InnerFidelity

Of course not! For one thing, as one's earning power increases, one's high frequency hearing deteriorates. So market forces could well be emphasizing features and capabilities other than frequency response. Fashion, build quality, social signals...these are all very significant factors in something you wear, the practical priorities of audiophiles and enthusiasts notwithstanding. In fact, those are probably stronger factors for that set of people! (Of which, I am a member.)

Headphones also have a serious empiricism issue. You can probably pass off one high end Sennheiser for another in an A/B test. But you couldn't pass off an Audeze for one and have a valid A/B test. Also, you will often read or hear an expert say, if the measurements say something is bad, but it sounds good, or vice versa, then it means we're measuring the wrong things. I'm not saying that the Harman response curve isn't valid. It's just not the whole story.

tl;dr -- Buy the cheapest headphones that you really like, and ignore whatever your coworkers say. ( Hell, there are actually Beats that are good headphones! https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/time-rethink-beats-solo2-excellent )

Things are going to change in significant ways in the future as the price of signal processing, compensation, and active correction drops, however. Combining those with advances in the cheaper manufacturing of better drivers will result in the headphones of 10 years from now making the high end headphones of today seem…

That waveform looks pretty good imo. When I did it, I the signal was very weak so the signal to noise ratio was bad. There were low frequency impulses from me moving the headphones around and regular hums from other sources.

My best guess for the large attack showing up there is not effects from the microphone, DAC, amp, or anything but the actual speaker. Good audio measurements are hard to come by thanks to all the snake oil, but square wave measurements are common when there is data. The physical models of transducers aren’t trivial, but in a single broad stroke the answer is “physics” and “spring-mass-damper”.

https://www.innerfidelity.com/images/AKGK701.pdf

The decay is expected, as the pressure around the microphone can only temporarily increase before the pressure wave disperses into the room. As an extreme example, if you turned an entire wall into a speaker and played a square wave, you would be able to make a much more square shaped waveform. There’s no replacement for displacement baby (see: subwoofers). If you want a more square waveform, try using a headphone pushed right up to the mic and going to a higher frequency (like 1 kHz).

Edit: If you want to skip the trip down the rabbit hole: I think the end-all for audio quality are sealed in-ear monitors (IEMs). Low group delay from short distance from transducer to eardrum, and sealed enclosure for good bass response (see: square shaped low frequency square waves).

I'm not sure why the 2 options being offered here seem to be either Airpod-style non-sealing hard plastic or full on over-ear cans. What about standard IEMs with better sealing silicon tips? Or the foam variants sold by Comply and similar? Wouldn't that better allow you to isolate external noise and listen at a lower volume than the separate cans? Especially for public transit use cases they'd seem to be better, unless I'm missing something?

You should also factor in diminished enjoyment - if you're worried about bothering your neighbor by turning up the volume and are just keeping it lower out of courtesy, well, that's not really an ideal scenario either, especially if you have to put up with barely hearing what you're listening to as a result.

Additionally, many of the products being suggested here are not really rated very well and would be hard to suggest to someone listening on even using cheap stuff like the Philips TX2. I don't understand how these can be recommended by any reasonable measure.

$30 https://www.innerfidelity.com/images/PhilipsTX2.pdf

A few suggestions from the article, $50 and $200+ https://www.rtings.com/headphones/1-2/graph#617/2085/463

I greatly respect NwAvGuy and agree with almost everything he says, but I think in practical terms that's a slightly over-simplified perspective. Look how inaccurate even these headphones are [1], arguably the best or one of the best ever made.

Getting the inaccuracies to be the right inaccuracies is quite subtle and very important in my opinion. See for example this review of his [2] and in particular the paragraph near the end:

>AN EQ EXPERIMENT: I tried using highly configurable parametric EQ to tweak my Denon D2000s to be similarly forgiving and I failed. When I filter out equivalent amounts of sibilance and harshness with the Denons, more of the music is gone and the result sounds veiled and artificial. The HD 650, to my ears, somehow works more like polarized sunglasses. They largely remove what I don’t want while revealing more of what’s left. It’s not just a simple frequency response difference. My objective side wants to pin down what’s going on but I don’t have a full explanation besides the HD 650’s lack of distortion.

[1] http://www.innerfidelity.com/images/StaxSR009.pdf
[2] http://nwavguy.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/sennheiser-hd-650.html

So, uh, we can measure the frequency response made by headphones.

http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/headphone-measurement-proceedures-frequency-response

http://www.headphone.com/pages/evaluating-headphones

This is a pretty scientific matter - when I say "the purpose is to reproduce the input sound", we can tell exactly what is supposed to be reproduced, and we can tell exactly how capable the speaker is of reproducing it.

Some exceptions have to be made due to how having headphones on your head causes the sound to change, but again, these are pretty much known quantities - to get the equivalent of a flat response from a speaker, you will see change X in bass response, change Y in treble response, etc for headphones.

It's not a question of esoteric "The artist and recording engineer meant for this to be played on Kef blades powered by a Cary tube pre-amp feeding into a Mcintosh amp setup using a rail to rail ladder DAC", but a "We know how frequency response should look when measuring equipment and if it doesn't look like that then the sound you are getting out of it is different than the source material"

Sorry I should have done a bit more research before posting ... yes it appears that the official line on lightning is that it's digital only, but there are conflicting empirical accounts [0]

Since my 5s still has a headphones jack there is certainly still a DAC there.

It could well be down to the fact that my car stereo has a better DAC on the USB line than it does on the bluetooth line. Or simply an older bluetooth audio standard as you suggest. Actually this is probably the most likely suspect!

Which I think all serves to underline how digital output is not "open and shut" when it comes to sound quality.

Thanks for the additional technical context on why they might be eliminating analogue signal altogether. I'd felt a similar rationale informed their refusal to include a FM receiver from the beginning.

It does make sense from many different perspectives for apple to make this "not their problem". I kind of feel it's a pity from a customer/functional perspective though.

[0] https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/apples-lightning-headphone-adapter-analog-or-digital