Images of items I have purchased (except trainers [no feet pics])

henson0115 said:
if you cant trust your ears then in theory what your saying is all headphones sound the same, because placebo makes them sound better or worse. this is categorically not true even scientifically like you say, they all have different ranges for a start... some lower, some higher, some broader, some narrower. take a pair of standard £10 headphones from any brand and compare them to something like Sennheiser hd650 are you saying you cant hear the difference? i can money back gaurentee you will hear a difference, not quality per say, but you will hear more of the original composition of what the song should sound like. i think your talking at the extreme end of the scale where all really high end headphones or amps/dacs sound similar but not the same, if you say this then you clearly havnt used enough of them or just dont care about the differences you can hear. and i didnt even get into response times or anything remotely technical. sure blind testing is a good way to say people can be wrong about something, but it doesnt mean they are completely wrong and the complete opposite is true.

edit: and no im not saying trust all the marketing :D
Click to expand...

No, because we can do clear frequency sweeps and see that the outputs for these headphones are all vastly different. The same cannot be said for amps.

Blind testing is the only way to eliminate placebo. You all overestimate your own ability to be immune to placebo. None of you are.

Raymond Lin said:
I do have a baseline.

When I was "chasing", I chased hard. I am one of the first members on Head-Fi.com (no. 46), I used to go to the annual What HiFi shows, I have the older Musical Fidelity Tube Headphone amp, I had silly Van Den Hul Ultimate cables. I even built my own kettle lead with better shielding...I got my HD600 before the HD600 became the standard.

I do have a good baseline, and I already knew about this product from a video on Headphone.com about 6 months ago, that guy that looks like Eddie Redmayne reviewed it on his channel.

So, I know what good audio sounds like, I have just stopped chasing. The difference now is hard to tell whether it is merely imperceptible to placebo.
Click to expand...

Now I wonder if that is truly down to your age (I presume your up to 8KHz freqs are all intact, which is where most music lies) or if the differences disappeared because you stopped caring and so placebo no longer affects you?


Again, this is why I prefer the pro speaker world. Klippel measurements are absolute and eliminate a lot of these types of claims, especially in powered studio speakers.
 
Last edited:
mrk said:
Whilst true that hearing gets weaker as we get older, that has nothing to do with soundstage and imaging/details. These are features that everyone at any age can hear and the amp or DAC used will dictate how much of that is audible and to what level of quality. The frequency range doesn't matter in this context as even at a young age headphones and amps like these have a range that far exceeds what the human ear can hear anyway., but you can feel things like sub-bass beyond human hearing inside your head, that is something only a certain combo of headphone and amp can deliver, and soundstage/imaging detail can be heard by any age on any capable kit.
Click to expand...
(maybe I should continue discussion in the headphone thread where I see you also posted ... but since no one else has had some new stuff, unless his fingered aquatic flippers arrived,
you remain with windows volume mixer, I use Tidal that gives direct sound on 44.1KHZ/CD, for me direct sound/ASIO(windows 7) is very revelatory in soundstage;
don't many streaming services use 44.1, so windows/android mixer at 48Khz is a hmmh resample/interpolation
 
Tephnos said:
No, because we can do clear frequency sweeps and see that the outputs for these headphones are all vastly different. The same cannot be said for amps.

Blind testing is the only way to eliminate placebo.



Now I wonder if that is truly down to your age (I presume your up to 8KHz freqs are all intact, which is where most music lies) or if the differences disappeared because you stopped caring and so placebo no longer affects you?
Click to expand...

Bit of both, and being alone (not completely alone but I also don't want to ask for help lol) is impossible to do blind testing and also.....I can't be bothered....if I start doing blind testing then I am not here for the music, I just listen to the music now. The best music I've heard is when I was a broke teenager in school listening to cassettes or a discman with tiny speakers. I realise those can't sound good but I enjoyed it.
 
Last edited:
Tephnos said:
No, because we can do clear frequency sweeps and see that the outputs for these headphones are all vastly different. The same cannot be said for amps.

Blind testing is the only way to eliminate placebo. You all overestimate your own ability to be immune to placebo. None of you are.



Now I wonder if that is truly down to your age (I presume your up to 8KHz freqs are all intact, which is where most music lies) or if the differences disappeared because you stopped caring and so placebo no longer affects you?
Click to expand...
in your humble opinion :D

you can do the same with amps, not every amp is made the same, different components being the biggest giveaway... the car engine analogy above is very apt i think
 
Last edited:
Tephnos said:
No, just the scientific method. If you don't blind test/have a control your data is junk and no better than anecdotes.

Simple as.
Click to expand...
who's to say the people you are blind testing ant being biased in that they are not trying to be biased, i/e do the reverse. there is as much control in a blind test as there isn't. im sure if your sample gets big enough over 5/10 people you'd get the opposite result of only 5 people. your forgetting 1 thing, not all people hear the same and its really as simple as that, how do you control that? you cant, unless you only use 1 person which is a very biased result in itself. science can only go so far I'm afraid.
ps all scientific evidence starts as anecdotal evidence at 1 point in its existence
 
Last edited:
I have actually had the Moondrop Dawn Pro in my basket for months now, not so much as an DAC/Amp, but to be able to use wired IEM with my phone, something to put in my carry on bag and leave it there in case I forgot my wireless headphones.

