Damn you good bruh

Xelento first gen was, to put it gently, not good QC wise. Lots of old posts on forums, dunno if they were some on Reddit back then

I have 13 years old pairs of Sennheiser that behave like they're brand new

Hate to break it to you but Susvaras have been notorious for the bad QC, the HE1000 was a disaster, the Focal Utopia had bad pads on the first batch, Stax had drivers that would die on their own back in the mid 00's, etc.

Find me one company that has never had any QC complaint in their entire history.

Just buy from the official Sennheiser store

https://www.amazon.fr/Sennheiser-300-II-Precision-Ecouteurs-Intra-auriculaire/dp/B001EZYMF4/ref=sr_1_29

You can also find some IE80 or IE100 for dirt cheap nowadays

I spent 18 months trying to find decent pbt caps for my layout, and even though it's not perfect I jumped the gun. Took 6 months to arrive so I guess m hella lucky

The first batch of Utopia had too weak of a glue and pads came loose, the first Clears had yokes breaking from no reason, same thing with the Elex iirc

Not sure about Fostex tbh except their products have always been underwhelming for me

One magic answer : Sennheiser

EQ is free, and while resources like squig.link are very valuable learning to E by ear is really handy. EQ APO and Peace are free on Windows, and Wavelet is also free on Android

Could be yeah

Usb on headphones is cringe lmao

This is what Hololens are used for atm, and I know Lenovo has a similar product for entreprise markets. Meta also advertised for this use case on their new Metaverse thingy, but it's still not widespread ('look at how many construction companies struggle with CAD) it's gonna take a while to become a normal usecase

It's all item based audio, and not panned tracks anymore. Basically the same thing

Yes

My reference is the 800S with a reduced 3400Hz, and another cut @7400 and 9100Hz

You're too caught up in graphs my dude, the 600 is way too narrow and mid focused to be considered neutral. 5128 is a better tool, I agree, but it's still far from the best we can do with human ears

Objective, and tonality in the same sentence ? You okay buddy ?

Depends on the IEM, I'll use Dunu S&S, Final type E, and TRI Clarion.

I use the Clarion the most, then Type E exclusively on Finals, then S&S for the rest

I know it can seem comforting to buy the things you see people buy online, but that's just a way to never ever get to listen to any good product, and you just play the consumerist game instead of getting a nice experience out of a market. Just my 2c

As a man of many hobbies, the best advice I can give you is not to spread yourself thin by buying multiple cheap/mid-range products, but to research extensively and buy a single good to high end product, and if it doesn't suit you just sell or trade it for something similar. It's the best user experience in my, well, experience

The answer is very easy : it's a different mastering, made solely for audiophiles. The file itself matters very little, it's just a better product from the start

Oh yeah you're toast dude. I'm 23 and I've been playing drums since I'm 6, and that's how I fucked my hearing.

I can't hear shit above 17kHz, and no human even infant can hear shit above 21-22kHz.

The reason manufacturers claim responses outside of the human hearing range is that it's a way to claim the headphone perfectly reproduces both extrêmes of the spectrum.

This is legit on paper, thanks to your Fourier transform but it doesn't help with actually understanding headphones here. The graph we see helps us seeing if something is wrong with the resonances/reflections inside the earcup, or if the open/closed back design manages what it intended to. No need to expand into theoretical Fourier transforms of "whole song FR" and Hz ranges outside of human hearing.