Agree and all of our preferences are different…
I pay no attention to the HR curve, its when I put on a set of headphones and how do they work for me?
If they happend to match this or any other curve fine…but is totally a dont care here…
Its all about the music and how well its reproduced in my head…
Attempts to quantitify this stuff for designers and builders of cans is a great tool at times…but its going to get back to me putting them on and listening…
Alex
Resolve drives me crazy by having understood about 80% of the concepts that go into FR and measurements … but mixing the 20% that he’s got wrong at any given time. In this case he’s using “Harman” to mean his personal amalgam of the 2013 Harman curve’s bass with the 2018’s mids & treble. So it’s not quite as radical a departure from some mythical over-ear headphone neutral as the full 2018 Harman curve.
If you want to hear what actual FR neutral sounds like on a headphone, it’s simple (grin). Listen to your headphones using the Online Tone Generator or your favourite sine sweep tool. Set the volume to quiet conversation but not whisper quiet. Move the slider slowly from 20 Hz to however far into the stratosphere your hearing reaches. Note the frequency ranges of any meaningful departures – either dips or rises. Then EQ them out. Now use that EQ to listen to a variety of your usual music at your usual loudness levels.
It takes a bit of practice to learn to hear very gradual rises or falls in loudness. And also to distinguish what’s actual loudness vs the psychoacoustic softness of low frequencies and the psychoacoustic piercing-ness of high frequencies.
And of course (this keeps on needing to be repeated) neither the three flavours of Harman nor the multiple flavours of diffuse field nor even your personal neutral is in any way the “correct” tuning for a headphone. The correct tuning is the one that rocks your boat. period. full stop.
I guarantee neither Sean Olive nor Todd Welti has ever described the Harman FR curve as either Neutral nor Correct in some Absolute Truth sense. They know very well it’s the statistical average consumer preference tuning. They even assign this a number: 71% likely to be at least acceptable to any given consumer.
Yes neutral is relative, however there should always be some degree of elevation past 1k because of pinna gain, even more so for in ears. Other than that it’s really a matter of taste, I do like the idea of having harman as a neutral standard because it gives a objective understanding of what people mean when they say neutral, otherwise it would be so much harder to convey how a headphone sounds if we don’t have a baseline.
I for one don’t think the 2013 over ear harman response is perfect but it is a pretty good safe tuning that most would not find offensive, the in ear harman response is less ideal imo.
My understanding was that the pinna gain meant that those frequencies where natural louder, so why wound they need to be elivated?
For in ears it’s much more elevated because the pinna is bypassed entirely, for over ears, I’m actually not completely sure, but a strong suspicion of mine is that most measurement rigs, even the cheapest minidsp ears has plastic ears outside the microphone, these fake ears probably simulate the effect pinna pain resulting in the final measurement containing that elevation which the brain corrects for. The harman target was developed with a measurement rig that had “ears” thus having that elevation too.
The key concept here is that all headphones, in-ear, on-ear and over-ear, are directly coupled to the ear. There’s no open air environment between the driver and the ear drum as there is with both loudspeakers and live sounds.
Direct coupling cancels out the natural amplification from the outer ear’s shape. Therefore, the amplification of frequencies starting in the midrange has to be artificially engineered into the headphone or it doesn’t happen.
Oh thank God. I’ve listened to the AKG TWS N400 that are specifically tuned to the harman curve and I can’t listen to them, they drive me mad. To my ears they sound exactly like you described - I was head nodding while reading your post. Shouty, but also thin and metallic. Gross.
I EQed my HD58X to Harman only for +1khz and omg they sound much better. Surprisingly, timbre improved significantly. Now I understand what timbre is and why it’s related to the frequency response.
For-1khz, I didn’t like Harman at all which is actually stated in researches. I used Utopia’s frequency response since it was almost flat with decreased sub-bass which I prefer.
I honestly think the harman curve is one of the worst things to happen in audio. Maybe it’s just me hating v-shape (where are the mids??), but just irks me when someone else has almost arbitrarily decided what sound is “good”.
Harman’s curve is only good if you are Harman. All ears are different. 
