My definition of detail is how much individual sound/instrument can be distinguished with clarity, so my definition of detail kinda goes hand in hand with how good the separation is
I would say detail is the difference between hearing minute sounds in an audio track/source and separation is being able to tell all of the instruments apart at any given moment.
"Details" its a verb, full spectrum or maybe "full reproduction"is better words to use.. One part of the spectrum is just one part, its like describing colors without describing nuances..
@@Drewsterman777 That's called separation, we already have definition for that. Clarity again while related to detail and goes hand and hand. Is still a little different from detail. In both cases you are not defining detail and describing something else we already have definitions for.
As a pro musician maybe I can help shed some light on this: IEMs were originally designed to be monitors for musicians to hear each other on stage in a much better way than the wedge speakers we originally used. They helped isolate the sound so there is less chance of hearing loss, and they're instantaneous since they're in the ears rather than a few feet away which drastically can help timing. Over time, a third function of IEMs started to develop: Instrument separation. By putting multiple sound drivers on each iem, it helps spread out the sound more allowing each instrument to be heard without blending in with the other instruments. IEMs can have 5+ drivers in them meaning 10 total "Speakers" in your head. This can be mistaken for better detail since it's easier to pick out the full timber of an instrument or sound whereas most headphones or speakers will blend those instruments together so some of the frequencies end up overlapping and fine details end up lost in the mix. At low price points, this can definitely make a difference in the perceived quality of the iems but we can't forget that separating the sounds is not actually increasing the quality of the sounds. This is why high end headphones seem to blow the sound quality of iems out of the water.
@@Usernotknown21where in his point does he give an opinion? I believe he is being objective and he is not saying you cant have preference to one over the other. He is talking about their qualities.
I love all the takes everyone has on this!! Thanks DMS for including me in this discussion! Video came out great. Big shout out to other other reviewers with valid takes!
This is so bad every this Audio talker not mention about the Source what is a name of current iems what they are using to compare at least instrumental layering and detail retrival Thats it we re comparing by simply a /b test and talking about it how are experiences on raw data But no we re do philosophy lesson😂
Loved the production quality of this video. And the way you incorporated those other opinions is so aesthetically pleasing. Thank you for this experience.
I’ve always felt detail comes down to (1) speed (2) finding ways to bring quietest parts of a song step forward so they are not lost, and (3) handling busy audio moments competently and coherently
Thats how i see it, also how bright the headphone is makes a difference in picking up backround sounds that are used as ear candy as they are mostly higher end sounds.
Agreed, on speed especially. Lack of speed "smears out" the sound. It's like with a photo, with speed kinda comparable to resolution. I feel like while frequency range rating defines the theoretical performance, speed defines how tight the end result matches the input, so how accurate it is - hence how detailed.
@@En_Joshi-Godrez The technical term "speed" as in "velocity of the diaphragm" is determined by frequency, volume level and coupling (free field vs pressure chamber). But that's not what audiophiles mean when they say "speed". They usually mean "how fast a kickdrum stops reverberating on a song", in which case it's frequency response (how loud are the frequencies that are reverberating in the song, and how loud is the loudspeaker reproducing these exact frequencies) and/or damping of the system (electrical and mechanical, how well does the loudspeaker follow the signal, which, normally, is also visible in the frequency response...). So if you measure all of these, you can find the "speed" (I hate this term because it's not really accurate) of a transducer.
For me Detail is simply the more amount of things i can hear in a track. Some would say that how clear or well defined it sound is detail but i like to term that precision or definition.
More details mostly have brighter headphones with faster drivers, since those micro informations are hidden in high freq. Yet so many have failed and created sharp, piercing sounding headphones :)
As an audio engineer, from my own experience IEMs are more revealing as they have more dynamic range and you can hear low level information better that is what most people refer to as detail
Funny…. I have literally been thinking about this the last six months. I understand the complexity of the question ….however, as a 60 year old audiophile ….I’m increasingly starting to look sideways at frequently hyped headphones and increasingly I’m turning to my IEM collection for ease, weight, compactness and yes for detail as well.
I have expensive headphones but never had expensive IEM's, since I believe that sticking something in ear canal is not healthy for ear itself. Both represent sound very differently thou
Comfort while listening is the single most import thing (To me anyway) and I still haven’t found a pair of over ear cans, that don’t make me uncomfortable after an hour or so, even though I feel the their overall sound quality is slightly better than IEM’s. As subjectivity goes though, there is no wrong way, as long as it makes you happy. Great video👍🏻
Same here. I have been searching for headphones that work for me for nearly 4 years now. IEM's have been the best as far as comfort. However, I want the soundstage and imaging of headphones with the comfort of IEM's and I have not been able to find that yet. I've tried AKG, Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, HiFiman, EPOS, HyperX headphones/headsets. So far the Sundara is my favorite sounding headphone but they are not comfortable to me. The AKG K702 are the best for comfort for me but they lack detail almost completely. Good soundstage and imaging though. I have tried various IEM's such as the Hexa, Dunu Titan S, Antlion Kimura Duo, and now I am trying the Kiwi Ears Orchestra Lite. My problem with IEM's is they have little to no soundstage and a lot of the ones I've tried have weird imaging.
I don't know if you're going to like the sound of the SIVGA Robin but that pair has huge and quite wide ear cushions, virtually any ear will fit in those headphones.
I’ve been watching your videos for years now, and this one of the best (if not THE best) topics you’ve broached. Fantastic question and I love the answers. To answer the question about what detail is: I consider detail to be how close it can get to reality, not so much in tone but in presentation of what is actually produced. I’m familiar with the violin. I’m familiar with the sound the bow makes when it scratches the string as it switches directions. The ability to reproduce that sound accurately helps ground me on what “detail” is, since it’s usually such a fine, quiet sound that you HAVE to know what you’re listening for to find it. Detail is the ability to reproduce those fine details realistically. (Provided that the source is appropriately captured and transferred.) This is why I consider things like the 560S to be detailed, but the Bathys to be less so: the 560S show me how things are, where as the Bathys contours the experience for greater aural comfort, its warmth covering some of that detail. Then again, I’ll happily spend 8 hours with the Bathys and tire of the 560S quickly unless I’m working. Keep up the great work.
Your description is focused on tonality more than detail in my opinion. You look for how it sounds: aka tuning. Picking up individual strings' vibrations however (is there a headphone that can produce this? ) should be counted as detail.
@@mehmetgurdal - i have to disagree. Tonality would imply tone, which would be more related to timbre. For example, listening to a violin and making it sound a little darker or brighter by either enhancing or attenuating certain frequencies. Moving the violin’s sound post or adding a mute to the bridge would have a similar effect. On the other hand, the detail of the elements in the sound - the difference in the hiss of the bow as it passes on the string at different distances from the bridge, or the aforementioned scratch as one switches directions - would be detail. These are things you can’t really enhance or attenuate with EQ, for example, short of some significant changes. It’s detail that either you have or you don’t. Here’s a good example: if you listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, at 2:12 or so, there’s a scratch on the left channel. If your headphones are detailed enough, you’ll hear it. If they’re not, you won’t. You can enhance it by raising the volume, for example, but a detailed set of headphones won’t need that. It’ll just be there. This was an issue with the initial capture, but even in the remasters, it remains. This is detail.
this video sums up my audiophile journey as a whole. everything is ambiguous!!! even the experts couldn't agree to such a basic concept as 'details'. glad I found my perfect sets and left the rabbit hole pretty early 😉
Stellar Video from the storyline, to substance, to production. Really well done! Resolve nailed it for me, I think the closer the speaker is to my ear drum then the more I hear based on how air moves and things that can obstruct its movement, like my outer ears. I will add that detail for me also has to do with how "black" the background is on my listening device, RS8 Black as night hence a ton of detail in strings and high hats for instance, Matrix Element i4 some background noise on my IEM's so I lose HOW WELL I CAN HEAR some of that "detail" in the strings and high hats again for instance. So yes there are many aspects to this well deserved topic. Thanks
Not just j-pop, pretty much any pop. Fortunately I find _most_ pop music too commercial sounding and lacking in creativity so I rarely listen to it. Seek out live recordings from small private venues organised by the venue themselves; they often have a good mix with little to no compression.
@@maidsandmuses I mostly listen to vtuber cover now since most of the time it is mix by individual mixer even with yt compression still better than j-pop CD.
@@Sintrania You can blame the major record labels for the loudness war; so much of their catalogue ends up brick-walled, it is just stupid. CD has 96dB dynamic range, but they are voluntarily wasting a lot of that headroom. I have given up on major labels ever being willing to mix and master pop material properly. Funny enough they can do mixing of classical/jazz music just fine. Hence as I said I prefer small venue live recordings. E.g. "Forest Jam Archive's: Forest Jam vol.107 "Momiji & The Bluestones"" set.1 and set.2
These days I'm much more measured, but I have had moments where I hear more. My Elex renders cymbals well, they seem to be everywhere. Yet I remember standing at a traffic light, listening to "Songbird" on IEM's and suddenly becoming aware that Lyndsey Buckingham was plucking strings in the background. Kind of spooked me. I also have an SACD remix of Oasis' "What's the story Morning Glory" that gets rid of the "wall of noise" so you can actually hear them play, and there is a moment when "Champagne Supernova" gets serious where I can hear somebody playing an amazing guitar riff in my right ear where the main guitar is on my left. The way IEM's open up sound, is astounding. I own many headphones, and many more IEM's just bought the Chu2 for my son, it's kind of a hybrid as I'm using the cable and vinyls from the salnotes Zero Mecha which I bought on a prime sale. The IEM is meh but the accessories are amazing. So yes I would concur that IEM's have detail in spades, especially modern in ears from the past two years or so.
I always thought about detail being a step beyond separation. If you listen to the same mix in different cans, using one of them it will be easier to focus on individual different instruments. Detail is how much "detail" you can hear about each instrument, the hum of an amp, the twang of a string, an overtone muddled out by another headphone. I don't think IEM's or headphones are more detailed than each other, its 100% individual. Basically with how much granularity and resolution the drivers can recreate an area of the frequency spectrum accurately.
Completely agree, another term you could use is clarity. It's the grating quality of a trumpet or other horn. A lack of blur of subtle sounds. Frequency curve likely does play a part in it, but also the speed of the drivers, and how tightly controlled they are by the amplifier. An amplifier with too little power for a headphone provides a muddy sound with that grain smoothed out, which means there's less to hold your interest. IEMs may just need less power, and so they may sound more detailed in more scenarios.
Just going to comment on how nice your cinematography and lighting are in this video. I tend to think of detail as the ability to pick out individual parts in a mix, wheras lower detail things (maybe due to intermodulation distortion) tend to blend into one mass of sound. My ER4's were one of the first things that I had the feeling of actually hearing the reverb added to a track, instead of it blending in to the driver decay. The Sundara is a good second and has better tuning. The ER4 is well tuned almost diffuse field, but flat. I EQ it to give it that -1db/oct slope thats consistent with good reference speaker setups in a treated room. I think the headphone show knocked that reference curve out of the park.
@@私気に成ります it makes sense to me that the ability to differentiate different parts of a mix as if it were in real life, instead of being compressed into a mess of it all as being detailed. One of few things that explain this is intermodulation distortion, which is unrelated to frequency response of a playback device. Harmonic distortion generally doesn't cause this as harmonics are natural to physical objects. When the frequency of a horn and a piano mix in real life though, they don't produce multiplications and differences between their frequencies, they merely add or subtract from the pressure level linearly. Electrostatics have very little of this and they also get the highest praise for detail.
I have the Sennheiser IE 300, they feel the most "detailed" than any other headphone / IEM I have. The IEMs I have feel more close then the headphones, but I can hear more clear layers if that makes sense. What I love about my Hifiman R7DX (headphones) is the impact that the bass has and how "open" they feel. The one thing that might be an unfair comparison in my gear is that I do not have a ~300$ headphone to compare to the IE 300 (retail 300$ but I got a deal for ~150$ new).
I'm going to go the other way about it and say that producing something akin to a "standard recording" that listeners can use to judge headphone "detail" would be one way to start. A standard 3 minutes sound file produced with an accompanying checklist that you can tick off and check against to see how much "detail" you heard. Over time you can build upon the recording to add more things that is defined as "detail".
I consider detail to be how accurately can a headphone reproduce complex sounds. This means keeping proper/accurate volume ratios between the different sounds in the mix (wich often times means handling a big dinamic range across all sound frequencies), and also not introducing "new sound" or distortion.
I think the correct answer is that being detailed really includes all the different aspects of hearing into a recording. So room acoustic reverbs, hard to hear background sounds, texture of instuments, resolution of instruments, imaging, seperation, and everything else there is to hear. Id be curious to know if that is the way reviewers are using it, though i kindof suspect that to be the case.
Simple answer. Yes. With regards to wireless headphones. No matter what, wireless audio will always have to be compressed before heard and that will never be the case with wired IEMs.
