Praise be!

Yeah in hindsight I shouldn’t have assumed folks are familiar with how the Variations sounds, and given a more thorough description of the sound. Definitely something for me to improve on.

Pouch gud.

Well… I think the problem becomes when they think they’re buying something that makes a massive difference in sound quality, when in reality those claims are impossible to assess without a proper ABX. Even then, it gets very difficult to get to a meaningful result.

I don’t have an issue with folks believing in differences that don’t exist (and there are on occasion measurable differences), my issue is with situations where people are putting their money into this stuff instead of stuff that tangible does matter, and very obviously so - like headphones and speakers.

Past a certain point, price is mostly just a number. If you want to find your ideal sound signature, it may end up costing more, but that’s not because it costs more. In the high end, you find fewer products aiming for a middle ground or an average preference, and more and more it’s about the specifics, with unique and even esoteric sound signatures. Some do this tastefully, others not so much. But don’t think that just because you get into the $1k plus territory that your experience is necessarily going to be better than if would be if you just happened to find the right fit for your HRTF and preference at a lower price point.

While the best responses to this post have already been given, I just wanted to add one thing. The reason what you see on the graph for a given headphone “doesn’t tell the whole story” is also in part because its being measured in the condition of being on a particular ‘head’ - this is how we should think of measurement rigs.

Each rig has its own head-related transfer function (HRTF), as do you, and these are likely to be different to some degree. Think of this as like the effect of the head and ears on incoming sound, and that effect for your head and ears is bound to be different from that effect of the measurement head. That’s not to say “we all just hear differently”, since we all typically have heads and ears that are… head and ear shaped, but there are still going to be some differences that can be meaningful.

So, HRTF variation is one reason, but there is also another one, and that’s the Headphone Transfer Function (HpTF). This is how the behavior of the headphone can change depending on the head that its on. You mention the well-measuring DCA headphones not sounding very good, one likely explanation for this is that the headphone itself is behaving differently when its being worn by you - and with respect to those headphones in particular I’d actually expect this to be the case (it was the same for me).

It doesn’t mean the graph is wrong, or that categorically the product doesn’t sound like the graph to SOME person. It just means it doesn’t to you, because the condition of that headphone is different. Bottom line, HRTF and HpTF effects explain much of the whole “there’s more than just FR” concept - at least in cases where all else is reasonably equivalent.