I think it's a combination of shape, size, clamp pressure, pressure distribution, and each person's anatomy. I was wearing my Sundara today and I found that the clamp pressure was actually worst on my cheekbones in front of my ears. The size of the Sundara's earpads places pressure on a part of my cheekbones that I'm sensitive to and thus causes more discomfort.

In contrast, my Shangri-La Jr is vastly more comfortable than the Sundara because the earpad is slightly larger, and hence the clamp pressure is distributed over a larger area, and the areas in contact are different, and those are areas that I am less sensitive to. Also, the SGL Jr has earpad swivel, which the Sundara lacks. This means that the earcup will swivel to more evenly distribute the pressure towards the back of the earpads rather than the front which makes contact with my cheekbones. In that sense, perhaps a headband replacement would work, as it could add the earcup swivel that's missing on the stock headband.

Unfortunately for me, I tend to find many headphones that others find comfortable to be uncomfortable on me. The Philips Fidelio X2HR was reviewed to be very comfortable, but I found it so uncomfortable from both a hotspot and clamp pressure that it made me see stars from wearing it, and I had to return it due to discomfort. The Aeon 2 Closed is also rather uncomfortable and causes weird pressure on my temple, despite not even resting on my temple. Focal headphones in general are incapable of properly distributing downwards weight across the top of my head, and immediately form a hotspot. I guess I have a narrow and pointy head, so many headbands don't have enough curvature to properly distribute weight across my scalp.

I enjoyed reading this. The journey to finding out what aspects of sound you value most and which ones are less important is a huge part of the enjoyment of audio in my opinion. It's almost like self-discovery in a way.

I also find the Sundara can have pretty harsh jaw pressure. For me, it's weird because some days it's fine, and I wonder why I ever had problems with it. Then the next day it will make my jaw sore after half an hour.

Haha, good guess, but no, they were on the right way. Most things sounded correct, but there were just a few moments where the imaging was off. The game I was playing has Dolby Atmos support, which normally works very well, but it might have edge cases that don't play nice with how the Sundara images.

To me, it depends on the headphone. I wouldn't make any declarations that a driver type alone makes a headphone better or worse for gaming. Good imaging ability is best for most types of gaming, often better than wide soundstage. Many times wide soundstage can be worse for gaming as things sound far away and their locations get smeared a bit compared to sounding closer, but with pinpoint locations. Best of all would be layered soundstage (can tell when things are near vs far) with pinpoint imaging.

That being said, I found the Sundara to be not that good for gaming as I've had odd scenarios where things sound like they're coming from the wrong side. That might just be my unit though, or it could be the games I play that make a difference. I'm glad it's working out well for you.

I use mine with my Surface Pro X. Since the X uses an Arm processor, EqualizerAPO doesn't work on it (certain types of programs cannot be emulated). So the 5K offers me the EQ options, and also doesn't require music apps to go through the Windows audio stack to be EQed, so I can use exclusive mode in my player without issue.

I tend not to use it, but I have had good experiences with it. For virtual surround, it's highly dependent on the virtualization algorithm, so there are good and bad implementations. The best I've heard thus far is Waves NX. I combined Waves NX with a Stax Lambda-series headphone (which already has an interesting "frontal" soundstage) to play an orchestral piece and it was possibly one of the best "out-of-head" sound experiences I've had. The Waves NX Windows desktop app has been discontinued though.

I think after a while nothing really wows you anymore. I've heard a number of summit-fi headphones (Meze Elite, Focal Utopia pre-2022, Focal Stellia, HEDDphone, Audeze CRBN and LCD-3, HD800S, HE1000se, Fostex TH-900mk2 Anniversary, Verite Closed, and my personal Shangri-La Jr), and all of them sound good in various forms, but nothing produces the "wow" sensation. Possibly this is because my first summit-fi experience was the SGL Jr, and I only got to demo the others after already owning it, so the bar was very high already. Plus, demo conditions are never good for "wow" moments as the stuff that would impress me is hard to hear in noisy show floors.

It's not about impedance, it's about efficiency (or a related metric of sensitivity). The efficiency of the Sundara is lower relative to many other headphones of the same impedance, so it needs more power to get to a given volume level.

Topping D10 and JDS Atom amp was my first stack too! And driving a Sundara as well!

Do I want to try more headphones and gear? Yes, always. Do I want to buy more headphones? Mmm, not really. I haven't found anything that I've really wanted to buy since I got my Shangri-La Jr. Certainly there are things I've enjoyed trying out and comparing to the Jr, but nothing that made me want to spend money. If anything, I should be selling some of my gear off as there's stuff that I barely use (e.g. my Elex).

For the full gear list:

Headphones: Hifiman Shangri-La Jr, Sundara, R7DX, Stax SR-L700mk2, DCA Aeon 2 Closed w/ Perforated Pads, Focal Elex, Bang & Olufsen Beoplay Portal (and I sometimes use my wife's Sennheiser HD 6xx).