I think the best way to quantify detail in a way most people can understand is how close a headphone or IEM can faithfully reproduce the recording we're listening to. In a lot of ways, I feel like my IE900s have come a bit closer to doing that for me than my HD800's surprisingly enough. I grab my IEMs so much more often for that reason. Not that the HD800 is bad by any means, but its hard to go back to my HD800's sometimes because of it.
Allegedly, isn't Sennheiser's sound-signature more neutral and analytical? I just got the IE 100 Pro as my 3rd pair starting out with all this stuff and really love the design and comfort.
I am trying to wrap my head around “faithfully reproduce the recording” because does it refer to the, intention of the artist, at the time of recording or the concert version? Also how will we know what to look for if we have not heard it before. Just my two cents on why I get confused but for your second part i agree that detail is partly how well the system/headphone/iem can produce sound in ways that is most appealing while at the same time can make it seem more lifelike. But i reach a point where I enjoy listening on my setup than going to concerts since i care more about midrange,timbre and clarity than thumping bass and sound of the crowd from recent concerts. I felt the same for IE900 compared to focal clear and lcd-2. Never had an Abyss and electrostatic though just up to Arya on hifiman. also never had 800
Aaaaah, I have had so, so many discussions on this and I 100% agree that detail is different things to different people. But I also think that it's likely a collection of factors combined for each person. For me, I hear detail primarily as a function of frequency response balance, but also, I theorize, as a function of driver displacement for a signal at a given voltage & current. For example, if I play a particular frequency at, say, 0 dBFS and then play the same frequency at -6dBFS through a transducer, the transducer should displace air for the second signal half as far as the first signal. If it displaces further, I'd likely call it more detailed and if it displaces less than that, I expect I'd call it less detailed. This is something I really want to test, I just haven't had time to do so.
This video and the comment section are very meaningful. The performance of the microphone, which is called the "eardrum", differs from person to person. If there is a correct answer, it lies in what more people feel. So I think it's very meaningful for so many people to give their opinions.
for me, details is I can hear all the instruments like the guitars, drums, piano, the vocal, the void, the silence, the ambience, the serenity, and peace of the music. And for $23 I'm enjoying Tangzu Wener Jade Green IEM right now :D
To me, detail is a combination of things. Generally speaking, detail to me is how easy it is to understand the information of the music. That means that separation, treble, sound stage and other factors all contribute to a detailed headphone. The most detailed head- or earphone therefore to me is neutral or has a mild v shape with no mid bass bleed or excessive treble roll-off. And it has to have good imaging.
What if our hearing, being directly connected to the brain, and we know the brain has to < forget> in order to work, the filter with audio ... imagine everything from the string/finger noise of the bass player to where his/her sound source is in the room compared to everything else
From a physics perspective, sound is just a change in air pressure over time (obviously). So IMO 'detail' means the ability for the IEM/headphone/speaker to recreate this change in air pressure as accurately as possible. This means not just the frequency domain, but also the time domain. If a transient spike lasted exactly 0.0016s during the recording, then it should last exactly 0.0016s during playback. This definition also accounts for the problem of IEMs/headphones/speakers artificially creating 'detail' by adding a slight compressor effect to the sound.
For me, detail is like the contrast setting on a television screen. When set properly, it defines the clarity of images on the screen and makes the picture come alive. Detail in music is the clarity of each note in contrast to the room. Good detail seems to make the sound 3 dimensional and also create a sense of feeling. More detail means the impact of percussion instruments , the plucking of stringed instruments, the air from wind instruments and voices have more presence.
Wrong, all those things are separate qualities on their own. What you are describing is clarity or presence, not detail. Detail, just like detail in a photo. Allows you to see more fine details in an image. Print an image to say 8 feet wide, with with a 400mp scanning back and one at 20mp. The higher resolution photo is gonna retrieve far more detail from the scene and be sharper. Same with audio, you will hear more fine nuances of the music and more details you may have missed with less resolving equipment. If we are talking about a veiled sound, the oposite of clarity. Think of a high resolution photo of a foggy or low contrast scene. Still can have lots of detail, but looks way different.
i think one of the major reasons IEMs seem to pull more detail and offer that unique listening experience... is because of the noise floor they can practically eliminate. with speakers you can turn them up and drown out a fan or the sound of traffic... but you're actually raising the noise by introducing all manner of harmonics and reverberations. if it's detail you're after. it's probably not loud speakers that are going to give it to you... open and closed backs are great - but... you can still hear the dryer or the fan or someone next to you breathing in the case of too many of my cans. there are quiet parts of melody gardot or diana krall where you're supposed to only hear the softest whisper of brushes on a snare. but you can't cause the MF dryer is tumbling while your significant other is on the phone, while the dog is... while the kids are... but IEMs? boy howdy - get those things screwed in your side holes and suddenly, sexily... all you hear is ... fwoomp. that pressure sound of the cargo bay doors closing... you nerds know what i'm talking about... that isolation from the world - that zero noise floor... is why IEMs allow you to see all the way inside your music. because at exceedingly low volumes, you can attenuate the entire song without any one part of it d-bo'ing the other. IMHO - in a dead quiet < 10db environment - headphones and IEMs are equal for absolute detail retrieval. with speakers closely behind but being a whole different beast because outside of head vs inside of head. but as soon as you get above anything audible, IEMs remain king lord queen and jester... because they wrap a black velvet blanket around your music and present it to you like an OLED TV. crispy... with infinitely contrast to the noise floor around you.
Detail, to me (a non-audiophile, non-expert), is the ability to isolate different instruments in a recording and being able to listen to them exclusively via focusing on them (meaning all instruments are playing and can be heard, but you can focus on any single instrument you want and hear it very clearly, almost as if they were playing alone). Sometimes with a very good recording of an orchestra, I can isolate 1st string versus 2nd string as they are playing; it's a surreal experience. I use Sennheiser HD660S (original) with an Objective2+ODAC.
That is what I refer to by the term "Instrumental Separation", how well you can distinguish each of the instruments even though they are playing the same note.
I have bought the KZ ZS10 PRO IEMs and it was so good when i first heard it. The clearness of the IEMs is really great, I never heard anything like that before and i hear things in the songs i never heard like the detail in the sound is awesome. I say you try them out and if they arent good for ya you can always return them if you want. That is all from me.
Great video! "Audiophile terms" really are something that can be confusing since they aren't always clear on what is meant. Usually, I'll avoid terms like detail, speed, ect. because while it may describe a perception of how something may sound, it can imply some physical properties which may not actually be going on, and it can confuse the viewer. I think the difficult part with "detail" especially is, what does the reviewer mean? Is it the best FR for your HRTF? Is it better perception of small nuances which may be induced by certain small peaks and dips which can overcome some masking effects and emphasize things like trailing ends of tones? Is it something else? There's so much to unpack that sometimes these terms can be more confusing when used casually, and when different reviewers have different definitions. (Edit are just to clarify what I meant at the time of writing)
Call me an arrogant duchebag for this but isn't detail aka "resolution" (for me) different than hrtf? Hrtf is more of a tuning thing. Detail is however mostly determined by the products ability to reproduce the individual notes and their range. And lastly dynamics is the products ability to give a physical impact on these notes. I mostly agree with you but when I see seasoned veterans use these terms interchangeably I can't help but roll my eyes.
@mehmetgurdal it depends on what you mean by "detail" or even "resolution." Resolution in itself is a term that can have the literal meaning which could be it's frequency range. Being minimum phase systems, if it can play at least 20khz without issue or audible distortion, than it should fast enough to respond to any frequency below that and recreate the signal. But that in itself is not what people mean when they say resolution. They're usually referring to the perception. The perception can more likely be linked back to frequency response at your eardrum, and how it may relate to your hrtf or masking effects. At least that's what I mean when I'm talking about detail or resolution
@@sidesaladaudio Headphones like audeze, particularly the lcd4 that crinacle, resolve and almost anyone else can rate as having exceptional resolution despite having a tuning that is the opposite of what would be conducive of better detail (warm, dark, and recessed upper mids).
@@sidesaladaudioim not saying you are wrong, only that what we see as a FR is a snap shot. To quote orditory1990: "Common misconception, but "transient response" is *not* independent of frequency response. In fact frequency response can be calculated from the impulse response (by performing a fourier transform). That's how frequency response is "measured": you calculate the impulse response from cross-correlation of the stimulus with the recording and then perform a fourier transform. Any change to the impulse response necessarily results in a change to the frequency response as well. "waterfall plots" (cumulative spectral decay) do the same thing - perform an FFT of a short portion of the impulse response. Any change to the impulse response necessarily shows up in both the CSD plot as well as the frequency response plote" None of this is visible in a FR graph, even though it is FR, as in its snap shot that you see it can only describe how much attenuation/accentuation it has for each frequency, but it does not describe, for example, *playing one frequency would cause another harmonic frequency to appear* , aka nonlinear transformation. That is FR, but can only be done with a spectrometer analysing the music single verses the the impulse response, which you haven't tested so your opinion on technical performance being FR in your reviews are erroneous, because they are just the snap shots. Thats is a fallacious use of FR graphs for the reasons stated above.
@@sidesaladaudio you have a solid foundation however it is kinda limited. You do have a point in testing equipment with a specific frequency however this is rather limiting. Testing a speaker or headphone with 20k frequency and assuming that it'll keep up with the rest of the rage is rather a shallow assumption. This is basically like testing a monitor for its ability to emit white light (sunlight's full wavelength for comparison) and assuming that it'll give you 100% Adobe rgb and 240hz refresh rate. I know it's kinda out of the topic but when we talk or listen we produce and listen more than one specific frequency. A humans voice a combination of more than one specific frequency. So are the instruments. 20k frequency alone is not enough to reach at a concrete conclusion for the resolving capabilities of a specific driver. I have another idea; we can design a new coupler for this purpose; we can play sound at 20 or more different frequencies at the same time. And have 20 different microphone ends to listen these specific frequencies. (In each mic end we also need to cancel other 19 bands somehow) We can reach to a certain Result in this method; frequencies shouldn't affect each other. Ratner then measuring a specific frequency using this combined frequency test we can determine if a driver is able to produce all of the range as quickly as it needs to be. We can first test this method with dynamic, planar and electrostatic drivers and scale down the coupler system accordingly. We do know these 3 drivers have differing results in user feedback. And also using hrtf is not viable in here; we're after the driver speed not the tuning efficiency. You can tune a driver to hrtf but you can't tube it to give more resolving capacity. What do you think? And one question?; whats minimum phase?
in medicine there is this idea of an almost "double" placebo effect. say for example you just got prescribed an anti depressant with some less than pleasant side effects. a person may not notice an improvement with their depression, but they will say the medicine is effective because they definately notice the mentioned negative side effects. even if people highlighted what detail means to them (let's say space between voices) and did not notice it in a recording but did notice more decay on a cymbal hit they may very well still say that headphone or IEM is more detailed because of it even if it doesn't fit their idea of what detail should be. I'm super interested to see what measures are taken to overcome stuff like this should the question of what detail is gets seriously explored. thanks for the video l.
I’d like to see a video comparing various IEMs and headphones that people consider detailed, and then have some explanation about what is being heard that make them sound detailed.
Closed back headphones = Brilliant in a Silent environment at home, useless in a noisy enviroment. Open back headphones = Sat down at home silent or noisy enviroment they excell. IEM's = On the go, take anywhere, never run out of battery, can use Foam tips to block out other sounds. Massive amount of choice. ANC Headphones = Light and comfy but need a battery to be charged and 90% of them have poor sound quality. ...I like them all.
I have all of these, but something that someone who lives in a tropical place should consider, IEMs are great when you are not going to be in an airconditioned area. ANCs and closed back in general are nightmare to use outdoor unless it is rainy season or the colder months and even then expect sweat build up. Even open back gets you sweating and the pads material matters a lot. Oh, just regular earbuds for exercising.
I think you are a bit confused about close back & open back headphones. Both are brilliant in a quiet environment but in a noisy environment the close back headphones are better because they can block the noise & the sound from the headphones won't leak outside which is not possible in open back headphones. The rest of it is fine. ANC isn't very advanced yet so it's just useless feature imo. IEMs are best for cutting off the bg noise & providing better details in less price & superior comfort than headphones. A high quality studio headphone will always beat any IEM in terms of sound quality, sound staging & imaging. But if you choose under $100 IEM is a better option.
In my mind, detail is being able to reproduce all of the fine details in a song or audio source. Can you hear fingers moving up and down guitar strings? Can you hear the twang of bass guitar strings? Detail is the reproduction of all of the minute sounds in an audio track/source. Separation is being able to hear all of the instruments at once and in their own defined space, at the same time. Soundstage is how far away an audio source appears to you or if you can tell how large the recording area is. Does a live song sound like you're at a concert? Does your enemy sound like they're off in the distance, down the hallway or close to you. Imaging is where that audio source is in directionality. Can you tell that footsteps are coming from behind you or to the sides? Is your enemy on the floor above you? Which direction did that gunshot appear to be from. I don't think these concepts can be quantified but they can be defined and understood.
