own issues involving group delay, which can easily exceed audible thresholds.

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rhalf t1_iy5npl0 wrote

Yes they do, but do these two things sound so similar that they deserve common name? I think we need to talk about audiophile dictionary in a more critical way, or else it'll continue to be just poetry. Poetry is nice, but for communication's purpose, it's interpreted with more disciplined language. It would be cool to have some intermediary terms that help us with interpretation and link physical phenomena to casual talk.

I'd like to add something that I've been always pointing out. Headphone audiophile speak came from speakers. Words like 'soundstage' are far more descriptive with speakers than with headphones. No wonder, newcomers are often confused. Not everyone imagines headphone soundfield as a stage, more often as a bubble.

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dongas420 t1_iy5u91u wrote

I don't really care. The Crinacle dictionary has been perfectly adequate for judging and unambiguously describing the sound of virtually everything I've listened to, and I can correlate the terms both with what I hear in my test tracks and with FR elements such as pattern/magnitude of treble notches, upper treble downslope, and 5-8/10-16 kHz treble ratio.

Anyway, this post is about the reductionist big brains who constantly chant Harman curve as a thought-terminating cliché, and critically examining the terms that audiophiles use to describe sound isn't going to help with them at all.

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BGpolyhistor t1_iy5tkn6 wrote

I’m deeply skeptical of your statement. The Legend X SE is significantly boosted in the mid bass and has zero bloat or mudiness. Treble is also elevated. Again, no bloat.

I’ve purchased around 10 sets of IEM’s and combined them with 7 different DAP’s and 3 DAC/Amp combos. In my experience excess subbass leads to bloat. Or just a cheap/poorly implemented driver configuration.

Wouldn’t be able to prove it objectively, just saying my personal experience is different than it should be if what you’re saying is correct.

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dongas420 t1_iy5wado wrote

Now you're learning that there's more to technicalities than general tonality and that the relationship between FR and sound is very complicated. Keep on doing that.

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BGpolyhistor t1_iy6m9ep wrote

Oh, I posted a drunken rant elsewhere on the thread arguing just that. Cheers!

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c0ng0pr0 t1_iy449ib wrote

It’s funny to me after 18 months of paying attention to the “professional” reviewers… none of them have tried to start a wiki or something like to build a common vocabulary/jargon list which is clear.

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dongas420 t1_iy4612j wrote

Browsing the /r/headphones front page every day doesn't count as paying attention. Crinacle and Precogvision have posted detailed articles on how they perceive and evaluate technicalities.

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mainguy t1_iy4z37u wrote

I mean its the same for musicians. We describe sounds as fuzzy, thin, thick, warm, bright, moody, and so on. It works because we have a common reference of experience (im talking about guitar).

It always baffles me how headphone reviewers get so much schtick for their vocab. Sound is hard to describe.

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Headytexel t1_iy46aqx wrote

IIRC Head-Fi did it a loooooong time ago but it never really caught on. Also I’m sure newer reviewers like Resolve could do a much better version.

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Muscletov t1_iy3xfts wrote

> I have yet to cross paths with a clear definition of what “technicalities” are.

Because there isn't. Most people think "hearing new things in song" = TECHNICALITIES

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NFTOxaile t1_iy422ip wrote

Technicalities are acoustic properties that aren't related to subjective aspects such as tuning or timbre. Technicalities cover areas such as soundstage, resolving ability and attack/decay.

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hyde0000 t1_iy49wb9 wrote

Yeah basically this, I've yet to see anyone able to EQ for more accurate imaging, better layering, or faster transients. Though sometimes more treble can give perceived wider/bigger soundstage.

I always think EQ is like saying Corolla at 40 km/h is the same as Ferrari at 40 km/h, therefore they're the same car because they both travel exactly at 40 km/h. To certain extent it's true but doesn't tell the full story.

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ThelceWarrior t1_iy4eyla wrote

>Yeah basically this, I've yet to see anyone able to EQ for more accurate imaging, better layering, or faster transients. Though sometimes more treble can give perceived wider/bigger soundstage.

It really doesn't take much to demonstrate that you can indeed EQ to get better technicalities, just buy an in-ear with a shitty FR you can find the graph of online then EQ it to Harman/VDSF or a target that you find "technical", even better if you can use oratory1990's EQ list so that way you can stay sure that you didn't fuck up something in the process too.

While it will never sound exactly the same (Expecially in the "air" section of the FR) as other IEMs EQed to that target you will still get much better technicalities.