Amps and DACs: CCS-modded Stax SRM-006tA (currently broken, awaiting a replacement part), Stax SRM-D10, FiiO K9 Pro AKM (at my gaming desk), Topping D50s/A50s (in the living room), Qudelix 5K (office/portable).

IEMs: Samsung Galaxy Buds2

At least on the R9, I would entirely disagree with that assessment. It was extremely comfortable to me when I tried it, and my wife also mentioned how comfortable it was when she tried it. The comfort may vary with implementation though, as most of the comfort issues I've seen with that headband are on the Edition XS, which is a significantly heavier headphone.

Yup, these are bass cannons. I'd say at the 370 USD price point, they're a competitive option if you're looking for maximum bass headphones and you don't mind the hilarious ergonomics. The bass extends deep, it hits hard, and there's a lot of it. I recently heard a Fostex TH-900mk2 Sapphire Blue with ZMF pads, and I think the R9 does bass better. The Fostex had a lot of bass, but it lacked impact and sounded "slow" or "soft", like being whacked by a plush pillow.

I generally agree with your treble assessment, though I wouldn't call it "V-shaped" given that it doesn't have the treble elevation that I would consider to be V-shaped. It has enough treble to avoid being dark sounding though, so it's generally done well. The bass is very prominent, and everything else is fine. This combo allows the bass to take center stage, without making the bass muddy. It's also extremely comfortable.

Yeah, or "Singles Appreciation Day" (Feb 15).

Another thing to look out for is November 11th sales from Chinese companies. 11/11 is Single's Day in China, and sort of their equivalent of Black Friday.

There's a term that one reviewer (Marcus at Headfonics) uses that I like very much, and that's "tonal contrast". In the reviews I was reading from him, he doesn't even use the term "detail". Elevated treble produces more tonal contrast, which the brain will easily pick up on (our vision is also highly dependent on visual contrast for object identification), and think it's detailed, because the contrast between tones is greater via the boosting of the harmonics. But more contrast doesn't really improve true detail retrieval, just like maxing out the contrast slider on your TV or monitor won't improve the detail that you get from that screen. Proper balance between colors is what produces good visual detail, and avoids colors being crushed.

The treble peaks on the Takstar (I had a HyperX Cloud which is based on that headphone) make certain types of sounds, like the trailing tones of cymbals and snare drums stand out with greater contrast (that sparkly sound), but when those tones are overemphasized, it starts to affect our ability to perceive other similar tones at the same time, so overall perceived detail suffers. I had an Audio Technica headphone that I modded with different earpads, and those headphones brought out cymbals like nothing else. Cymbals would cut through the mix, and if a song had cymbals or hi-hats, you would know that they were there. They were subjectively pleasing to me, but that emphasis on the air region in the upper treble would obscure details elsewhere in the treble.

Man, all of these XS impressions are making me want to get one. I don't need one, but I've been musing about getting one to fill out my Hifiman menagerie.

In general, I group sources into 2 categories, shitty ones and competent ones. I got a noticeable upgrade going from a SteelSeries GameDAC (your run-of-the-mill gamer gadget) to a Topping D10. Like yeah, the soundstage is a bit wider, and the details are more pronounced, and all that. But after that, I couldn't really tell a difference* between well-built, competent sources. So yeah, I had a pretty similar experience to you.

* About that asterisk, one of the things I can notice between different DACs is the effect of different low-pass filters. When I got the Topping D50s, I noticed over time that transients sounded slightly sharper on that DAC than on the D10 or any other DAC that I had. I then looked at the manual and found that the D50s by default used a different filter type than the usual sharp linear-phase filter. So I changed the filter type to sharp linear-phase, and the effect went away.

Recently, I was playing around with the filter types on my FiiO K9 Pro, and I found that if I upsample everything to 96 KHz, the filter type basically didn't matter. If I used exclusive mode on my music player so that 44.1K files were played at native sample rate on the DAC, then the filter type would make a slight difference. This is plausible from a signal analysis point of view, because at high sample rates, the aliases are so far above the audible range that any filter has enough attenuation to eliminate them, but at low sample rates, the slow roll-off filters do not properly filter them out and those aliases can be folded back into the audible range.

Another fun little anecdote: this past weekend I was at a local headphone meet, and I brought along my Stax amp and my electrostats. The store where the meet was held had a DCS Rossini (MSRP $33,000) that I hooked my amp up to. I was able to listen to some of my favorite and most familiar tracks at the meet, and not once did I notice anything new or different about what the Rossini did vs what my K9 Pro did. I respect the engineering and the FPGA-based architecture behind all of the DCS gear, but for me, that tech is more academic than practical. Maybe if I was playing a super-high-res master of the 1812 Overture I might notice a difference, but I'm just enjoying Illenium's new song from his upcoming album.