Detail is about how many instruments I can distinguish from each other. Or those little sounds in the background of a song like fingers scratching the strings of a guitar or the breath of a singer.
Interesting point about details, kinda reminded about the time I got into arguments online about the definitions of details (and its subset like macrodetails, microdetails, etc.). I personally define details as "the percentage of information that passes from the source to the listener". Of course, certain systems might exaggerate some information, allowing you to have more "information" than the source material, similar to how frame interpolation or image upscaling is done to video contents. I view other things like room effect, timbre, imaging, separation, etc. to be separate technical aspects from details. Hence, my preferred nomenclature of "resolution" instead of "details", as I strongly associate it to resolution in video.
You have a great deal of micro-pistonic-ejection-fractions that peak within any given frequency response. I would say that the display of leading-edge transience, trailing tones, dynamic range and z-axis image seperation of sounds vs quiet spaces in a given frequency response... will be the determinant factor of how well those pistonic peaks will be audible without bluring or distorting. Thus, a driver that can control all said variables will allow a non-distorted or non-blurred presentation of the frequency response being transmitted. Aka. Our ability to hear all of those pistonic peaks are perceived as what we call resolution or detail. G
Separation of treble mid and base in three balanced drivers would help in conjuction of sound stage. Open ear headphones work better in a sound isolated room for more sound stage and external sounds isolation.
The most impressive thing i noticed after getting my 7hz Timeless is the freaking textures on anything, its like i can run my fingernails into a surface and could feel all bass and treble from the vibrations of the grooves. Another difference that i could never feel in any headphones is the feeling that the sound is being generated inside your head and not coming from outside, it like you are inside a room and the music playing around, not that you have one source of some sound coming from each side of your head.
tl;dr: It's all in the frequency response. For me, objective "detail" or "resolution" (an idea albeit initially planted in my mind by Sharur's long headphone video as well as one of the main EQ-by-ear tutorials I consulted early on) as a property of sound systems is simply related to the smoothness of the actual frequency response reaching your eardrums and the relative levels of the frequency bands (if you don't have in-ear microphones, you can check this for yourself by listening to sine sweeps), plus their "synergy" with how the music was mixed (mixers may adjust frequency bands to make things sound right on their studio monitors which may not necessarily be perfectly neutral or match your own playback system's frequency response, or your preferences may differ from the mixer's). All the information that exists in the music can be decomposed into sinusoids of different frequencies and phases that change in amplitude over time, whereby the frequency response simply tells you how the sound system "filters" (controls what passes through) that content. If the frequency response goes up to 20 kHz without being significantly diminished relative to the rest of the frequency response, then it objectively can resolve the "fastest" or "tiniest" details (though other content might obscure perception of such). What matters then is the _balance_ of all this information. If there are no major dips in the frequency response, then no "details" are being diminished. If there are no major peaks, then there would be no cases of certain frequency content being overamplified and thus masking adjacent frequencies. Treble peaks could cause the music's noise floor to sound amplified, obscuring the subtler sonic events, whereby EQing those peaks down can create a "black background" from which those subtleties can emerge more clearly, that lack of overamplified noise possibly also improving the sense of spaciousness. "Detail" could also simply be a relative thing from one's hearing one headphone bring certain frequencies forward that the previous headphone didn't have as forward. Anyone with EQ can add a low-Q peaking filter to some frequency and artificially amplify the frequency content in that region, effectively bringing those "details" forward, but then that could sound unnatural, be objectively incorrect relative to your ears' actual HRTF, or cause details elsewhere in the audio band to sound diminished by comparison. Distortion and sufficiently delayed reflections as in many speaker listening rooms can obscure detail if not introduce grain incorrectly interpreted as more detail, causing the real details to be lost within said noise. Another sort of noise contributor could be the decay of transients as can be analyzed from a sound system's "cumulative spectral decay" (CSD). If a transducer is highly underdamped and takes a long time to stop, then those frequencies will continue to erroneously ring, possibly contributing to a noise floor obscuring some of the real details. Then for "accuracy", if you stick in-ear microphones into your ears and sit in front of a neutral point source speaker, you will discover the shape of how your ears naturally amplify and diminish certain frequencies. You will also discover that your ears for sound sources coming from a specific direction will incur certain phase cancellations ("nulls" or "notches") such that "details" at certain frequencies would never be heard. Regardless, from my measurements, these frequency responses are generally quite smooth (when using a small impulse window to remove the comb filtering caused by reflections), the "sharpest" parts being those natural phase cancellations; my in-ear measurements of the Sennheiser HE-1 and Stax SR-X9000 (this one I am not allowed to share as of yet) shows exceptionally smooth frequency responses with no major peaks or nothing hard to EQ down, and as such are indeed objectively very "detailed". Playback from perfectly flat and ultra-low-distortion speakers in an anechoic chamber would be exemplary of perfect audio playback that neither diminishes nor boosts any frequency content within the music beyond what is naturally done by your ears. In practice, full free-field "ear gain" can sound pretty bright, but my previous very flat Meze Elite hybrid pads EQ with comparatively lower ear gain levels closer to Harman levels (and also comparable to the Sennheiser HE-1's and Stax SR-X9000's levels of flatness for in-ear canal entrance measurements) and as fine-tuned for my ears to eliminate peaks simply sounded exquisite. The only remaining frontier for me is to combine ultra-low distortion with exquisitely sharp _and_ clean (super-fast decay) transients (this is likely related to the phase response), to come across yet more spacious and comfortable pads or open-sounding drivers, and for a headphone to be developed that eliminates the natural nulls caused by 90-degree sound incidence so that you can more easily and accurately EQ the directional nulls in a binaural head-tracked HRTF. Simulated anechoic true neutral speakers with head-tracking through headphones is the real deal for accurate stereo imaging bliss.
You can look at detail as resolution and the definition of resolution in terms of vision and displays because they have a clear definition and was to measure. Resolution is the smallest distance required to tell 2 things apart (simplified definition). And it's easy to measure the resolution of a monitor by counting the pixels or PPI. Relating that definition to sound, I treat resolution and detail as the ability to clearly hear all aspects of a sound, hear all instruments and sounds in a song clearly. You could say more detail makes it feel life you are listening to the instrument or singer and not a recording of it. Same with video, more detail makes it feel like that thing is real in front of you and not dust being displayed on a screen.
You should make a review on the AKG N5005. Just picked them up, and I'm just blown away. I think it's the most under reviewd IEM, and they are only $200 right now that's down from the original price of $1000. Please make a review. I would love to have your input on these. They come with 4 sound filters, ballanced 2.5 and single ended 3.5 and even a Bluetooth cable! The presentation blew me a way, and the sound is super clean to my ears.
I think the detail part comes down to the transients and volume of micro clicks or sounds that are in the soundtrack that are not apparent in some headphones/iems/speakers. For example: Start of slight clanging in Why so serious - Worse equipment shows the clanging at the later louder parts. (Treble detail) Stacey Kent - pianist hums along with his/her improvisation. Worse equipment doesn't present these detail. (Midrange detail) Forgot the song name - Some one knocked over equipment at the very back of the recording room - Not present in worse equipment (Lower midrange detail) Dark eyes - Vibration of the Bass/cello strings at their bassiest notes. - Vibration of strings smoothed out due to slow bass (Bass detail)
Hard to answer this because I have 2 headphones and 1 IEM i rotate between regularly and they all bring out different things. My desktop planars reach deeper into the bass and treble and have lower distortion than the others, as well as having the best soundstage and most coherent "wall of sound" effect. Best dynamics too I'd say. The IEMs do imaging the best and are quite fast. My daily portables somehow seem to have the best texture and layering to sounds, it's like you can hear more within a note yet somehow they don't win out on imaging. All that being said, the baseline definition to me of high end audio is when you start hearing the space the instruments were recorded in, or when you start hearing the mixer as almost another band member contributing to the sound. The other aspect that's consistent with high end audio is you'll start hearing notes as waves. You'll start hearing the attack and decay within notes that you didn't know was there. Which of those wins? Vague and personal answer. My brain tells me imaging, speed, and treble clarity contribute most to "detail" so IEMs would win but I'd also say, detail isn't everything. I currently use my IEMs the least.
When I think detail I think a combination of good high frequency reproduction, soundstage, and separation. High frequency reproduction in particular I suspect is key, and something IEMs will naturally do better at simply because their drivers are physically smaller. E.g. reproducing all the high-frequency parts of the percussion and how high-frequency transients interact with the recording environment.
For me detail is being able to listen to a particular sound signature or graphical frequency that is native to manufacture and being able to destingus voice from texture and instrument from voice, the artists equipment to record a piece and finally the hardware limits , if it can handle the most technical of bass and can it handle the extreme clarity of voice without shift in vocal tonality. Can it match the harmonic instruments whilst providing a crisp fast static response. These are some of the things you can understand from a variety of songs/artists. Does the headphone push like the rev limiter on the car going 400kmh or does it struggle to deliver the nostalgia we all get when listening to a new audio device. Ultimately can you drift away in to total abyss without adjusting volume or EQ or even the seating position. Can the audio device take whatever genre and give the best in class whatever the genre. Does it take that genre and perform better than other focused devices set for a specific genre. Is it valorous amongst its predators. Does it take the music experience to a whole nother dimension.
what i think detail is, is 1; how flat the response is to it's own target, and 2; the amount of distortion (quality and strength of the driver, and how much reflections affect the sound output), due to these 2 reasons, IEMs usually have a more detailed sound.
As much as I love my Hifiman Edition XS for detail. I feel the isolation and reproduction that my Moondrop Variations give, give it the edge over the Edition XS. Isolation plays a big part in hearing the small micro nuances in my opinion
Detail is the speed and accuracy of the drivers response to reach the new 'position' of the phase. it signifies low distortion and great transient response, it also cascades into other forms of details, like stereo seperation, freq response etc.
For me detail in music is the combination of instrumental separation and clarity. If I listen to a recording and one iem/headphone allows me to hear "more" or pick things I could not hear before I would describe that is being more detailed. I also feel there is a subjective side to this regarding the "quality" of individuals hearing. Simply put because of the proximity to the ear drum it "could" be far easier for a lesser trained ear to pick up more detail from an iem than an headphone since sonically the sound wave has much further to travel and more to interact with in a headphone than an iem. Something that makes sense when considering that alot of general consensus is that iems are better until you start hitting hi end headphones
If you ask me, detail is in the frequency response. Specifically, the high end. Boost 8k or so up a little, cut the mids a little from 500 to 6k or so, and you've made the sound "clearer", "crisper", or "sharper". The mids can very easily make a sound muddy; especially when a lot of bass is in the mix.
This feels like David Imel explaining how modern smartphone cameras should be much better than they are, as their processing emphasizes sharpness and definition over sfumato and chiaroscuro, out of a mistaken belief that sharpness and definition are the *only* things that count as "detail". Detail is a balance.
For me it's granularity of the sound. It can be the definition of the instruments, textures, anything that can be picked out that gives the sound charcter. Similar to details in picture. Is anything being covered or distorted in a way that I can no longer pick it up. An hyperbolic example would be can you tell the difference between a guitar or a piano, or the difference in singers. It's stuff like that because that is detail. Better audio equipment allows you to hear things you couldn't with different audio equipment without messing with the eq. Though that can also bring those things out potentially. It's why people think brighter headphones give more detail. Proximity can also effect this which is probably why this discussion with iem vs headphones vs speakers goes this way.
*To provide or to get complete details in audio is all comes to the audio data extractor like a digital music player or a CD player, I've heard Nakamich CD changer at music retail stores during early 2000s with Nakamichi headphones and other very cheap headphones and the detail was used to be breath taking, so all come down to the audio player how efficiently it extracts audio.*
This is something that's been on my mind recently actually, not sure if I'm alone in thinking this but I can't really tell the difference in detail between say a Moondrop Chu and an Ananda Nano. I can tell a difference in the tuning, soundstage, imaging, separation, etc. But not in detail despite the fact that it's supposed to be a very detailed headphone. So I've never really understood when people describe headphones or IEMs as being more detailed than another. I can accept the fact there simply is a difference in detail since so many people tend to agree on it, but I would like to understand and experience that difference too.
I've been at your stage, as what I observed so far it seems that detail/resolution becomes a marketing term to kinda mask the flaws in the frequency response. Plus I don't really buy terms that is defined so vaguely that multiple people has different interpretation of it same with "technicalities". Though to me I'd like to define it as objectively as possible, "detail" is mainly in the frequency response, if the amplitude response is smooth and does not have major peak that may mask other frequencies that is "detailed", it is also inline at how we perceive each part of the frequency response, sometimes lesser bass or higher ear canal gain (2.7-3kHz) can affect our perception of detail. Simple as that, its just that "audiophiles" specially reviewers tend to overcomplicate things that they hear even if what they hear are just a part of multiple biases surrounding them.
