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.
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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.
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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”.
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Harman’s curve is only good if you are Harman. All ears are different. 
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Or Metal lol
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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.
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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.
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* 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).
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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.
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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
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Oh LOL, I didn’t realize we had the man himself, Headphone Santa 
, on YouTube explaining that first article of his. Love that he noticed and highlighted the fact that “flat all the way down” is not correct bass, that the famous Audezes are actually bass-light and would need a rise in the response down there to really sound correct. 
Audeze seems like a perfect example of how FR is not the only factor in how an individual will perceive the sound. The bass may measure “less than correct” but do to other factors like transient responce, driver size, dynamics, etc, the bass may sound “bigger” than it seems to measure.
Well, as he mentions there’s also a question of what typical loudness you listen at: if you’re a quiet listener like me, you need more boosted bass and a little extra treble for things to sound flat/natural, just because of how equal-loudness contours work at different loudness levels (he calls them Fletcher-Munson curves). People who blast themselves with decibels will prefer a flatter bass (in the raw response) and somewhat less treble, so the warmer LDC-2 style Audezes will sound closer to perfect for them than for me.
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I have gone through this whole thread, and these are the replies that stood out the most to me. They revolve around the same findings from my own thread. However I want to have some short questions, so I will proceed to repeat-quote some of the replies I quoted from above:
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This is a question for @Polygonhell, and @donjoe0’s 6th post. So, you can conclude that a “neutral” headphone is not achievable without calibration to the individual’s ear (personalization). You can also conclude that the original target curve (frequency response) of the headphone will sound (be perceived by human ears) differently than the original target curve/frequency response - this is what I believe HRTF is, the frequency response that we actually perceive.
The question is, if you were to calibrate a headphone individually to ones ear, would you want a “perfectly” flat frequency response if you wanted the headphone to be neutral/reference-grade/uncolored?
The reason why I am asking this is because you brought up a good point, that speakers are tuned to be flat in an anechoic chamber, but would you also want a “neutral” headphone to be perceived with a flat frequency response? -
If not, what is the frequency response that can be classified as “flat” for headphones (in the case that it is not the same as speakers)? Now, I understand that all of the frequency curves of headphones cannot be taken into consideration because they are for mass-production headphones that are not individually calibrated to the user’s ears, but if you were to calibrate them, what frequency response would you want the user to hear?
From my understanding an anechoic chamber isn’t needed for heaphones (unless they are open-back, correct?) since you do not face reflections or stuff like that when the headphones are on the measurement rig (I am specifically talking about a measurement rig that does not have external pinnae). But it is also very clear to me that no matter how you tune the headphones on these measurement rigs, the very frequency response of the tuning will get distorted and that is not how the user will hear it. This being said, I am very interested to get the answer to the 1st question, because if a flat frequency response (HRTF) is not what is neutral, I would like to understand why - since this is what you want in a “good” speaker, or studio monitors, why wouldn’t it be something that you want to hear (not talking about manufacturer’s frequency response that they got from the measurement rig)?
No I"m suggesting any definition of Neutral is suspect, and in itself it shouldn’t be a goal.
My point on speakers is a bit more nuanced.
At some point a neutral response on speakers was defined to be flat in an anechoic chamber, but no one listens to speakers in an anechoic chamber, so because of room interactions no speaker measures flat in a room. So what was the goal of defining it that way. And most good speakers don’t measure flat in an anechoic chamber either.
All the headphone targets try to match speaker responses either in a chamber, or near field, or …, usually with some “consumer preference” mixed in.
When you actually look at speaker frequency responses the parts that tell you anything useful are, what do the crossover points look like and how jaggy is the treble, because those are what get in the way of listening.
The question you have to ask is what are you trying to achieve, then you can answer how do you measure that.
In your case you want headphones for say Mastering, (although most engineers still master with near field speakers), so what are you looking for, it’s not Neutrality, it’s a presentation that lets you project how a consumer will consume it through FM radio (less important now) off a CD through an Ipod, from a phone with crappy earphones etc.
Very few recordings are mixed for the Hi-Fi enthusiast, but if you can make it sound good there as well great.
The harder to answer parts then becomes what characteristics of a headphone let you do that, and I would argue it’s predictability (no big spikes or lulls to have to account for, no excessive frequency tilt, smooth reproduction across the frequency range). Neutrality might give you that, you could even define it to be that, but it’s just a word if you don’t define it.
If you were using them for mixing rather than Mastering, resolution might be the most critical feature.
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As you quoted, MY definition (not everyone’s) for neutrality can be summed up by a flat PERCEIVED frequency response, or no stand out frequencies. So I would say yes, personalization is required. Whether that be through EQ or just finding the right headphone is up to the individual. Everyone’s ears are different to the point at which an individual can have two different ears (like me) so no headphone can be universal. Hell, that’s pretty much what thus hobby is all about. The hunt for the right sound.
On a side note. I kind of like what you said in your thread about measurements taken without a fake ear. To me, it makes sense to measure the headphone’s frequency response by its self, then let the people reading the graph use their knowledge of their own ears and preferences to decide if it’s what they want.
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