Or Metal lol
Blame audiophiles and audio reviewers who have popularized the Harman curve among laypeople without explaining it properly.
The Harman target curve is what frequency profile the sound should have by the time it reaches your eardrum in order to sound to you like good speakers in a good room. You can’t EQ the response at your eardrum without measuring it at your eardrum. Everyone who is “EQ-ing to Harman” without using deep-seated in-ear microphones (or a professional head simulator with eardrum microphones) to measure the results and see what to adjust is only kidding themselves. Then these people get horrible results and go around blaming the Harman curve. 
If you’re doing it right, it should at least sound decent, it shouldn’t sound completely wrong.
That’s why Oratory1990 can create very good Harman-based EQ curves and you can’t: he uses a GRAS measuring rig, which is one of those types of products they don’t even publish the price for, you have to ask for a quote. 
Also why people ask to send Oratory their headphones to get a custom Harman-based EQ - he can put your headphones on his GRAS rig and do this right.
Harman is not V shape. The highs are actually tamed. The bass is too much for some people which the researches stated that. Oratory1990 told me about 20% of people prefer a flat response without the bass bump.
Also, please try to EQ your headphones/iems if you want to hear Harman curve and don’t believe these so-called Harman target headphones.
I thought Harman curve is the frequency response of AKG/Harman Kardon. Oratory1990 says otherwise:
The thing I still don’t understand is why the Harman tuning (like the Shuoer Tape or Moondrop stuff) elevates the frequencies that are naturally amplified by our ears? Wouldn’t it make the most sense to make the headphone/IEM sound as close to flat as possible and let our ear do it’s thing?
it’s just not everyone likes the harman curve sound signature. won’t sound decent if you dislike it naturally.
* facepalm *
It’s explained at my first link above, where the effects of the ear sections appear one by one. IEMs are the ones that remove the most out of the normal influence of your head and ears by sitting too close to your eardrums. This means they have the most “work” to do (frequency response compensation) to make the sound profile they shoot directly into your eardrum look like the one you get naturally without headphones or earphones. They need to recreate the effect of your external ear in their own frequency response because they’re bypassing your external ear by being IEMs!
Having a decent target curve is only the beginning. Then comes the work of tuning an actual product to achieve that curve at the eardrum of a human listener. Every company is going to do that differently, starting with the measurement head or device they’re going to use. You could give the same team a B&K HATS and a miniDSP EARS and ask them to tune the same headphones on both rigs, and they will still get different results. You can’t blame Moondrop’s tuning or Shuoer’s tuning entirely on Harman (or Olive & Welti).
I guess the Harman tuning is just SUPER NOT my thing. My favorite headphone, the TR-X00 PH, has a dip specifically around 3k with a rather full and warm midrange. The Grado Hemps and HD58X have warm midrange with a slight bump around 3k. The Tin P1 is almost totaly flat until 5k and the Tin T2 also has a warm midrange with only a small bump around 3k.
Other than the TR-X00 PH and maybe the Hemps, I would call all of these pretty much neutral. I guess my ears are just special snowflakes that don’t naturally amplify the 3k region.
I just checked those links and it seem innerfidelity is gone and now stereophile. Is there anywhere else to get that information?
IEMs (as the name suggests) go in our ears so the pinna is useless (aside from fitting). IEMs should boost around 2k-3khz because the pinna boosts those frequencies. That’s how we hear the world.
Yeah, whoever said the ear canal resonance has to be at 3k must not have had the best research available. From dr. Griesinger’s data I think it came out that ear canals are so different that they can have their resonance frequency anywhere from 3k to 8-10k. (Just look at how many ear tip sizes exist for IEMs: there’s no way in hell all those different sizes of ear canals will have the same resonance frequency.) This is the biggest reason why there’s no way a “universal tuning” will sound optimal to everyone and you absolutely need personalized tuning for best results (which is why I prefer dr. Griesinger’s EQ method, also linked above, which uses your own ears instead of a head simulator, and doesn’t bother with Harman or any other artificial curve).
You can find snapshots of the Innerfidelity articles on Archive.org/WayBackMachine: https://web.archive.org/web/20191228175941/https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/headphone-measurements-explained-frequency-response-part-one