@@mehmetgurdal Oh haha, would you count things like what I mentioned as a part of detail? Also I'm assuming you'd consider resolution and detail as the same thing? I always assumed detail had something to do with the trailing ends of tones, and then resolution was more to do with how smooth a frequency response is i.e. lack of major peaks or dips. But I don't really have a clear definition of what either of those things are, they're just what I assume they are.
@@xeruskun Technicalities is something I've always thought of as an umbrella term for things like soundstage, imaging, separation, detail, etc. just so people don't have to say all those words haha That would make sense, that's how I see resolution, unless detail is the same as resolution, then the definition applies to both. But I did want to mention an example where I'd say that definition has some issues. Like say a DT 1990 Pro which is said to be very detailed, it has a pretty sizeable 8kHz peak. So by that definition the headphone shouldn't have detailed treble. From my ear, again having heard the headphone I can't tell a difference in detail between a 1990 Pro and other headphones I've tried, but it sounded cool haha Out of curiousity, what's the most detailed headphone you've heard thus far?
For me, detail is the pure resolution and accuracy of each individual sound. Having good imaging, instrument separation and soundstage are things that show how good the technical performance of that IEM or headphone is, but I've also noticed that a wide soundstage often reduces the impact of the midbass and it sometimes swallows some of the details of certain instruments when you get the feeling that they are more far away from your ears.
I thought it was like the resolution. When I got the Edition XS I realized that now I could make out what instrument was being used in certain songs, like, if it was a bass, a tuba or a violoncello, when all of them previously sounded just like a low hum (to say something). I didn't even thought what the low notes were played with, a lot of times I thought they were synths, but now I knew there were actual instruments. So I thought it was like this but for everything. In the same way, when playing videogames with music from another app, now it was much more clearer than without the EXS, it sounded like there was more separation between the sounds of the game and the music, like if they came from different speakers (and nothing could sound like noise anymore).
I think IEMs only feel and seemed detailed because they are closer to your ear. However the cans can pump in more energy and that can bring in more detail. It is a bit like asking a question will a smaller canvas show you more detail than a painting on a larger canvas … is a smaller camera sensor with more pixels better in detail than a larger sensor with less pixels. The smaller camera sensor can probably give you detail … but bad in dynamic range … I suppose same for iems. The iems only appear to be more detailed but the cans probably are more detailed … but … it’s all in perceptions end of the day … Even if to photos of different size pack in the same detail, which ones are you more likely to notice. My guess is that the larger print will show you more detail than the smaller one on account of the area. So probably the same logic works for sound as the cans just bring in and show you more in a much wider space. The iems lack space and dimension that the cans can give you.
I have all the options available to me, I use an IEM for video/sound editing, headphones for gaming, TWL when I move around the room and speakers for relax, all plugged into my lqptop and switch between them using hotkey software
Indeed, we’re all just listening to wiggly air, but as a non-audio pro, I find that having more drivers in IEMs helps in separating the lows (like leaves rustling or distant footsteps), mids (vocals, music, cars), and highs (gunshots, engine noise, explosions). Dedicated drivers for each frequency range can make the sound clearer and more detailed. Idk realistically how useful a dedicated DAC is. But I heard that paired with IEM’s unlocked the frequency range massively and makes them sound even more clearer and better, as well as provides IEMs with more power compared to just using the AUX port. I still bought a wireless adapter to see if I notice any difference. I’m struggling to let go of wireless. It’s so much better.
For IEMs i would say it depends. The fit must be PERFECT especially if you use foam tips. This is really hard to do if the tips colapse in your ear (which ive had trouble with recently). Fitment and therefore comfort is a huge factor. For headphones that's really not much of a problem.
A few years ago I was into IEMs and got a bunch of cheap KZ, CCA, Moondrop, 7HZ IEMs but later really hated the feeling of putting something in my ears. Just out of curiosity I gave them a try the other day and I was shocked. In terms of details, any of them totally destroyed my HD660S and S2. It's not because of volume. IEMs are just clearer. They may have problems in tuning, but they have all the details, even the $20 ones.
It is interesting that the various dictionaries even have different definitions that are used for "detail" or "detailed." The common thread appears to be that a "detail" is often a part of a whole entity that can be examined more closely or isolated from the whole. So, if we translate that to the audiophile world, everything used to describe the experiences in audio can be considered "detail" or "details," like timbre, clarity, soundstage, etc. So, if one is to try to describe "detail," they are being very vague in their choice of words, since a part of the whole should not be construed as an entity of itself or on it's own! Right?!?!
In my personal experience, "detail" (or lack thereof) is a combination of transient response (fast or sluggish) and frequency response. If the attack / decay and FR somehow land in the beholder's "golden" zone then that piece of gear seems to come across as more resolving.
Just recently I had been wondering this. In fact, what I am thinking about is if I want to improve my system, what is better going for a high quality IEM or a headphones? The IEM are usually less amplification dependents, are more portables and sometimes cheaper than equivalent headphones. My concern is a about the soundstage size. This is something I take in count with the earphones because never are as the speakers but I like be as nearer as possible. And answering the question about the what "detailed" means. And I think that talking about detail could confuse us. I think is better to talk about how "revealing" are the earphones. How they are able to represent the music with all the different details, nuances, space, imaging that we could find in a good speakers system. I personally want to check some good IEM and headphones to compare with the system I have now, to discover which is more convenient for me.
To me detail is being able to pin point and hear every instrument or sound aspect of what you’re listening to. Like looking at a pinging and seeing what strokes where used where to give it dept. what colors where used in specific spot to create the whole. The DETAILS! Of the painting
For me, detail is about seperating sounds from other sounds, with clarity Footsteps in the battlefield Gunshots from rustles etc. I have Turtle Beach Stealth Pros and this has been nice
Detail for me, is anything that can be distinctly identified. Whether that is the decay or transient notes, the piecring of a high hat being noticeable, or texture of bass, or the timbre of vocals, or how well alll of these are presented in a way that suggest good instrument separation. It's how much of what you can hear in the music, ragrdless of the frequency range or note type. My IEMs give clear smooth and detailed vocals and treble, but my bluetooth overear ANC headphones that lack the clarity of the cheaper IEMs give muchhhh better bass texture, slighly more fuller vocals and have better soundstage. They are giving detail to me in different ways.
For me, what I consider to be detail in a pair of headphones would be the attack/decay speed and distortion levels. A fast attack with low distortion I find makes it much easier to hear quieter/less pronounced sounds when there's a lot of things going on in a track at once.
In my opinion, no matter how close or far the sound is, the detail is a single sound/effect, ideally with easily indentifiable location within the soundstage. In other words, I can say that for me sound is detailed when I hear as much sound sources as possible, can identify individual sounds and their locations, and ideally can name it somewhat clear/realilistic. Also I've noticed that I need to capture specific detail is a song once, so I can somehow identify it with other less-detailed IEMs/headphones/etc. Again, it's just a personal opinion.
Writing this comment half way through the video so perhaps it's touched on later in the video anyway - but I've had the theory that well isolated headphones with narrow stage and good instrument separation lend themselves better to *perceiving* detail than wider spaced open backs, simply for the fact that your ears don't have to "search around" the stage for a given sound or detail, it's just there right in your face. I think that's why headphones used for monitoring are often closed backs with very narrow stages. For example my HD-25 has a tuning that I don't think lends itself to being the most detailed, and yet because of its narrow presentation and amazing isolation, it is very easy to notice the details that _are_ there. So with that in mind I think if you take an open-back headphone, and a well-isolating IEM with a small soundstage, and they have similar overall detail retrieval capabilities, the detail will still be a little bit easier to notice on the IEM for that reason, and that might be why people think of IEMs as sometimes being more detailed. That's not to say spacious headphones can't be detailed, on the contrary I think a lot of _the_ most detailed headphones are quite open and spacious, but I think comparing them against an IEM there can be the illusion that the IEM has more detail because it's harder to ignore/not notice said details due to the presentation. That and I think at the low end IEMs just perform really well, better than super-budget headphones tend to perform. Edit: As for what detail actually means to be. To me if a headphone is detailed, it's capable of reproducing as much of the original sound that went into the recording as possible, including the most subtle of sounds, so that means having a balanced tuning and well extended bass and treble - however I think what people actually mean when they say that a headphone _sounds_ detailed, is that said subtle details aren't just present but are brought to the forefront and very noticeable. Which can again be a presentation thing (narrower stage), or a tuning thing (like for example the 1-1.5KHz peak on some electrostats)
Dms, what you're saying is a 100% true! I have the focal utopia, and loved it for "Detailretrieval" , its speed, accuracy ...and then came , what i nicknamed "the trio infernale"... : the cayin n8ii/aroma audio jewel/liquid links venom mk1 cable...and destroyed it! More "Detail" than everything else, to my ears , in that combo!!! For me, in that regard, over abyss,hifiman he 1000v2,utopia...un-believable! Soooo....i'm , now , "converted"; i have the hypothesis that the iem- development (yes, pricing also/the "trio infernale"is a 10k!!!) is some sortiert of fester growing than with the big cans, but : I think all the possible Options are not checken yet! Think of why mtb's had 26 tyres...😂 And old sennheiser 'phones of the past already had electrodynamic and conventional drivers, combined...think of the early days of hifi...highly sensitivity-speakers, "Vott"(Voice of the Theater, etc), tubes!! Sometimes, the marketing-strategies overcome the potential Output, ok, almost everytime!? You are developing something brilliant, and then the Marketing and how-to-sell-strategies kick in....i hope that there's still much more to come. And it will. But it takes some pioneer's , like you, for example, who are thinking out-of-box , asking the right questions, giving ideas, New pov's, if you want. Remember also the akg 1000, jecklin float, etc...what happened? It was sent to sleep...😢 Not totally! The 1266, in my opinion, Cremes it's Sound because of lesser pressure/loose fit on the ears...brilliant! So, lets develop new thoughts about our Hobby, combined with old knowledge, experience.. And even better stuff will occur 😊 Without such people like you, medicine and all the other high-end technical genres would't have come so far..and, of course , are still developing (Sokrates😊) Maybe the KI (we call it that in Germany/Artifical Intelligence)will help? But, only combined with human Design,old technical knowledge...and overcoming old "structures" like marketing-focused-break-even-points, etc I'm looking forward to that! Keep up your good work, i'm in on your mission, for sure. Mischa Fuchs,Germany
For me, even though I'm very loosely an audiophile, regarding sheer experience, but I define detail as very minute things, that all come together and make a headphone or earphone a joy to listen to. These are the following, but my definition isn't limited to: -clarity of instruments/sounds, granularity -reverberation of the "room" where the recording was taken, decay, that sort of stuff -a sort of sharpness, tbh I don't know how to define that, maybe the "speed" of the driver itself? And the very big part, which to me is peak detail, which quite funnily enough, I have in my daily driver Technics RP-F400-s (open back headphone) is I can crank up the volume, like up high, and no sound gets in the way of others, and it doesn't become jarring. There isn't a part which overpowers anything. Tho this could just be part of the frequency response.
![If you can't hear this then you're not an audiophile [See description for link to followup video]](/img/n.gif)
2:58 *vsauce music starts playing*
Love this analogy and it looks like DMS does too = ).
My definition of detail is how much individual sound/instrument can be distinguished with clarity, so my definition of detail kinda goes hand in hand with how good the separation is
I would say detail is the difference between hearing minute sounds in an audio track/source and separation is being able to tell all of the instruments apart at any given moment.
"Details" its a verb, full spectrum or maybe "full reproduction"is better words to use..
One part of the spectrum is just one part, its like describing colors without describing nuances..
@@Drewsterman777 That's called separation, we already have definition for that. Clarity again while related to detail and goes hand and hand. Is still a little different from detail. In both cases you are not defining detail and describing something else we already have definitions for.
Congratulations, you are a speaker person. No amount of iem "detail" will beat a speakers REALISM or separation imo
@niccster1061 Says the person that clearly has no idea what they are talking about.
As a pro musician maybe I can help shed some light on this: IEMs were originally designed to be monitors for musicians to hear each other on stage in a much better way than the wedge speakers we originally used. They helped isolate the sound so there is less chance of hearing loss, and they're instantaneous since they're in the ears rather than a few feet away which drastically can help timing. Over time, a third function of IEMs started to develop: Instrument separation. By putting multiple sound drivers on each iem, it helps spread out the sound more allowing each instrument to be heard without blending in with the other instruments. IEMs can have 5+ drivers in them meaning 10 total "Speakers" in your head. This can be mistaken for better detail since it's easier to pick out the full timber of an instrument or sound whereas most headphones or speakers will blend those instruments together so some of the frequencies end up overlapping and fine details end up lost in the mix. At low price points, this can definitely make a difference in the perceived quality of the iems but we can't forget that separating the sounds is not actually increasing the quality of the sounds. This is why high end headphones seem to blow the sound quality of iems out of the water.
