The Harman curve’s popularity is literally the audio equivalent of the focus tested hamoginouse AAA trash video games that no one actually loves but everyone buys and plays because “everyone else is playing it” and it’s overall inoffensive to most people.
Of course there is nothing wrong with liking the Harman curve just like there is nothing wrong with liking CoD or Fortnight. But self important snobs like myself will still feel superior to you and look down on you like the peasants you are (this is sarcasm… mostly).
To stay on topic a bit, I’ve never been a fan of eq because it feels like a bit if a cop out for poor design. I know it’s not and it has a place in this hobby but it just feels dirty to me, like cheating. But for those who can’t afford dozens of headphones to cover every sound signature they could possibly want, eq is a great way to fudge the sound of the headphones you have to better fit what you want or to fix a SMALL problem you may have. If you find yourself tweaking basically every frequency band by like 6db on average then you probably just don’t like that headphone. Return or sell that one and find a better one.
Exactly! The way to make your peace with the Harman target is to realize the purpose it exists for. In the consumer market there are endless headphones that give consumers the huge bass boost that rocks their boats. (Optionally, there may be some elevated treble as well.) But the technically easy solution to boosting bass is to jack up the entire bass region, then gradually taper off through the low and middle midrange. This tuning plays havoc with the naturalness of vocal and instrumental sounds, because these live and die in the midrange.
The Harman target shows how to elevate the bass then taper it off before reaching the midrange. Effectively, it’s a mass market compromise between the contrary demands of the gimme-bass crowd and the vocals-matter crowd. It makes sense when your goal is to produce one model of passive headphone that will appeal to the greatest percentage of the consumer market.
The problem is that here in the headphone enthusiast microcosm it’s still being interpreted as an attempt at defining true FR neutrality. In fact, the Harman team did start their research with just such a hypothetically neutral FR curve. Their original 2013 AES paper demonstrated that a reasonable sample of people preferred that neutral-ish tuning over several alternatives, notably Beats by Dre, Audeze LCD2r2 and the HD-800. But since then, as Brad358 points out, they’ve been progressively honing in on mass market appeal, not some hypothetical neutrality.
The ultimate argument for why the Harman curve should not be promoted as a standard response in my opinion is the Audioquest Nighthawk. They would never have been made if manufacturers just slavishly followed the Harman curve. Although they are a polarizing headphone I think the world of headphones would be much poorer without them. And although I am not a great Grado fan I respect the fact they have been faithful to a house sound over decades, again the world of headphones would be poorer without them.
Exactly. Like the Harman target or not, it would objectively be BAD if everything had that same sound signature. Just like how it sucked when every big budget game was trying to copy CoD in the 2010s.
