Taking Harman as a target can’t be that bad. For example my preferred signature for now is a Harman one (Aria).
What is dangerous is considering it as THE one and only target. It would imply the FR says all about an iem, that everyone has the same hearing and that we can’t learn/discover further from psycho-acoustic.
As said, I like Amir’s approach of “if a dac/amp can do better, let’s push them to do so”. It pushes the technology forward, with lesser cost at each iteration/generation. The downside of it is that chasing this technical perfection can be done at the expense of other parameters that aren’t/can’t be measured.
At the end of the day, having this kind of review is great, but everyone has to mix his sources to help making a choice. There’s no way around it.
The Harman curve thing… Personally, my experience is that Harman is not an ideal target. However, if we remember the website is called Audio Science Review. At least there is Science to support Harman. Recent science. So it is completely consistent with the perspective of a website focused on the Science aspect of this “hobby”. I guess we should not consider their motivations to be the same as ours. However, if you look into the forums there are some very long discussions about the Harman target, going back to its origins, comparisons to other targets etc. For someone interested in understanding this better, this is a good source to highlight key considerations, other studies etc. However, the reviews on ASR cannot be considered “the final word” in the selection of a product, because their perspective is not your/my perspective. I am less interested in general technical excellence / engineering excellence and more interested in audible technical excellence, comfort and reliability.
While Hifiguides forum is certainly a courteous, non-confrontational venue (for the most part), and the ASR forums at times can be very confrontational and hostile. My perspective in evaluating the mertis of one or the other would be to consider what is the utility of the discourse? Is someone sharing useful information? Is anyone trying to do anything to improve the (IMO) very lacking situation when it comes to understanding how to select “good” headphones/earphones, or other audio products? Or should it merely be a social club to repeat similar subjective impressions ad nauseum?
I would put the same measure against reviewers in general. Are they improving the situation, making it worse, or maintaining the status quo? I can think of a number of reviewers, who even make comments in these forums who would fit into all of those categories. For me, good audio reviewers, recognize this situation, and are actively trying to improve it. They also recognize their own limitations, what value subjective impressions truly mean, how bias plays a part, what the threshold would be to make a valid claim.
If you spend any significant time on r/HeadphoneAdvice you would quickly understand how difficult this is for the typical consumer. I frequently see posts where the person has some kind of decision paralysis because of all the conflicting reviews/opinions on a particular product. They are more or less ready to give up. You also see the situation where someone has dropped, for them, a relatively large amount of cash on some hyped product and are left underwhelmed. The answer is frequently, better luck next time, we all hear differently, or of course that wouldn’t sound good.
This video for instance is ludicrous. This guy either got a different headphone to me, or he is talking through his arse. The treble on these headphones is incredibly subdued. He’s calling them “on the edge”, the right amount of “shimmer” and so on. There’s a MASSIVE scoop around 7.5k, and to my ear there is between 2.8 and 6.6db gain required at various points between 1.6k upwards to approach anything close to neutral. He says the treble is extended. To me it is the epitome of rolled-off.
That Youtuber is a waste of time. Not only was he the biggest ER2SE shill the world has ever seen, he now did a 180 and now says it’s trash? I said it before and I say it again:
If he tries to be funny - he is not.
If he doesn’t try to be funny - it’s just sad.
Just the fact this dude worships Nouvraught tells me all I need to know.
Nouvraught is perhaps the biggest imbecile among headphone reviewers. He pays attention to nothing but frequency curves, somehow overlooks the horrible treble spike and sizzle of every Beyerdynamic he worships and considers nearly all other reviewers to be wrong.
This dude and Nouvraught are the classic high school contrarians. They’re the same assholes insisting the sky is azure when someone calls it blue.
What’s funniest is that this cat has less than 2K subscribers to his channel, but he’s offering tips to get more subs to a fellow reviewer who he’s ripping. Pot, meet kettle.
This video drips of insane amounts of inferiority and jealousy, just like every video he and his buddy Nouvraught puke onto YouTube.
I wouldn’t say that shilling one thing for years and then suddenly saying it is shit is ambiguous (not sure you know what the word means). And neither is it funny.
Just goes to show that he hammers some arbitrary opinions for no real reason. Randomness without a punchnline is not funny.
plus basically his whole joke is the ASR style “everything is objective, there is only one perfect… headphones are basically as utilitarian as blenders”… something i just personally don’t believe in
Am I supposed to find it funny the same way the Birds Aren’t Real people are supposed to be funny? At least that proves a point of how absurd things have gotten, but I don’t think any of the birdbrains actually believe it.
It isn’t funny, and not even effective trolling. Not sure what the point is other than wasting bandwidth.