Thank you i fully understand
I can agree but that's an opinion. Individuals can prefer iems over headphones even though headphones are technically better
Thank you for this.
@@Usernotknown21where in his point does he give an opinion? I believe he is being objective and he is not saying you cant have preference to one over the other. He is talking about their qualities.
Iem is not for bass ?
I love all the takes everyone has on this!! Thanks DMS for including me in this discussion! Video came out great. Big shout out to other other reviewers with valid takes!
Glad to see you being recognized by other well known audiophiles. You deserve it man!
This is so bad every this Audio talker not mention about the
Source what is a name of current iems what they are using to compare at least instrumental layering and detail retrival
Thats it we re comparing by simply a /b test and talking about it how are experiences on raw data
But no we re do philosophy lesson😂
Gadgetry’s channel got me into headphone space,he does a great job!
Loved the production quality of this video. And the way you incorporated those other opinions is so aesthetically pleasing. Thank you for this experience.
Thank you for the input Idubbbz! I didnt know u were an audiophile until now
I’ve always felt detail comes down to (1) speed (2) finding ways to bring quietest parts of a song step forward so they are not lost, and (3) handling busy audio moments competently and coherently
Thats how i see it, also how bright the headphone is makes a difference in picking up backround sounds that are used as ear candy as they are mostly higher end sounds.
"Speed" is most likely FR related
Agreed, on speed especially. Lack of speed "smears out" the sound. It's like with a photo, with speed kinda comparable to resolution. I feel like while frequency range rating defines the theoretical performance, speed defines how tight the end result matches the input, so how accurate it is - hence how detailed.
Can we make this the definition of details?
@@En_Joshi-Godrez The technical term "speed" as in "velocity of the diaphragm" is determined by frequency, volume level and coupling (free field vs pressure chamber). But that's not what audiophiles mean when they say "speed". They usually mean "how fast a kickdrum stops reverberating on a song", in which case it's frequency response (how loud are the frequencies that are reverberating in the song, and how loud is the loudspeaker reproducing these exact frequencies) and/or damping of the system (electrical and mechanical, how well does the loudspeaker follow the signal, which, normally, is also visible in the frequency response...).
So if you measure all of these, you can find the "speed" (I hate this term because it's not really accurate) of a transducer.
For me
Detail is simply the more amount of things i can hear in a track.
Some would say that how clear or well defined it sound is detail but i like to term that precision or definition.
More details mostly have brighter headphones with faster drivers, since those micro informations are hidden in high freq. Yet so many have failed and created sharp, piercing sounding headphones :)
As an audio engineer, from my own experience IEMs are more revealing as they have more dynamic range and you can hear low level information better that is what most people refer to as detail
Funny…. I have literally been thinking about this the last six months.
I understand the complexity of the question ….however, as a 60 year old audiophile ….I’m increasingly starting to look sideways at frequently hyped headphones and increasingly I’m turning to my IEM collection for ease, weight, compactness and yes for detail as well.
I have expensive headphones but never had expensive IEM's, since I believe that sticking something in ear canal is not healthy for ear itself. Both represent sound very differently thou
@@soulfulfoolhearing aid users shaking right now
Comfort while listening is the single most import thing (To me anyway) and I still haven’t found a pair of over ear cans, that don’t make me uncomfortable after an hour or so, even though I feel the their overall sound quality is slightly better than IEM’s. As subjectivity goes though, there is no wrong way, as long as it makes you happy. Great video👍🏻
Same here. I have been searching for headphones that work for me for nearly 4 years now. IEM's have been the best as far as comfort. However, I want the soundstage and imaging of headphones with the comfort of IEM's and I have not been able to find that yet. I've tried AKG, Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, HiFiman, EPOS, HyperX headphones/headsets. So far the Sundara is my favorite sounding headphone but they are not comfortable to me. The AKG K702 are the best for comfort for me but they lack detail almost completely. Good soundstage and imaging though.
I have tried various IEM's such as the Hexa, Dunu Titan S, Antlion Kimura Duo, and now I am trying the Kiwi Ears Orchestra Lite. My problem with IEM's is they have little to no soundstage and a lot of the ones I've tried have weird imaging.
I don't know if you're going to like the sound of the SIVGA Robin but that pair has huge and quite wide ear cushions, virtually any ear will fit in those headphones.
I’ve been watching your videos for years now, and this one of the best (if not THE best) topics you’ve broached. Fantastic question and I love the answers.
To answer the question about what detail is: I consider detail to be how close it can get to reality, not so much in tone but in presentation of what is actually produced. I’m familiar with the violin. I’m familiar with the sound the bow makes when it scratches the string as it switches directions. The ability to reproduce that sound accurately helps ground me on what “detail” is, since it’s usually such a fine, quiet sound that you HAVE to know what you’re listening for to find it. Detail is the ability to reproduce those fine details realistically. (Provided that the source is appropriately captured and transferred.) This is why I consider things like the 560S to be detailed, but the Bathys to be less so: the 560S show me how things are, where as the Bathys contours the experience for greater aural comfort, its warmth covering some of that detail. Then again, I’ll happily spend 8 hours with the Bathys and tire of the 560S quickly unless I’m working.
Keep up the great work.
Your description is focused on tonality more than detail in my opinion.
You look for how it sounds: aka tuning.
Picking up individual strings' vibrations however (is there a headphone that can produce this? ) should be counted as detail.
@@mehmetgurdal - i have to disagree. Tonality would imply tone, which would be more related to timbre. For example, listening to a violin and making it sound a little darker or brighter by either enhancing or attenuating certain frequencies. Moving the violin’s sound post or adding a mute to the bridge would have a similar effect.
On the other hand, the detail of the elements in the sound - the difference in the hiss of the bow as it passes on the string at different distances from the bridge, or the aforementioned scratch as one switches directions - would be detail. These are things you can’t really enhance or attenuate with EQ, for example, short of some significant changes. It’s detail that either you have or you don’t.
Here’s a good example: if you listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, at 2:12 or so, there’s a scratch on the left channel. If your headphones are detailed enough, you’ll hear it. If they’re not, you won’t. You can enhance it by raising the volume, for example, but a detailed set of headphones won’t need that. It’ll just be there. This was an issue with the initial capture, but even in the remasters, it remains. This is detail.
this video sums up my audiophile journey as a whole. everything is ambiguous!!! even the experts couldn't agree to such a basic concept as 'details'.
glad I found my perfect sets and left the rabbit hole pretty early 😉
Should have had a short clip of Blaine saying "what the heck to you mean by detail?"
Stellar Video from the storyline, to substance, to production. Really well done! Resolve nailed it for me, I think the closer the speaker is to my ear drum then the more I hear based on how air moves and things that can obstruct its movement, like my outer ears.
I will add that detail for me also has to do with how "black" the background is on my listening device, RS8 Black as night hence a ton of detail in strings and high hats for instance, Matrix Element i4 some background noise on my IEM's so I lose HOW WELL I CAN HEAR some of that "detail" in the strings and high hats again for instance. So yes there are many aspects to this well deserved topic. Thanks
“It doesn’t matter how detailed your headphone is, I will destroyed it all” - j-pop mixer compressing music to bits
I don't understand, what is it means?
Not just j-pop, pretty much any pop. Fortunately I find _most_ pop music too commercial sounding and lacking in creativity so I rarely listen to it.
Seek out live recordings from small private venues organised by the venue themselves; they often have a good mix with little to no compression.
@@maidsandmuses I mostly listen to vtuber cover now since most of the time it is mix by individual mixer even with yt compression still better than j-pop CD.
@@ahmadmustaqim7960 Search for loudness war, that's exactly what they are doing.
@@Sintrania You can blame the major record labels for the loudness war; so much of their catalogue ends up brick-walled, it is just stupid. CD has 96dB dynamic range, but they are voluntarily wasting a lot of that headroom. I have given up on major labels ever being willing to mix and master pop material properly. Funny enough they can do mixing of classical/jazz music just fine. Hence as I said I prefer small venue live recordings. E.g. "Forest Jam Archive's: Forest Jam vol.107 "Momiji & The Bluestones"" set.1 and set.2
These days I'm much more measured, but I have had moments where I hear more. My Elex renders cymbals well, they seem to be everywhere. Yet I remember standing at a traffic light, listening to "Songbird" on IEM's and suddenly becoming aware that Lyndsey Buckingham was plucking strings in the background. Kind of spooked me.
I also have an SACD remix of Oasis' "What's the story Morning Glory" that gets rid of the "wall of noise" so you can actually hear them play, and there is a moment when "Champagne Supernova" gets serious where I can hear somebody playing an amazing guitar riff in my right ear where the main guitar is on my left. The way IEM's open up sound, is astounding.
I own many headphones, and many more IEM's just bought the Chu2 for my son, it's kind of a hybrid as I'm using the cable and vinyls from the salnotes Zero Mecha which I bought on a prime sale. The IEM is meh but the accessories are amazing.
So yes I would concur that IEM's have detail in spades, especially modern in ears from the past two years or so.
I always thought about detail being a step beyond separation. If you listen to the same mix in different cans, using one of them it will be easier to focus on individual different instruments. Detail is how much "detail" you can hear about each instrument, the hum of an amp, the twang of a string, an overtone muddled out by another headphone. I don't think IEM's or headphones are more detailed than each other, its 100% individual. Basically with how much granularity and resolution the drivers can recreate an area of the frequency spectrum accurately.
Completely agree, another term you could use is clarity. It's the grating quality of a trumpet or other horn. A lack of blur of subtle sounds. Frequency curve likely does play a part in it, but also the speed of the drivers, and how tightly controlled they are by the amplifier. An amplifier with too little power for a headphone provides a muddy sound with that grain smoothed out, which means there's less to hold your interest. IEMs may just need less power, and so they may sound more detailed in more scenarios.
Just going to comment on how nice your cinematography and lighting are in this video. I tend to think of detail as the ability to pick out individual parts in a mix, wheras lower detail things (maybe due to intermodulation distortion) tend to blend into one mass of sound. My ER4's were one of the first things that I had the feeling of actually hearing the reverb added to a track, instead of it blending in to the driver decay. The Sundara is a good second and has better tuning. The ER4 is well tuned almost diffuse field, but flat. I EQ it to give it that -1db/oct slope thats consistent with good reference speaker setups in a treated room. I think the headphone show knocked that reference curve out of the park.
Then it sounds like "detail" to you is instrumental separation.
@@私気に成ります it makes sense to me that the ability to differentiate different parts of a mix as if it were in real life, instead of being compressed into a mess of it all as being detailed. One of few things that explain this is intermodulation distortion, which is unrelated to frequency response of a playback device. Harmonic distortion generally doesn't cause this as harmonics are natural to physical objects. When the frequency of a horn and a piano mix in real life though, they don't produce multiplications and differences between their frequencies, they merely add or subtract from the pressure level linearly. Electrostatics have very little of this and they also get the highest praise for detail.
I have the Sennheiser IE 300, they feel the most "detailed" than any other headphone / IEM I have. The IEMs I have feel more close then the headphones, but I can hear more clear layers if that makes sense.
What I love about my Hifiman R7DX (headphones) is the impact that the bass has and how "open" they feel.
The one thing that might be an unfair comparison in my gear is that I do not have a ~300$ headphone to compare to the IE 300 (retail 300$ but I got a deal for ~150$ new).
'we're just listening to wiggly air and having a good time' gold
6:45 Short Answer - it ALL is details!
Love your content DMS! Keep it up.
To me, the term details is pretty much a combination of different things like imaging, treble extension, speed, clean soundings and separation.
I'm going to go the other way about it and say that producing something akin to a "standard recording" that listeners can use to judge headphone "detail" would be one way to start. A standard 3 minutes sound file produced with an accompanying checklist that you can tick off and check against to see how much "detail" you heard. Over time you can build upon the recording to add more things that is defined as "detail".
I consider detail to be how accurately can a headphone reproduce complex sounds. This means keeping proper/accurate volume ratios between the different sounds in the mix (wich often times means handling a big dinamic range across all sound frequencies), and also not introducing "new sound" or distortion.
I think the correct answer is that being detailed really includes all the different aspects of hearing into a recording. So room acoustic reverbs, hard to hear background sounds, texture of instuments, resolution of instruments, imaging, seperation, and everything else there is to hear. Id be curious to know if that is the way reviewers are using it, though i kindof suspect that to be the case.
Simple answer. Yes. With regards to wireless headphones. No matter what, wireless audio will always have to be compressed before heard and that will never be the case with wired IEMs.
I think the best way to quantify detail in a way most people can understand is how close a headphone or IEM can faithfully reproduce the recording we're listening to. In a lot of ways, I feel like my IE900s have come a bit closer to doing that for me than my HD800's surprisingly enough. I grab my IEMs so much more often for that reason. Not that the HD800 is bad by any means, but its hard to go back to my HD800's sometimes because of it.