I also watched this video...just go cheap man lol They all sound good now.

www.youtube.com

Affordable vs Expensive IEMs! Can Normal People Tell the Difference?

Fc-Construct's Affordable IEM Round-up: https://headphones.com/blogs/reviews/year-end-budget-iem-round-up-7hz-salnotes-zero-kiwi-ears-cadenza-and-tin-hifi-c2...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
 
Rroff said:
I have trouble with this - I experimented with building headphone amps for a few years and have several devices which objectively measure the same or one better than another but can clearly hear a difference between them - and a common one I find is having general purpose electrolytic capacitors capacitors in the audio path - even when by every known metric if two audio devices measure the same but one has electrolytic capacitors in the audio path it sounds to the ears dull compared to the other.
Click to expand...
This is what I meant when I said measurements only tell half the story. It's absolutely true ^^

By all means use measurements left and right, but you have to hear them too, and age doesn't matter one bit at discerning details in sound such as music that now sounds natural/organic with a nice wide soundstage vs something that feels narrow inside the middle portion of your head. Imaging isn't placebo, soundstage isn't placebo, hearing details that one amp or headphone has over the other isn't placebo - Even if they measure similarly!

That's why I just buy stuff if I'm in the market for something new and have done some research to sideline a bunch of stuff that could tick my boxes. Keep what's good, return what's not. This is the best balance of objective and subjective preferences being satisfied. If we then share those findings with a wider community, then awesome.

Raymond Lin said:
So, I know what good audio sounds like, I have just stopped chasing. The difference now is hard to tell whether it is merely imperceptible to placebo.
Click to expand...

There is no argument here, but you haven't heard the M15i, you have simply watched a review of it, just like I did before deciding if what I was watching warranted a purchase to hear for myself.

And back to back swapping cables between amps as the music is playing objectively demonstrates the differences. ON its own any amp I've had sound great, back to back though you then begin to hear the subtle differences that make one better than the other for what matters most, and that isn't a placebo, as in the bits mentioned above like soundstage and stereo imaging, these are inherent characteristics of the engineering behind every amp, and every amp is different this way, you just need the right headphones to take advantage of those qualities to be able to hear them. Soon enough your ears train themselves at picking out new or missing details in the future when playing back songs you know like the back of your hand.

I could not hear them clearly with Sennheiser HD650 and HD660S2, hence why I stuck with the MX3s for headphones for so long as it satisfied what I was after on Sennheisers, but since upgrading to high sensitivity large planar magnetics, the whole field changed and now I'm hearing things no Sennheiser can deliver, and every headphone has an amp preference, some are bright and not evenly matched if the headphone is also bright, whilst a smooth and warm sounding amp suits perfectly on this particular type of headphone.

As Rroff says, there are differences that are heard, you just have to hear the kit for yourself instead of just relying on reviews.

jpaul said:
(maybe I should continue discussion in the headphone thread where I see you also posted ... but since no one else has had some new stuff, unless his fingered aquatic flippers arrived,
you remain with windows volume mixer, I use Tidal that gives direct sound on 44.1KHZ/CD, for me direct sound/ASIO(windows 7) is very revelatory in soundstage;
don't many streaming services use 44.1, so windows/android mixer at 48Khz is a hmmh resample/interpolation
Click to expand...
I don't us Tidal, I have my local FLAC collection and the rest is streamed on Spotify, regardless of the format played back, musical details are obvious across the board, what matters with albums/tracks is the mastering quality. I have FLAC albums I ripped myself that are terrible sounding masters yet the later remasters on Spotify sound superior just because a better quality master source was used in the later production. So I don't put much value into playing back lossless files as it's mostly redundant and dependent on the original source mastering quality.

I keep Windows at 48KHz (remember Windows 11 samples all audio at 32bit float) as the bulk of my audio consumption is at 48KHz (gaming, movies, TV shows etc), and there's no audible difference in general music between 44.1 and 48, any differences are beyond human hearing. I only care about three things, detail, soundstage and stereo imaging and these are all determined by the quality of both headphone and the DAC, which does all the processing after Windows sends the data over.

Edit*
The headphones thread is still alive :D


Edit2*
Just seen the thing about IEMs and normal people :p - Back in the day I had Sennheiser IE80s, the then recognised as the benchmark for high quality audio for an in ear bud. This was back when phones had headphone jacks with quality headphone amps built in with EQ control etc on Android. This was before Bluetooth audio was any good. Then years later aptX and things gained rapid traction and suddenly the whole scene of wireless buds and cheaper wired IEMs that matched the IE80s became a thing. Advancements can happen in relative quick time. I sold the IE80s before they lost too much value as a result and have had wireless buds ever since and never looked back for mobile music when commuting etc.
 
Last edited:
Rroff said:
I have trouble with this - I experimented with building headphone amps for a few years and have several devices which objectively measure the same or one better than another but can clearly hear a difference between them - and a common one I find is having general purpose electrolytic capacitors capacitors in the audio path - even when by every known metric if two audio devices measure the same but one has electrolytic capacitors in the audio path it sounds to the ears dull compared to the other.
Click to expand...
What instruments are you using and what are you measuring?
 
Recently sold my Apple Watch Series 9 on MM so I could buy another Series 9... only this one has LTE. Needed as I run without my phone and like to stay connected.

DSCF4641.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom