interesting, thanks!

the technical limit is 1/2 the rate of the audio file in an uncompressed file. thus, a wav with 44.1 kHz can store frequency information of up to 22.05 kHz. You may thus argue that about 10% is wasted in those files.

interesting article, but for some reason it stops right before the point where I would EQ the cheap cans to bring back the frequencies they’re lacking. isn’t it the most obvious next step to do this and see if that makes them sound faster? and then the next question would be: do all headphones sound identical once the FR is equalized between them? my guess would be no, and the next question is what measurements or graphs would explain the remaining differences.

Thanks for your response! I've read parts of that paper now and it's interesting, albeit only concerned with FR. I'm aware that different ears have different signal modulations and that paper shows this quite well (although I wish the plots were digital color images to see individual traces). However, "finding the perfect tune" isn't my concern here.

>Frequency response is the only measurement that matters for headphones (CSD and waterfall are useless).

This is much more what I'm after -- why are they useless in your opinion?

>I recommend trying two separate headphones and EQing them to the same target and you'll experience that they sound differently in areas other than tonal balance.

Yes, that's my starting point for this. Precisely because there is more to a headphone than timbre, I want to know how these things can be measured. RTINGS measures a bunch of things (as listed in the first post), although none of that relates to dynamics, and a few things aren't perfectly clear to me, plus I don't know how agreed upon their methods are in the headphone world.

BTW my comparison was between the 990s and 1990s, which have very comparable timbre, but the 1990s have what I would describe as a larger dynamic range, faster response, better imaging, and cleaner sound. Or the other way around, the 990s sound a little lush and sluggish in comparison.

root mean squared error is lower though compared to a stopped clock (assuming it’s less than 3 hopes off)

that’s what she said!

I don't follow. What does the one have to do with the other?

but based on what you said you don’t really have the data to back that up? if you’ve never heard them with an amp, how do you know a powerful amp would fix your issues with it?

I would advise you to try the 1770 Pro, it’s bass-heavy and the most fun headphone i’ve tried so far. It sells in Europe at around 400€. Or maybe the 177x from drop?

So for all you know it might just as well be the case that you don’t like the Sundaras?!

so… what you’re saying is you’ve only ever listened to your Sundaras via headphone out and you don’t like it much?

I have a small Fiio usb-powered amp that compared to a macbook headphone out does not really make a difference on 770 Pro/80s, other than for volume. The 990Pro/250s on the other hand do benefit a little as far as I can tell.