Allegedly, isn't Sennheiser's sound-signature more neutral and analytical? I just got the IE 100 Pro as my 3rd pair starting out with all this stuff and really love the design and comfort.
I am trying to wrap my head around “faithfully reproduce the recording” because does it refer to the, intention of the artist, at the time of recording or the concert version? Also how will we know what to look for if we have not heard it before. Just my two cents on why I get confused but for your second part i agree that detail is partly how well the system/headphone/iem can produce sound in ways that is most appealing while at the same time can make it seem more lifelike. But i reach a point where I enjoy listening on my setup than going to concerts since i care more about midrange,timbre and clarity than thumping bass and sound of the crowd from recent concerts. I felt the same for IE900 compared to focal clear and lcd-2. Never had an Abyss and electrostatic though just up to Arya on hifiman. also never had 800
I feel the same with my Edition XS to my Moondrop Variations. I feel the isolation plays a big part
Aaaaah, I have had so, so many discussions on this and I 100% agree that detail is different things to different people. But I also think that it's likely a collection of factors combined for each person.
For me, I hear detail primarily as a function of frequency response balance, but also, I theorize, as a function of driver displacement for a signal at a given voltage & current. For example, if I play a particular frequency at, say, 0 dBFS and then play the same frequency at -6dBFS through a transducer, the transducer should displace air for the second signal half as far as the first signal. If it displaces further, I'd likely call it more detailed and if it displaces less than that, I expect I'd call it less detailed. This is something I really want to test, I just haven't had time to do so.
This video and the comment section are very meaningful.
The performance of the microphone, which is called the "eardrum", differs from person to person. If there is a correct answer, it lies in what more people feel. So I think it's very meaningful for so many people to give their opinions.
Excellent video all my favorite personalities in one compact video discussing a very interesting topic great work DMS!
I have a question
What is better using type c cabel to iems
Or using a converter type c to 3.5
for me, details is I can hear all the instruments like the guitars, drums, piano, the vocal, the void, the silence, the ambience, the serenity, and peace of the music. And for $23 I'm enjoying Tangzu Wener Jade Green IEM right now :D
I also have those. But still, over all IEMs I have, I prefer Chu1.
To me, detail is a combination of things. Generally speaking, detail to me is how easy it is to understand the information of the music. That means that separation, treble, sound stage and other factors all contribute to a detailed headphone. The most detailed head- or earphone therefore to me is neutral or has a mild v shape with no mid bass bleed or excessive treble roll-off. And it has to have good imaging.
What if our hearing, being directly connected to the brain, and we know the brain has to < forget> in order to work, the filter with audio ... imagine everything from the string/finger noise of the bass player to where his/her sound source is in the room compared to everything else
From a physics perspective, sound is just a change in air pressure over time (obviously). So IMO 'detail' means the ability for the IEM/headphone/speaker to recreate this change in air pressure as accurately as possible. This means not just the frequency domain, but also the time domain. If a transient spike lasted exactly 0.0016s during the recording, then it should last exactly 0.0016s during playback. This definition also accounts for the problem of IEMs/headphones/speakers artificially creating 'detail' by adding a slight compressor effect to the sound.
For me, detail is like the contrast setting on a television screen. When set properly, it defines the clarity of images on the screen and makes the picture come alive. Detail in music is the clarity of each note in contrast to the room. Good detail seems to make the sound 3 dimensional and also create a sense of feeling. More detail means the impact of percussion instruments , the plucking of stringed instruments, the air from wind instruments and voices have more presence.
Wrong, all those things are separate qualities on their own. What you are describing is clarity or presence, not detail. Detail, just like detail in a photo. Allows you to see more fine details in an image. Print an image to say 8 feet wide, with with a 400mp scanning back and one at 20mp. The higher resolution photo is gonna retrieve far more detail from the scene and be sharper. Same with audio, you will hear more fine nuances of the music and more details you may have missed with less resolving equipment. If we are talking about a veiled sound, the oposite of clarity. Think of a high resolution photo of a foggy or low contrast scene. Still can have lots of detail, but looks way different.
i think one of the major reasons IEMs seem to pull more detail and offer that unique listening experience... is because of the noise floor they can practically eliminate.
with speakers you can turn them up and drown out a fan or the sound of traffic... but you're actually raising the noise by introducing all manner of harmonics and reverberations. if it's detail you're after. it's probably not loud speakers that are going to give it to you...
open and closed backs are great - but... you can still hear the dryer or the fan or someone next to you breathing in the case of too many of my cans. there are quiet parts of melody gardot or diana krall where you're supposed to only hear the softest whisper of brushes on a snare. but you can't cause the MF dryer is tumbling while your significant other is on the phone, while the dog is... while the kids are...
but IEMs? boy howdy - get those things screwed in your side holes and suddenly, sexily... all you hear is ... fwoomp. that pressure sound of the cargo bay doors closing... you nerds know what i'm talking about... that isolation from the world - that zero noise floor... is why IEMs allow you to see all the way inside your music. because at exceedingly low volumes, you can attenuate the entire song without any one part of it d-bo'ing the other.
IMHO - in a dead quiet < 10db environment - headphones and IEMs are equal for absolute detail retrieval. with speakers closely behind but being a whole different beast because outside of head vs inside of head. but as soon as you get above anything audible, IEMs remain king lord queen and jester... because they wrap a black velvet blanket around your music and present it to you like an OLED TV. crispy... with infinitely contrast to the noise floor around you.
Detail, to me (a non-audiophile, non-expert), is the ability to isolate different instruments in a recording and being able to listen to them exclusively via focusing on them (meaning all instruments are playing and can be heard, but you can focus on any single instrument you want and hear it very clearly, almost as if they were playing alone). Sometimes with a very good recording of an orchestra, I can isolate 1st string versus 2nd string as they are playing; it's a surreal experience. I use Sennheiser HD660S (original) with an Objective2+ODAC.
That is what I refer to by the term "Instrumental Separation", how well you can distinguish each of the instruments even though they are playing the same note.
I have bought the KZ ZS10 PRO IEMs and it was so good when i first heard it. The clearness of the IEMs is really great, I never heard anything like that before and i hear things in the songs i never heard like the detail in the sound is awesome. I say you try them out and if they arent good for ya you can always return them if you want. That is all from me.
Great video! "Audiophile terms" really are something that can be confusing since they aren't always clear on what is meant. Usually, I'll avoid terms like detail, speed, ect. because while it may describe a perception of how something may sound, it can imply some physical properties which may not actually be going on, and it can confuse the viewer.
I think the difficult part with "detail" especially is, what does the reviewer mean? Is it the best FR for your HRTF? Is it better perception of small nuances which may be induced by certain small peaks and dips which can overcome some masking effects and emphasize things like trailing ends of tones? Is it something else?
There's so much to unpack that sometimes these terms can be more confusing when used casually, and when different reviewers have different definitions.
(Edit are just to clarify what I meant at the time of writing)
Call me an arrogant duchebag for this but isn't detail aka "resolution" (for me) different than hrtf?
Hrtf is more of a tuning thing. Detail is however mostly determined by the products ability to reproduce the individual notes and their range.
And lastly dynamics is the products ability to give a physical impact on these notes.
I mostly agree with you but when I see seasoned veterans use these terms interchangeably I can't help but roll my eyes.
@mehmetgurdal it depends on what you mean by "detail" or even "resolution."
Resolution in itself is a term that can have the literal meaning which could be it's frequency range. Being minimum phase systems, if it can play at least 20khz without issue or audible distortion, than it should fast enough to respond to any frequency below that and recreate the signal. But that in itself is not what people mean when they say resolution. They're usually referring to the perception. The perception can more likely be linked back to frequency response at your eardrum, and how it may relate to your hrtf or masking effects.
At least that's what I mean when I'm talking about detail or resolution
@@sidesaladaudio Headphones like audeze, particularly the lcd4 that crinacle, resolve and almost anyone else can rate as having exceptional resolution despite having a tuning that is the opposite of what would be conducive of better detail (warm, dark, and recessed upper mids).
@@sidesaladaudioim not saying you are wrong, only that what we see as a FR is a snap shot.
To quote orditory1990: "Common misconception, but "transient response" is *not* independent of frequency response.
In fact frequency response can be calculated from the impulse response (by performing a fourier transform).
That's how frequency response is "measured": you calculate the impulse response from cross-correlation of the stimulus with the recording and then perform a fourier transform.
Any change to the impulse response necessarily results in a change to the frequency response as well.
"waterfall plots" (cumulative spectral decay) do the same thing - perform an FFT of a short portion of the impulse response.
Any change to the impulse response necessarily shows up in both the CSD plot as well as the frequency response plote"
None of this is visible in a FR graph, even though it is FR, as in its snap shot that you see it can only describe how much attenuation/accentuation it has for each frequency, but it does not describe, for example, *playing one frequency would cause another harmonic frequency to appear* , aka nonlinear transformation. That is FR, but can only be done with a spectrometer analysing the music single verses the the impulse response, which you haven't tested so your opinion on technical performance being FR in your reviews are erroneous, because they are just the snap shots. Thats is a fallacious use of FR graphs for the reasons stated above.
@@sidesaladaudio you have a solid foundation however it is kinda limited.
You do have a point in testing equipment with a specific frequency however this is rather limiting.
Testing a speaker or headphone with 20k frequency and assuming that it'll keep up with the rest of the rage is rather a shallow assumption.
This is basically like testing a monitor for its ability to emit white light (sunlight's full wavelength for comparison) and assuming that it'll give you 100% Adobe rgb and 240hz refresh rate.
I know it's kinda out of the topic but when we talk or listen we produce and listen more than one specific frequency.
A humans voice a combination of more than one specific frequency. So are the instruments.
20k frequency alone is not enough to reach at a concrete conclusion for the resolving capabilities of a specific driver.
I have another idea; we can design a new coupler for this purpose; we can play sound at 20 or more different frequencies at the same time. And have 20 different microphone ends to listen these specific frequencies. (In each mic end we also need to cancel other 19 bands somehow)
We can reach to a certain Result in this method; frequencies shouldn't affect each other.
Ratner then measuring a specific frequency using this combined frequency test we can determine if a driver is able to produce all of the range as quickly as it needs to be.
We can first test this method with dynamic, planar and electrostatic drivers and scale down the coupler system accordingly.
We do know these 3 drivers have differing results in user feedback.
And also using hrtf is not viable in here; we're after the driver speed not the tuning efficiency. You can tune a driver to hrtf but you can't tube it to give more resolving capacity.
What do you think?
And one question?; whats minimum phase?
Thanks for this informative and easy to understand video DMS 👍 short and sweet and to the point 😊 (sigh) why can't more reviewers use this format 🤔
in medicine there is this idea of an almost "double" placebo effect. say for example you just got prescribed an anti depressant with some less than pleasant side effects.
a person may not notice an improvement with their depression, but they will say the medicine is effective because they definately notice the mentioned negative side effects.
even if people highlighted what detail means to them (let's say space between voices) and did not notice it in a recording but did notice more decay on a cymbal hit they may very well still say that headphone or IEM is more detailed because of it even if it doesn't fit their idea of what detail should be.
I'm super interested to see what measures are taken to overcome stuff like this should the question of what detail is gets seriously explored. thanks for the video l.
Very beautiful video! 😃 Just great to look at.
I’d like to see a video comparing various IEMs and headphones that people consider detailed, and then have some explanation about what is being heard that make them sound detailed.
Closed back headphones = Brilliant in a Silent environment at home, useless in a noisy enviroment.
Open back headphones = Sat down at home silent or noisy enviroment they excell.
IEM's = On the go, take anywhere, never run out of battery, can use Foam tips to block out other sounds. Massive amount of choice.
ANC Headphones = Light and comfy but need a battery to be charged and 90% of them have poor sound quality.
...I like them all.
I have all of these, but something that someone who lives in a tropical place should consider, IEMs are great when you are not going to be in an airconditioned area. ANCs and closed back in general are nightmare to use outdoor unless it is rainy season or the colder months and even then expect sweat build up. Even open back gets you sweating and the pads material matters a lot. Oh, just regular earbuds for exercising.
I think you are a bit confused about close back & open back headphones. Both are brilliant in a quiet environment but in a noisy environment the close back headphones are better because they can block the noise & the sound from the headphones won't leak outside which is not possible in open back headphones. The rest of it is fine.
ANC isn't very advanced yet so it's just useless feature imo.
IEMs are best for cutting off the bg noise & providing better details in less price & superior comfort than headphones.
A high quality studio headphone will always beat any IEM in terms of sound quality, sound staging & imaging. But if you choose under $100 IEM is a better option.
In my mind, detail is being able to reproduce all of the fine details in a song or audio source. Can you hear fingers moving up and down guitar strings? Can you hear the twang of bass guitar strings? Detail is the reproduction of all of the minute sounds in an audio track/source.
