Is the Harman curve "neutral"?

[donjoe0]

@voja

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?

Already answered everything you’re asking but you keep repeating the same questions. I think you’re simply refusing the notion that “flat” for headphones is not objective or universal and it’s not a graph that looks anything like a straight line. When people add EQ to mass-produced headphones to make them sound more like open-space sound from a flat-tuned speaker, they get various curves that you can see in a Griesinger lecture that MaynardGK quoted in your other thread: How to approach to review and judge a studio/reference headphone? How to tell if something really is "reference-grade"? - #15 by MaynardGK

I don’t know how many more ways I can say this. The point of “neutral” is to not sound different from reality. To achieve that, headphones have to have a response with hills and valleys, not a straight line. The hills and valleys will be different for each headphone because their drivers and cups are also doing different things to the sound, and also different for each user because their ears will be doing different things to the sound until it reaches the eardrum. What will natural FR look like on a headphone? A curve with hills and valleys, not a straight line. I don’t know how else to answer this.

@A_COC0NUT

The way you do this at home is with a tone generator and you raise or lower the frequencies that stand out until it sounds about equal the whole way from 20 to 20k.

That’s an equal-loudness tuning, it’s not natural sound, not even close. If you’re going to put in the work to do equal-loudness tuning, do it with the chosen headphones, do it again for good speakers in a good room, then derive the final EQ curve by subtracting the speaker equal-loudness EQ values from the headphone equal-loudness values, and you will get the tuning you have to apply to those headphones to make them sound more natural to you, more like listening to speakers. This is Griesinger’s method.