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dongas420 t1_iy3regb wrote

Reply to comment by c0ng0pr0 in Just EQ in resolution. by TheFrator

Communicating ideas by language effectively depends on everyone involved possessing a common baseline of experiences, particularly anything involving the senses.

Without that, you're stuck wrapping everything up in abstractions such as PRTF accuracy that don't entirely correspond 1:1 to what's actually going on (What do you mean, this IEM has a deep-sounding stage? Doesn't it bypass the pinna entirely?), and there's only so much you can do to explain to someone who's never seen before why, say, painting all of their walls hot pink is a bad idea.

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rhalf t1_iy4jt05 wrote

>Communicating ideas by language effectively depends on everyone involved possessing a common baseline of experiences, particularly anything involving the senses.

Audiophilia is like that, but audiophiles are trying to communicate things WAY more subtle than the resolution of their 'common baseline of experiences'.
At least if they knew well what they're talking about, they wouldn't say that somehitng has slow bass, if having a darker sound or quiet upper range is the same thing.

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dongas420 t1_iy4m1pf wrote

Bloated bass with notes that lack crispness and bleed into each other is something pretty much anyone who's listened to the crappy stuff should have heard before. It's hardly subtle.

Excess mid-/upper bass is part of what causes it, but a lot of it's related to subtle issues with treble presentation that are hard to point out on a graph, especially if you don't know what you're looking for. "Slow bass" is handy shorthand for all that.

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rhalf t1_iy4nwlt wrote

This is different to what other people are describing online. PEople say that a subwoofer has slow bass...

It's just an inacurate language.
IF it's not bass that's doing it, then it's not slow bass. It's everything else that you described.

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dongas420 t1_iy4qwl4 wrote

Subs have their own issues involving group delay, which can easily exceed audible thresholds.

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rhalf t1_iy5npl0 wrote

Yes they do, but do these two things sound so similar that they deserve common name? I think we need to talk about audiophile dictionary in a more critical way, or else it'll continue to be just poetry. Poetry is nice, but for communication's purpose, it's interpreted with more disciplined language. It would be cool to have some intermediary terms that help us with interpretation and link physical phenomena to casual talk.

I'd like to add something that I've been always pointing out. Headphone audiophile speak came from speakers. Words like 'soundstage' are far more descriptive with speakers than with headphones. No wonder, newcomers are often confused. Not everyone imagines headphone soundfield as a stage, more often as a bubble.

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dongas420 t1_iy5u91u wrote

I don't really care. The Crinacle dictionary has been perfectly adequate for judging and unambiguously describing the sound of virtually everything I've listened to, and I can correlate the terms both with what I hear in my test tracks and with FR elements such as pattern/magnitude of treble notches, upper treble downslope, and 5-8/10-16 kHz treble ratio.

Anyway, this post is about the reductionist big brains who constantly chant Harman curve as a thought-terminating cliché, and critically examining the terms that audiophiles use to describe sound isn't going to help with them at all.

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BGpolyhistor t1_iy5tkn6 wrote

I’m deeply skeptical of your statement. The Legend X SE is significantly boosted in the mid bass and has zero bloat or mudiness. Treble is also elevated. Again, no bloat.

I’ve purchased around 10 sets of IEM’s and combined them with 7 different DAP’s and 3 DAC/Amp combos. In my experience excess subbass leads to bloat. Or just a cheap/poorly implemented driver configuration.

Wouldn’t be able to prove it objectively, just saying my personal experience is different than it should be if what you’re saying is correct.

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dongas420 t1_iy5wado wrote

Now you're learning that there's more to technicalities than general tonality and that the relationship between FR and sound is very complicated. Keep on doing that.

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BGpolyhistor t1_iy6m9ep wrote

Oh, I posted a drunken rant elsewhere on the thread arguing just that. Cheers!

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c0ng0pr0 t1_iy449ib wrote

It’s funny to me after 18 months of paying attention to the “professional” reviewers… none of them have tried to start a wiki or something like to build a common vocabulary/jargon list which is clear.

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dongas420 t1_iy4612j wrote

Browsing the /r/headphones front page every day doesn't count as paying attention. Crinacle and Precogvision have posted detailed articles on how they perceive and evaluate technicalities.

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mainguy t1_iy4z37u wrote

I mean its the same for musicians. We describe sounds as fuzzy, thin, thick, warm, bright, moody, and so on. It works because we have a common reference of experience (im talking about guitar).

It always baffles me how headphone reviewers get so much schtick for their vocab. Sound is hard to describe.

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Headytexel t1_iy46aqx wrote

IIRC Head-Fi did it a loooooong time ago but it never really caught on. Also I’m sure newer reviewers like Resolve could do a much better version.

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