Separation is being able to hear all of the instruments at once and in their own defined space, at the same time.
Soundstage is how far away an audio source appears to you or if you can tell how large the recording area is. Does a live song sound like you're at a concert? Does your enemy sound like they're off in the distance, down the hallway or close to you.
Imaging is where that audio source is in directionality. Can you tell that footsteps are coming from behind you or to the sides? Is your enemy on the floor above you? Which direction did that gunshot appear to be from.
I don't think these concepts can be quantified but they can be defined and understood.
Detail is about how many instruments I can distinguish from each other. Or those little sounds in the background of a song like fingers scratching the strings of a guitar or the breath of a singer.
Interesting point about details, kinda reminded about the time I got into arguments online about the definitions of details (and its subset like macrodetails, microdetails, etc.). I personally define details as "the percentage of information that passes from the source to the listener". Of course, certain systems might exaggerate some information, allowing you to have more "information" than the source material, similar to how frame interpolation or image upscaling is done to video contents. I view other things like room effect, timbre, imaging, separation, etc. to be separate technical aspects from details. Hence, my preferred nomenclature of "resolution" instead of "details", as I strongly associate it to resolution in video.
any tips on how to make self animations like 3:20 ?
You have a great deal of micro-pistonic-ejection-fractions that peak within any given frequency response. I would say that the display of leading-edge transience, trailing tones, dynamic range and z-axis image seperation of sounds vs quiet spaces in a given frequency response... will be the determinant factor of how well those pistonic peaks will be audible without bluring or distorting. Thus, a driver that can control all said variables will allow a non-distorted or non-blurred presentation of the frequency response being transmitted. Aka. Our ability to hear all of those pistonic peaks are perceived as what we call resolution or detail. G
Separation of treble mid and base in three balanced drivers would help in conjuction of sound stage. Open ear headphones work better in a sound isolated room for more sound stage and external sounds isolation.
The most impressive thing i noticed after getting my 7hz Timeless is the freaking textures on anything, its like i can run my fingernails into a surface and could feel all bass and treble from the vibrations of the grooves. Another difference that i could never feel in any headphones is the feeling that the sound is being generated inside your head and not coming from outside, it like you are inside a room and the music playing around, not that you have one source of some sound coming from each side of your head.
tl;dr: It's all in the frequency response.
For me, objective "detail" or "resolution" (an idea albeit initially planted in my mind by Sharur's long headphone video as well as one of the main EQ-by-ear tutorials I consulted early on) as a property of sound systems is simply related to the smoothness of the actual frequency response reaching your eardrums and the relative levels of the frequency bands (if you don't have in-ear microphones, you can check this for yourself by listening to sine sweeps), plus their "synergy" with how the music was mixed (mixers may adjust frequency bands to make things sound right on their studio monitors which may not necessarily be perfectly neutral or match your own playback system's frequency response, or your preferences may differ from the mixer's). All the information that exists in the music can be decomposed into sinusoids of different frequencies and phases that change in amplitude over time, whereby the frequency response simply tells you how the sound system "filters" (controls what passes through) that content. If the frequency response goes up to 20 kHz without being significantly diminished relative to the rest of the frequency response, then it objectively can resolve the "fastest" or "tiniest" details (though other content might obscure perception of such). What matters then is the _balance_ of all this information. If there are no major dips in the frequency response, then no "details" are being diminished. If there are no major peaks, then there would be no cases of certain frequency content being overamplified and thus masking adjacent frequencies. Treble peaks could cause the music's noise floor to sound amplified, obscuring the subtler sonic events, whereby EQing those peaks down can create a "black background" from which those subtleties can emerge more clearly, that lack of overamplified noise possibly also improving the sense of spaciousness.
"Detail" could also simply be a relative thing from one's hearing one headphone bring certain frequencies forward that the previous headphone didn't have as forward. Anyone with EQ can add a low-Q peaking filter to some frequency and artificially amplify the frequency content in that region, effectively bringing those "details" forward, but then that could sound unnatural, be objectively incorrect relative to your ears' actual HRTF, or cause details elsewhere in the audio band to sound diminished by comparison. Distortion and sufficiently delayed reflections as in many speaker listening rooms can obscure detail if not introduce grain incorrectly interpreted as more detail, causing the real details to be lost within said noise. Another sort of noise contributor could be the decay of transients as can be analyzed from a sound system's "cumulative spectral decay" (CSD). If a transducer is highly underdamped and takes a long time to stop, then those frequencies will continue to erroneously ring, possibly contributing to a noise floor obscuring some of the real details.
Then for "accuracy", if you stick in-ear microphones into your ears and sit in front of a neutral point source speaker, you will discover the shape of how your ears naturally amplify and diminish certain frequencies. You will also discover that your ears for sound sources coming from a specific direction will incur certain phase cancellations ("nulls" or "notches") such that "details" at certain frequencies would never be heard. Regardless, from my measurements, these frequency responses are generally quite smooth (when using a small impulse window to remove the comb filtering caused by reflections), the "sharpest" parts being those natural phase cancellations; my in-ear measurements of the Sennheiser HE-1 and Stax SR-X9000 (this one I am not allowed to share as of yet) shows exceptionally smooth frequency responses with no major peaks or nothing hard to EQ down, and as such are indeed objectively very "detailed". Playback from perfectly flat and ultra-low-distortion speakers in an anechoic chamber would be exemplary of perfect audio playback that neither diminishes nor boosts any frequency content within the music beyond what is naturally done by your ears. In practice, full free-field "ear gain" can sound pretty bright, but my previous very flat Meze Elite hybrid pads EQ with comparatively lower ear gain levels closer to Harman levels (and also comparable to the Sennheiser HE-1's and Stax SR-X9000's levels of flatness for in-ear canal entrance measurements) and as fine-tuned for my ears to eliminate peaks simply sounded exquisite. The only remaining frontier for me is to combine ultra-low distortion with exquisitely sharp _and_ clean (super-fast decay) transients (this is likely related to the phase response), to come across yet more spacious and comfortable pads or open-sounding drivers, and for a headphone to be developed that eliminates the natural nulls caused by 90-degree sound incidence so that you can more easily and accurately EQ the directional nulls in a binaural head-tracked HRTF. Simulated anechoic true neutral speakers with head-tracking through headphones is the real deal for accurate stereo imaging bliss.
You can look at detail as resolution and the definition of resolution in terms of vision and displays because they have a clear definition and was to measure. Resolution is the smallest distance required to tell 2 things apart (simplified definition). And it's easy to measure the resolution of a monitor by counting the pixels or PPI.
Relating that definition to sound, I treat resolution and detail as the ability to clearly hear all aspects of a sound, hear all instruments and sounds in a song clearly.
You could say more detail makes it feel life you are listening to the instrument or singer and not a recording of it. Same with video, more detail makes it feel like that thing is real in front of you and not dust being displayed on a screen.
You should make a review on the AKG N5005. Just picked them up, and I'm just blown away. I think it's the most under reviewd IEM, and they are only $200 right now that's down from the original price of $1000. Please make a review. I would love to have your input on these. They come with 4 sound filters, ballanced 2.5 and single ended 3.5 and even a Bluetooth cable! The presentation blew me a way, and the sound is super clean to my ears.
I think the detail part comes down to the transients and volume of micro clicks or sounds that are in the soundtrack that are not apparent in some headphones/iems/speakers.
For example:
Start of slight clanging in Why so serious - Worse equipment shows the clanging at the later louder parts. (Treble detail)
Stacey Kent - pianist hums along with his/her improvisation. Worse equipment doesn't present these detail. (Midrange detail)
Forgot the song name - Some one knocked over equipment at the very back of the recording room - Not present in worse equipment (Lower midrange detail)
Dark eyes - Vibration of the Bass/cello strings at their bassiest notes. - Vibration of strings smoothed out due to slow bass (Bass detail)
Hard to answer this because I have 2 headphones and 1 IEM i rotate between regularly and they all bring out different things. My desktop planars reach deeper into the bass and treble and have lower distortion than the others, as well as having the best soundstage and most coherent "wall of sound" effect. Best dynamics too I'd say. The IEMs do imaging the best and are quite fast. My daily portables somehow seem to have the best texture and layering to sounds, it's like you can hear more within a note yet somehow they don't win out on imaging.
All that being said, the baseline definition to me of high end audio is when you start hearing the space the instruments were recorded in, or when you start hearing the mixer as almost another band member contributing to the sound. The other aspect that's consistent with high end audio is you'll start hearing notes as waves. You'll start hearing the attack and decay within notes that you didn't know was there.
Which of those wins? Vague and personal answer. My brain tells me imaging, speed, and treble clarity contribute most to "detail" so IEMs would win but I'd also say, detail isn't everything. I currently use my IEMs the least.
When I think detail I think a combination of good high frequency reproduction, soundstage, and separation. High frequency reproduction in particular I suspect is key, and something IEMs will naturally do better at simply because their drivers are physically smaller. E.g. reproducing all the high-frequency parts of the percussion and how high-frequency transients interact with the recording environment.
I like this video format!
I agree with side salad audios thoughts on the matter
For me detail is being able to listen to a particular sound signature or graphical frequency that is native to manufacture and being able to destingus voice from texture and instrument from voice, the artists equipment to record a piece and finally the hardware limits , if it can handle the most technical of bass and can it handle the extreme clarity of voice without shift in vocal tonality. Can it match the harmonic instruments whilst providing a crisp fast static response. These are some of the things you can understand from a variety of songs/artists. Does the headphone push like the rev limiter on the car going 400kmh or does it struggle to deliver the nostalgia we all get when listening to a new audio device. Ultimately can you drift away in to total abyss without adjusting volume or EQ or even the seating position. Can the audio device take whatever genre and give the best in class whatever the genre. Does it take that genre and perform better than other focused devices set for a specific genre. Is it valorous amongst its predators. Does it take the music experience to a whole nother dimension.
what i think detail is, is 1; how flat the response is to it's own target, and 2; the amount of distortion (quality and strength of the driver, and how much reflections affect the sound output), due to these 2 reasons, IEMs usually have a more detailed sound.
As much as I love my Hifiman Edition XS for detail. I feel the isolation and reproduction that my Moondrop Variations give, give it the edge over the Edition XS. Isolation plays a big part in hearing the small micro nuances in my opinion
it make sense yet those details of IEM are not complete just because what resolve said about human ear construction
could be it's "complete" for him. could be his HRTF is perfectly match with his IEMs@@soulfulfool
Detail is the speed and accuracy of the drivers response to reach the new 'position' of the phase. it signifies low distortion and great transient response, it also cascades into other forms of details, like stereo seperation, freq response etc.
For me detail in music is the combination of instrumental separation and clarity. If I listen to a recording and one iem/headphone allows me to hear "more" or pick things I could not hear before I would describe that is being more detailed.
I also feel there is a subjective side to this regarding the "quality" of individuals hearing. Simply put because of the proximity to the ear drum it "could" be far easier for a lesser trained ear to pick up more detail from an iem than an headphone since sonically the sound wave has much further to travel and more to interact with in a headphone than an iem.
Something that makes sense when considering that alot of general consensus is that iems are better until you start hitting hi end headphones
If you ask me, detail is in the frequency response. Specifically, the high end. Boost 8k or so up a little, cut the mids a little from 500 to 6k or so, and you've made the sound "clearer", "crisper", or "sharper". The mids can very easily make a sound muddy; especially when a lot of bass is in the mix.
9:28 I need that on a T-shirt
I just bought the original campfire audio andromeda second hand for 400 dollars can’t wait to try them out
This feels like David Imel explaining how modern smartphone cameras should be much better than they are, as their processing emphasizes sharpness and definition over sfumato and chiaroscuro, out of a mistaken belief that sharpness and definition are the *only* things that count as "detail". Detail is a balance.
For me it's granularity of the sound. It can be the definition of the instruments, textures, anything that can be picked out that gives the sound charcter. Similar to details in picture. Is anything being covered or distorted in a way that I can no longer pick it up. An hyperbolic example would be can you tell the difference between a guitar or a piano, or the difference in singers. It's stuff like that because that is detail. Better audio equipment allows you to hear things you couldn't with different audio equipment without messing with the eq. Though that can also bring those things out potentially. It's why people think brighter headphones give more detail. Proximity can also effect this which is probably why this discussion with iem vs headphones vs speakers goes this way.
*To provide or to get complete details in audio is all comes to the audio data extractor like a digital music player or a CD player, I've heard Nakamich CD changer at music retail stores during early 2000s with Nakamichi headphones and other very cheap headphones and the detail was used to be breath taking, so all come down to the audio player how efficiently it extracts audio.*
So what's more detailed $1K IEM or $1K Headphone? Thinking maybe high end IEMS vs Headphones from the same mfg. Seinnheiser I900 vs 800s?
Side Salad for the win!