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NFTOxaile t1_iy54hqg wrote

>IEMs EQed to that target you will still get much better technicalities

No they don't. You perceive the sound as if it was better due to the tuning being more to your liking, but the technicalities are exactly the same as before.

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ThelceWarrior t1_iy56r8y wrote

Well that does kinda tell me you didn't actually try doing what I said above, it's expecially apparent with IEMs since you remove a lot of variables with them.

>Technicalities are acoustic properties that aren't related to subjective aspects such as tuning or timbre. Technicalities cover areas such as soundstage, resolving ability and attack/decay.

There are definitely a few things that needs to be said about this statement:

a) Tuning isn't really a subjective aspect but it's very much objective, you may say that tuning preference is subjective but even that could be argued a bit since there is clearly a trend when it comes to preference among the general population.

b) Technicalities are also very much a subjective criteria (As oratory1990 himself noted) and you often have disagreements when it comes to that aspect even among well known reviewers.

c) As you can see from that comment technicalities in general are very much directly related to tuning since in the end that's pretty much the main aspect you have when it comes to audio transducers (Barring audible levels of nonlinear distortion), the thing is that it's generally kinda hard to quantify what aspects of the tuning makes the difference between a "highly resolving transducer" vs one that just has "good timbre" really.

It can be argued that FR graphs aren't the most accurate compared to how they would actually sound in your ears but again eh, it's also the only thing acoustic engineers have to go by when it comes to tuning their stuff besides listening with their own ears (Which are different from yours too) and of course a test group if said manufacturer is big enough.

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dongas420 t1_iy4ieul wrote

This is basically how I EQ the Variations to give it faster transients: https://i.imgur.com/E2tHn2C.jpg

The main problem with these EST tribrids that gives them their wispy treble character and slightly smeared transients is that the upper treble rise/fall past 10 kHz isn't properly present. If you listen to cymbals on them, you can easily hear that the shimmer lasts for too long and starts bleeding into other cymbal strikes because of that treble overextension. The slight dip at 10 kHz gives a bit of extra depth (and by extension, better layering), with the 5 kHz notch being necessary to make sure the imaging remains coherent.

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hyde0000 t1_iy4pm3n wrote

lol this is the most well explained/reasonable counter argument that I read on reddit. I'm being serious, good job.

My EQ on m PC is currently buggy/not working, once I get it fixed I'll look into it again.

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fenrir245 t1_iy7gvne wrote

> Technicalities cover areas such as soundstage, resolving ability and attack/decay.

All of which are way more subjective than tuning.

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bubblejohns t1_iy3yfb7 wrote

For everyone it’s kinda different. And it’s been somewhat debunked aswell in some cases. Alot of it is tonality and fr. Some was driver performance. Some was design flaws. Some was literally nothing at all. Basically it’s people trying to describe the final 10% of sound that isn’t FR

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hcvc t1_iy4uplv wrote

People just make shit up in this hobby

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BGpolyhistor t1_iy6mfma wrote

and spend inordinate amounts of money based on made up shit.

Guilty. Still loving it though.

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Egoexpo t1_iy47lwk wrote

We can just speculate about this topic, maybe this text Here can help to understand.

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c0ng0pr0 t1_iy4qr9r wrote

Thank you. That was interesting.

I look at headphones/speakers/IEMs as technology/hardware. So when I hear technicalities I expect something about part of the hardware, and it’s effects on all the stuff listed in the linked article.

Like different material filters = x resulting sound

Or driver arrangements in hybrid setups positioned differently = y result

Sorry if my perspective is off.

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Egoexpo t1_iy50huy wrote

Engineers (like Sean Olive and Oratory) who have already been able to speak about this have already explained that the material, price or "arrangement of the drivers" does not necessarily make one headphone technically better than the other in terms of speed, decay or something of that order.

For those of us who just want to know about sound quality, any headphone technical result is show in the frequency response graph and the THD graph. Remembering that most headphones on the market do not have THD high enough for us to be able to hear, for this reason we have more frequency response graphs available than THD graphs on the internet.

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Jackstraw335 t1_iy4v6wr wrote

That article lost me at "Knowing that all the characteristics of headphones are in frequency response graph..."

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Egoexpo t1_iy519yh wrote

This is what engineers and scientists who study headphones talk about, only audiophiles disagree with this. I think it's worth remembering that these scientists and engineers also had the opportunity to listen to expensive headphones, such as the Hifiman and Stax headphones. If there was something about these headphones that wasn't showing on the frequency response graph and the THD graph, then those scientists and engineers who have been studying headphones for years would probably have noticed.

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blargh4 t1_iy43zqx wrote

My impression is that it's basically "things that are hard/impossible to EQ"

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