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Originally Posted by W9TR
Really interesting read. Thanks for posting. I’m aligned with Mr. Katz.
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BK: The issue of "lowest common denominator" comes up just as it does with speakers, and it's a specious argument just as it is with speakers: should we master on cheap earbuds or Audeze LCD-4s? With loudspeakers we can quantify the deviation from accuracy using well-established measurement utilities, but headphone target curves are not sufficiently standardized, and even then it's the wild, wild West out there. The deviation from the Harman target is not an efficient means of judging how close to flat our headphones are.
Besides, Sennheiser, Focal, Audeze, Electrostats, and in-ear headphones sound vastly different from one another! How are you going to make something translate to all those in the same way we can do every day using superior calibrated loudspeaker/rooms? Are you going to play the "put one on, listen, put the other on" game to arrive at some ugly "common medium"? Give me a break.
Problem that I see, is that speakers/rooms for audiophiles are no less Wild, Wild West... Tom. Certainly a Martin Logan sounds different from a Harbeth while the XRT2K sounds much different than both... There is no golden standard.
Of course mastering/mixing should be done with as close to your own system as possible but we know that is not possible.