Detail is more contrast between different sounds or frequencies. Simple, the opposite to diffuse
This is something that's been on my mind recently actually, not sure if I'm alone in thinking this but I can't really tell the difference in detail between say a Moondrop Chu and an Ananda Nano. I can tell a difference in the tuning, soundstage, imaging, separation, etc. But not in detail despite the fact that it's supposed to be a very detailed headphone. So I've never really understood when people describe headphones or IEMs as being more detailed than another. I can accept the fact there simply is a difference in detail since so many people tend to agree on it, but I would like to understand and experience that difference too.
You burned my brain in there :D
You can tell the resolution difference but not
I've been at your stage, as what I observed so far it seems that detail/resolution becomes a marketing term to kinda mask the flaws in the frequency response. Plus I don't really buy terms that is defined so vaguely that multiple people has different interpretation of it same with "technicalities".
Though to me I'd like to define it as objectively as possible, "detail" is mainly in the frequency response, if the amplitude response is smooth and does not have major peak that may mask other frequencies that is "detailed", it is also inline at how we perceive each part of the frequency response, sometimes lesser bass or higher ear canal gain (2.7-3kHz) can affect our perception of detail. Simple as that, its just that "audiophiles" specially reviewers tend to overcomplicate things that they hear even if what they hear are just a part of multiple biases surrounding them.
@@mehmetgurdal Oh haha, would you count things like what I mentioned as a part of detail? Also I'm assuming you'd consider resolution and detail as the same thing? I always assumed detail had something to do with the trailing ends of tones, and then resolution was more to do with how smooth a frequency response is i.e. lack of major peaks or dips. But I don't really have a clear definition of what either of those things are, they're just what I assume they are.
@@xeruskun Technicalities is something I've always thought of as an umbrella term for things like soundstage, imaging, separation, detail, etc. just so people don't have to say all those words haha
That would make sense, that's how I see resolution, unless detail is the same as resolution, then the definition applies to both. But I did want to mention an example where I'd say that definition has some issues. Like say a DT 1990 Pro which is said to be very detailed, it has a pretty sizeable 8kHz peak. So by that definition the headphone shouldn't have detailed treble. From my ear, again having heard the headphone I can't tell a difference in detail between a 1990 Pro and other headphones I've tried, but it sounded cool haha
Out of curiousity, what's the most detailed headphone you've heard thus far?
For me, detail is the pure resolution and accuracy of each individual sound. Having good imaging, instrument separation and soundstage are things that show how good the technical performance of that IEM or headphone is, but I've also noticed that a wide soundstage often reduces the impact of the midbass and it sometimes swallows some of the details of certain instruments when you get the feeling that they are more far away from your ears.
I thought it was like the resolution. When I got the Edition XS I realized that now I could make out what instrument was being used in certain songs, like, if it was a bass, a tuba or a violoncello, when all of them previously sounded just like a low hum (to say something). I didn't even thought what the low notes were played with, a lot of times I thought they were synths, but now I knew there were actual instruments.
So I thought it was like this but for everything. In the same way, when playing videogames with music from another app, now it was much more clearer than without the EXS, it sounded like there was more separation between the sounds of the game and the music, like if they came from different speakers (and nothing could sound like noise anymore).
I think IEMs only feel and seemed detailed because they are closer to your ear. However the cans can pump in more energy and that can bring in more detail. It is a bit like asking a question will a smaller canvas show you more detail than a painting on a larger canvas … is a smaller camera sensor with more pixels better in detail than a larger sensor with less pixels. The smaller camera sensor can probably give you detail … but bad in dynamic range … I suppose same for iems. The iems only appear to be more detailed but the cans probably are more detailed … but … it’s all in perceptions end of the day … Even if to photos of different size pack in the same detail, which ones are you more likely to notice. My guess is that the larger print will show you more detail than the smaller one on account of the area. So probably the same logic works for sound as the cans just bring in and show you more in a much wider space. The iems lack space and dimension that the cans can give you.
I have all the options available to me, I use an IEM for video/sound editing, headphones for gaming, TWL when I move around the room and speakers for relax, all plugged into my lqptop and switch between them using hotkey software
Indeed, we’re all just listening to wiggly air, but as a non-audio pro, I find that having more drivers in IEMs helps in separating the lows (like leaves rustling or distant footsteps), mids (vocals, music, cars), and highs (gunshots, engine noise, explosions). Dedicated drivers for each frequency range can make the sound clearer and more detailed. Idk realistically how useful a dedicated DAC is. But I heard that paired with IEM’s unlocked the frequency range massively and makes them sound even more clearer and better, as well as provides IEMs with more power compared to just using the AUX port. I still bought a wireless adapter to see if I notice any difference. I’m struggling to let go of wireless. It’s so much better.
For IEMs i would say it depends. The fit must be PERFECT especially if you use foam tips. This is really hard to do if the tips colapse in your ear (which ive had trouble with recently). Fitment and therefore comfort is a huge factor. For headphones that's really not much of a problem.
A few years ago I was into IEMs and got a bunch of cheap KZ, CCA, Moondrop, 7HZ IEMs but later really hated the feeling of putting something in my ears. Just out of curiosity I gave them a try the other day and I was shocked. In terms of details, any of them totally destroyed my HD660S and S2. It's not because of volume. IEMs are just clearer. They may have problems in tuning, but they have all the details, even the $20 ones.
It is interesting that the various dictionaries even have different definitions that are used for "detail" or "detailed." The common thread appears to be that a "detail" is often a part of a whole entity that can be examined more closely or isolated from the whole. So, if we translate that to the audiophile world, everything used to describe the experiences in audio can be considered "detail" or "details," like timbre, clarity, soundstage, etc. So, if one is to try to describe "detail," they are being very vague in their choice of words, since a part of the whole should not be construed as an entity of itself or on it's own! Right?!?!
Detail in my opinion - the tonal balance of specific sounds + clear cut imaging and seperation. 24.99 will fix detail for you with the zero2
In my personal experience, "detail" (or lack thereof) is a combination of transient response (fast or sluggish) and frequency response. If the attack / decay and FR somehow land in the beholder's "golden" zone then that piece of gear seems to come across as more resolving.
Details is Textures and Resolution ❤
For me detail means resolution of sound. How complete the sound is. How much can you hear in every instrument/voice.
Can I just say... You're set looks incredible! Just... Wow!
Just recently I had been wondering this.
In fact, what I am thinking about is if I want to improve my system, what is better going for a high quality IEM or a headphones?
The IEM are usually less amplification dependents, are more portables and sometimes cheaper than equivalent headphones.
My concern is a about the soundstage size. This is something I take in count with the earphones because never are as the speakers but I like be as nearer as possible.
And answering the question about the what "detailed" means.
And I think that talking about detail could confuse us. I think is better to talk about how "revealing" are the earphones. How they are able to represent the music with all the different details, nuances, space, imaging that we could find in a good speakers system.
I personally want to check some good IEM and headphones to compare with the system I have now, to discover which is more convenient for me.
To me detail is being able to pin point and hear every instrument or sound aspect of what you’re listening to. Like looking at a pinging and seeing what strokes where used where to give it dept. what colors where used in specific spot to create the whole. The DETAILS! Of the painting
Think about soundstage and imaging as X and Z axis on a graph .
X is imaging and Z (depth ) is soundatage but both need each other to be accurate.
For me, detail is about seperating sounds from other sounds, with clarity
Footsteps in the battlefield
Gunshots from rustles
etc.
I have Turtle Beach Stealth Pros and this has been nice
Detail for me, is anything that can be distinctly identified. Whether that is the decay or transient notes, the piecring of a high hat being noticeable, or texture of bass, or the timbre of vocals, or how well alll of these are presented in a way that suggest good instrument separation. It's how much of what you can hear in the music, ragrdless of the frequency range or note type.
My IEMs give clear smooth and detailed vocals and treble, but my bluetooth overear ANC headphones that lack the clarity of the cheaper IEMs give muchhhh better bass texture, slighly more fuller vocals and have better soundstage. They are giving detail to me in different ways.
For me, what I consider to be detail in a pair of headphones would be the attack/decay speed and distortion levels.
A fast attack with low distortion I find makes it much easier to hear quieter/less pronounced sounds when there's a lot of things going on in a track at once.
In my opinion, no matter how close or far the sound is, the detail is a single sound/effect, ideally with easily indentifiable location within the soundstage. In other words, I can say that for me sound is detailed when I hear as much sound sources as possible, can identify individual sounds and their locations, and ideally can name it somewhat clear/realilistic. Also I've noticed that I need to capture specific detail is a song once, so I can somehow identify it with other less-detailed IEMs/headphones/etc. Again, it's just a personal opinion.
Writing this comment half way through the video so perhaps it's touched on later in the video anyway - but I've had the theory that well isolated headphones with narrow stage and good instrument separation lend themselves better to *perceiving* detail than wider spaced open backs, simply for the fact that your ears don't have to "search around" the stage for a given sound or detail, it's just there right in your face. I think that's why headphones used for monitoring are often closed backs with very narrow stages. For example my HD-25 has a tuning that I don't think lends itself to being the most detailed, and yet because of its narrow presentation and amazing isolation, it is very easy to notice the details that _are_ there.
So with that in mind I think if you take an open-back headphone, and a well-isolating IEM with a small soundstage, and they have similar overall detail retrieval capabilities, the detail will still be a little bit easier to notice on the IEM for that reason, and that might be why people think of IEMs as sometimes being more detailed. That's not to say spacious headphones can't be detailed, on the contrary I think a lot of _the_ most detailed headphones are quite open and spacious, but I think comparing them against an IEM there can be the illusion that the IEM has more detail because it's harder to ignore/not notice said details due to the presentation.
That and I think at the low end IEMs just perform really well, better than super-budget headphones tend to perform.
Edit: As for what detail actually means to be. To me if a headphone is detailed, it's capable of reproducing as much of the original sound that went into the recording as possible, including the most subtle of sounds, so that means having a balanced tuning and well extended bass and treble - however I think what people actually mean when they say that a headphone _sounds_ detailed, is that said subtle details aren't just present but are brought to the forefront and very noticeable. Which can again be a presentation thing (narrower stage), or a tuning thing (like for example the 1-1.5KHz peak on some electrostats)
In IEM I can pick up plosives from vocals which I am unable to do on headphones
Dms, what you're saying is a 100% true!
I have the focal utopia, and loved it for "Detailretrieval" , its speed, accuracy ...and then came , what i nicknamed "the trio infernale"... : the cayin n8ii/aroma audio jewel/liquid links venom mk1 cable...and destroyed it!
More "Detail" than everything else, to my ears , in that combo!!!
For me, in that regard, over abyss,hifiman he 1000v2,utopia...un-believable!
Soooo....i'm , now , "converted"; i have the hypothesis that the iem- development (yes, pricing also/the "trio infernale"is a 10k!!!) is some sortiert of fester growing than with the big cans, but : I think all the possible Options are not checken yet!
Think of why mtb's had 26 tyres...😂
And old sennheiser 'phones of the past already had electrodynamic and conventional drivers, combined...think of the early days of hifi...highly sensitivity-speakers, "Vott"(Voice of the Theater, etc), tubes!!
Sometimes, the marketing-strategies overcome the potential Output, ok, almost everytime!?
You are developing something brilliant, and then the Marketing and how-to-sell-strategies kick in....i hope that there's still much more to come.
And it will. But it takes some pioneer's , like you, for example, who are thinking out-of-box , asking the right questions, giving ideas, New pov's, if you want.
Remember also the akg 1000, jecklin float, etc...what happened?
It was sent to sleep...😢
Not totally! The 1266, in my opinion, Cremes it's Sound because of lesser pressure/loose fit on the ears...brilliant!
So, lets develop new thoughts about our Hobby, combined with old knowledge, experience..
And even better stuff will occur 😊
Without such people like you, medicine and all the other high-end technical genres would't
have come so far..and, of course , are still developing (Sokrates😊)
Maybe the KI (we call it that in Germany/Artifical Intelligence)will help?
But, only combined with human Design,old technical knowledge...and overcoming old "structures" like marketing-focused-break-even-points, etc
I'm looking forward to that!
Keep up your good work, i'm in on your mission, for sure.
Mischa Fuchs,Germany
For me, even though I'm very loosely an audiophile, regarding sheer experience, but I define detail as very minute things, that all come together and make a headphone or earphone a joy to listen to. These are the following, but my definition isn't limited to:
-clarity of instruments/sounds, granularity
-reverberation of the "room" where the recording was taken, decay, that sort of stuff
-a sort of sharpness, tbh I don't know how to define that, maybe the "speed" of the driver itself?
And the very big part, which to me is peak detail, which quite funnily enough, I have in my daily driver Technics RP-F400-s (open back headphone) is I can crank up the volume, like up high, and no sound gets in the way of others, and it doesn't become jarring. There isn't a part which overpowers anything. Tho this could just be part of the frequency response.