There's a site called DIYAudioHeaven that does provide schematics for analog filters for certain headphones. And I've seen speculation that the Dan Clark Audio Expanse uses a passive filter to produce its bass shelf that would normally be impossible on an open-back planar-magnetic headphone. So it's not unheard of to use passive filters, but certainly not commonplace. I suppose people who use high-output-impedance amps on headphones with highly variable impedance curves are doing some passive filtering too.

Thanks for the info on Time Delay Spectrometry. I did some searching on the keyword and found a paper by Richard Heyser (1973) and another later one by Mark Fitzgerald (1989). Is the Heyser paper the one that started the practice? Or is there another one that came earlier?

The psychoacoustic effect of a longer chirp being interpreted as louder by our brains helps explain a few cases I've experienced where a part of the spectrum sounded louder to my ears than the graph would suggest, but was fixable via EQ.

I wonder if there is a way to incorporate the auditory effects of "lumping" into the FR graph. Like it adds to the parts of the spectrum where there is ringing to represent the audible effects of that ringing. It would no longer be a pure FR graph, but it might be helpful in some cases.

I've heard that the Elex is very close, like 90-95% of the OG Clear. I've also read that the Elex and Clear use the same earpads too; the Elex is an Elear with Clear pads based on what I've read.

So assuming you are listening at volumes that don't encounter the driver clipping issues that all Focals have (and the different driver on the Elex might make it more susceptible to clipping than the Clear), you are more likely to be able to EQ an Elex to sound just like a Clear, but again, you can't accurately do that with just a graph. The only way to you can accurately EQ the Elex to sound like a Clear is to have both headphones side by side, and EQ one to sound like the other by ear.

I've used and experimented with EQ a lot, and it's easy to destroy technicalities via EQ, but it's hard to improve technicalities with EQ. My experience is that technicalities are linked to relative levels of very narrow bands of frequencies throughout the audible range. "Correcting" small tonal problems via EQ also affects technicalities that are linked to those frequency ranges. EQ, even digital EQ, is not precise enough to accurately shape the needed frequencies without also messing up nearby frequencies. If you're really focused on technicalities, then I would suggest going for the Clear, as then you don't have to worry about EQ.

I'm not sure why you asked about whether "most people" could tell a difference. In audio, what "most people" think is irrelevant. Your ears are not anybody else's ears. Your preferences are not exactly the same as anybody else's preferences. Things that bother some people don't bother others. Will there be differences after EQing the Elex to sound like the Clear? Almost certainly, they won't sound exactly the same. Whether that matters is something that only you can answer for yourself.

So, unit variation is a thing, and it's unlikely that any 2 headphones of a given model will sound exactly the same. Tight manufacturing tolerances and mechanical testing is generally how good consistency is achieved.

But I was talking about EQing one model of headphone to sound like a different model of headphone, like EQing a Hifiman to sound exactly like a Focal or Sennheiser. That's not possible.

Also, you can physically modify headphones by changing their earpads and other parts of their construction (hardware EQ as you put it) to change their sound, but that is actually less precise than digital EQ.

Oh look, it's this question again.

Now in theory, for a headphone that acts like a minimum-phase device (and most headphones do), everything is encapsulated in (note the wording here) in frequency response and distortion. All of the technicalities and transient-response-related phenomena are reflected somewhere in the FR. In other words, you cannot change the technicalities of a headphone without also changing some aspect of the FR. The problem right now is we don't have a way to directly link technicalities to any parts of the FR with accuracy. Detail isn't just treble, but it's more like the balance of specific frequency ranges in the FR. Over-boosting the treble can actually hurt detail, as you're then masking other frequency ranges.

BUT, and this is a pretty significant but, don't trust graphs to tell you everything about a headphone's FR. Graphs don't take into account everyone's individual HRTF, so what you actually hear will deviate from what's shown on the graph. Secondly, FR in reality is a very fine-grained metric, which graphs (and especially target curves) do not represent well. So no, you cannot EQ any headphone to sound like any other headphone. That's just not possible, especially just by going off of a graph. I've had some success with EQing one headphone to sound like another when I had them side by side so I could EQ the treble by ear, but it's very complicated and time-consuming to do so.

There's another metric, distortion, that can sometimes play a role, but it's not always clear what that role is, or if it's really noticeable. Distortion basically sets the upper bounds of what a headphone can produce, because you can't EQ out distortion characteristics. Same goes for things like group delay, which is a metric that can be measured, but there's no consensus on what those metrics mean or how they relate to headphone performance.

Now, technicalities are definitely a part of the subjective experience of listening to a headphone. Imaging, resolution, dynamics, that's all part of what we experience. So I think it's fine to rate headphones by those metrics, because the experience is what matters. But I have yet to see any conclusive proof that those things are not influenced by FR in some way.

I'm totally unsurprised that a large Discord server based around the following the reviews and impressions of one person will get toxic when encountering an opinion not shared by that person. It's following the rule that the toxicity of a fanbase increases with both age and size.